Everything Apple moves sounds and tastes like money. Not just your newly released devices. They can be considered cheap even if we compare them with some of those that were launched 30 or 40 years ago. We have read news about the auctions of computers like the Apple I. Now we find the news of the auction of some schematics of an Apple II manuscripts by Steve Wozniak himself. They have been auctioned for a lot of money.
Before getting down to business with the boards and circuits, the details and design of any device are put on paper (now it will be done on a computer but 30 years ago it was done on paper). That's what Steve Wozniak did with the design of what was to become the Apple II. A total of 23 pages of work notes ongoing and diagrams, including:
- Five pages of circuit diagrams and notes on graph paper sheets.
- Six photocopied pages entitled "Bus Sources", "System Timing", "Display", "Sync Timing & Adr. Gen, and "Timing", with various annotations.
- An instruction guide 12-page handwritten schedule consisting of 28 detailed steps.
It is the detail of what has been auctioned and what has reached the figure of $ 630.272 you have paid a true admirer and collector of Apple. The pages were authenticated by Wozniak himself:
These documents, 1975, are my original Apple II schematics and programming instructions. They are beautiful. In these work-in-progress diagrams, you can even see my technique, where I would go over the connections drawn in red while soldering the wires. At that moment, I preferred to use a purple felt tip pen to write, so it is interesting to see these notes from decades ago. The prototype was wired by hand while I was still an engineer in Hewlett-Packard's Advanced Products Division, where I was involved in the design of handheld calculators.