$4.01 Check Signed by Steve Jobs Expected to Fetch Over $25,000 at Auction

An Apple Computer Company check written to Radio Shack in the amount of $4.01 and signed by late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is up for Auction this week and is expected to go for more than $25,000.

The check was written by Jobs on July 23, 1976, and signed “Steven Jobs.” The address on the check is the mail drop-off point and answering service that Steve Jobs used as a business address while running Apple out of his parents’ garage.

The check was written in the summer of 1976, approximately four months after Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded the Apple Computer Company and were hard at work on the Apple-1, which was the first computer sold by Apple.

While the Apple-1 was originally intended to be a kit that would be assembled by the buyer, like most computers in that early era of home computing, the duo decided to sell the Apple-1 as a finished product at the urging of Paul Terrell, owner of The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California. The Byte Shop was one of the first personal computer stores in the world.

Terrel purchased 50 Apple-1 computers at a price of $500 per unit, which he then sold at retail for $666.66.

This meant that the Apple-1 was one of the first completely assembled “personal” computers that were “ready to go” out of the box with the addition of just a few required accessories that were easily purchased at a local electronics store, including a power supply, case, keyboard, and monitor.

During the next 10 months or so, Jobs and Wozniak assembled approximately 200 Apple-1 computers, selling 175 of them.

Wozniak later said of Terrell’s purchase order: “That was the biggest single episode in all of the company’s history. Nothing in subsequent years was so great and so unexpected.”

While the check lacks a memo field, so we don’t know exactly what items Jobs was paying for, it’s possible that the check was written to Radio Shack to pay for components to be used by Wozniak to build the notorious “blue box” device Woz built to finance the production of the Apple-1. A blue box was an illegal device that allowed users to make free long-distance phone calls.

Wozniak was known to buy components at a local Radio Shack store. The once popular but now defunct electronics chain once covered the United States and was a popular place for electronics hobbyists to purchase components for use in their projects. Wozniak is said to have spent hours roaming the aisles of Radio Shack as a teenager.

Making and selling the blue box devices marked the first business partnership between Wozniak and Jobs, who built and sold around two hundred of the boxes, selling them for $150 each.

Jobs later on was quoted as telling his biographer that “there wouldn’t have been an Apple” were it not for Wozniak’s blue boxes.

At the time of this writing, there have been 21 bids on the check, and the high bid is currently $22,444. The next bid on the item will be $24,689. The auction ends on Wednesday, December 6, 2023.