And you thought that $999 Mac stand was dear: Steve Wozniak's Apple II doodles fetch $630,272 at auction Steve Jobs may no longer be with us but the cult of Apple persists as fanbois haemorrhage money to own pieces from the company's past. Cupertino relics are known to fetch eye-watering sums at auction, like the Apple-1 that went for a stonking $375,000 in 2018, or indeed the early consumer computer's documentation, which sold …
you jest. But imagine the conversation between Jobs and Woz.
Jobs: Your keeping those scrappy notes now we have sold the fist Apple 1? Who would have thought someone woul buy that hand wired monstrosity for USD 666.66
Woz: Hold my beer. In in a couple of decades all the Apple 1's will be in land fill sites, and these will be a thousand time what that Apple 1 sells for.
Jobs: choke, splutter cough.
>I've long since given up on the thought of anybody being able to read my handwriting.
Just out of interest, would this get you into trouble with RIPA ?
I'm concerned that somebody might ask me to decipher some XLST code I once wrote
(I was young and needed the money and they said it would be artistic)
IIRC he tried to get HP to build the Apple but HP weren't interested in "computers"
apple_co_founder_offered_first_computer_design_to_hp_5_times
Yes. The point was that he was still an employee of HP. In most jurisdictions ownership of intellectual property related to, or in the form of, articles of work undertaken whilst in employment are the property of the employer unless agreed otherwise by both parties.
The Woz and the Steve tried to get HP interested. They passed. This would make claiming the Woz’s work... difficult. Worse, it’s been well over 40 years. That may get any claims tossed just for age, particularly when it would be difficult for HP to believably claim that they were not aware of the history of the Apple I. Finally, if they persisted and annoyed Tim Cook, he might find some loose change behind one of the sofas in the lobby and buy both HPs... and recombine them into one. And name it ‘Hewlett-Packard-Wozniak, an Apple Company’. And fire all the management and put in ‘modern business management’. And put the Woz on the board, and give him a technical project to play with.
Actually, I like that idea. Apple gets a printer and scanner division again, after decades, HP ink prices fall (even Tim Cook hasn’t got the chutzpah to charge HP prices) and all of HP management face Christmas on the unemployment line. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch, unless we could get Apple to buy TalkTalk.
I doubt if HP were 'not interested in compuers' since they were already making and selling small computers to the science and technical marketplace. HP management probably didn't see a market for a computer for home use. Theywon't be the first (after all, even IBM thought the PC wasn't a 'real' computer.)
1) How do they know that Apple 1 board is legit? It is perfectly possible to build a replica that will fool a so-called "expert" using off the shelf components. No, you can't tell from serial numbers ... thanks to bad record keeping, and a general lack of giving a shit about that kind of documentation back then, nobody knows for certain what the numbers were. Couple that with the original design, which The Woz gave out at a Homebrew Computing meeting in '76 (making it open source(!!) ... I still have my copy, I can't be alone in this). Next, throw in a little unscrupulous silk screening of copyright notice, and Bob's yer Auntie.
Not that I would recommend doing such a thing, of course. But you've got to wonder every time one of these things turns up ... especially one in working condition.
2) I wonder what some fool would pay for my above mentioned copy? It is complete with a note from The Woz, offering to lend a hand if I need it, and his phone number. More to the point, I wonder what he'd do today if I contacted him and asked for help building an Apple 1 ... and once finished & working, what THAT would be worth.
Why do you even care?
You'll just turn this into another pet subject to bore people to death over. First it was IR35, now it's this...
Think your life over. It isn't this normal overshare. You're a tedious old bore. I'm asking, nicely, to wind your neck in - God knows you don't want your last years spent making yourself look a cunt to all and sundry.
Generally it's the provenance that matters more than looking at the actual item.
If an Apple I board was for sale by an electrical engineer that was well known at the Homebrew meetings and has some sort of original receipt or documentation and other people have seen him playing with it before it recently became valuable - you can be surer it's legit. Probably more reliable than carbon dating capacitors
Naah you can cut the single layer circuit boards and count the rings. One for each year. Some gaps are more narrow than others (the Lisa years, when Yobs was in exile at Next, but you get the point). Also there are traces of black turtle neck fibers around the through hole components.
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"Douglas Engelbart's three-button XY mouse"
I have to assume this was not an exclusively Apple themed auction. Two extra buttons would definitely be a showy extravagance. No mater how useful they are in other, non-fruity operating systems.
I'm actually surprised that in Apple's strive to minimalism, they haven't yet produced a zero button mouse.
The very first mouse had one button - although the first production model had the correct number of buttons
The 2005 Mighty Mouse was Apple's best value product — a mouse with a free trackball, rated for over ten hours of operation before the ball gunked up beyond use.
The current Magic Mouse can't quite match it for useful lifetime hours; it's a trackpad on top rather than a ball, great, but the crippling RSI will get you in very short notice.
I see the point, but I don't know if that matters all that much. A museum holding an original painting can at least show something beautiful to its patrons. A museum holding an original circuit board doesn't look very different from a museum holding a reproduction of the circuit board, which shouldn't be that hard to make. Better yet, a museum holding a reproduction of the circuit board in a glass case and an emulator of the running system next to it, perhaps running software from the time. That would probably be more interesting and educational to patrons.
It's even less necessary when the item is a bunch of papers that had engineering documentation on them. Most patrons won't want to read all of that anyway, and even if they did, are you going to post them all on the wall? I'm guessing we already have pretty good scans of those which can be published online (or if you insist next to the reproduction and emulator).
I can't say I have. Among other things, I can see a diagram of a proto-submarine on a monitor with equal clarity to the paper. I can't do that with a painting or tapestry, which is why I consider them different. Also, that is a diagram which the general public can easily grasp. The papers in this article are very different, and include such details as "five pages of circuit schematics and notes on sheets of graphing paper; six photocopied pages headed 'Bus Sources,' 'System Timing,' 'Display,' 'Sync Timing & Adr. Gen,' and 'Timing,' featuring several annotations; and a 12-page handwritten programming instruction guide consisting of 28 detailed steps." Those things, to me, don't sound special enough that the original is any more special than a copy, especially as a quarter of it is already copied. That's just my opinion, but if I were setting up a museum, I wouldn't be at all concerned with getting the originals and I might not put all of that on display at all, instead opting for the suggested exhibit in my previous comment with a web address available for interested people to read them at their leisure.
That's an "engineering pad", which was the required paper for homework in the 70s, when I was a student at UMass/Amherst. My gf (now wife) worked summers at National Blank Book in Holyoke (a few miles south of the school) to make money for tuition. She bought several 200 sheet pads of the stuff at employee discount for me every year. To my knowledge, no one else makes this exact kind of paper.
I was cleaning up and found a pad a few weeks ago. I akso still have the logic template I was required to use to draw circuit diagrams.
Thanks, I think, for the memories. I doubt my scribblings would bring as much.
"required paper for homework in the 70s,"
I've had one in the top left corner drawer of my desk since the '60s, usually attached to a clipboard for note taking on the go.
"To my knowledge, no one else makes this exact kind of paper."
Office Depot carries a reasonable facsimile.
"I doubt my scribblings would bring as much."
But I'll bet you and I (or others) could spend a couple hours over a beer, laughing with each other at our childhood musings :-)
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