A $4 check that the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wrote to Radio Shack in 1976 was auctioned off at Boston-based RR Auction for more than $36,000 on Wednesday. .
The signed check, drawn against an “Apple Computer Company” account at a Wells Fargo Bank branch in Los Altos, California, joins a hot market for Jobs’s signature and memorabilia.
Last year, a $9.18 Apple Computer check signed by Jobs in 1976 sold for $55,000; another from the same year, for $13.86 to Elmar Electronics, sold in March for $37,564.
The $4 check sold on Wednesday for $36,850.
The Apple inventor’s signature on a job application for employment as an “electronics tech or design engineer” from 1973, classified as Jobs’ earliest known signature by the auctioneer, sold in 2018 for $174,757.
A signature from three years later, when Jobs was 21, that appeared on an original Apple founding contract signed by Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne was sold by Sotheby’s in December 2011 for $1,594,500.
Even Steve Jobs’ business cards have value: in May 2015, a trio spanning his career at three different companies were sold at a high school charity auction in California for $10,050.
It’s not just Jobs’ signatures that are attracting bids. A pair of worn-out brown suede Birkenstock scandals worn by Jobs in the early days of Apple sold for $218,750 at Julien’s Auctions in New York last year – the highest price ever paid for a pair of sandals at auction. Pricey, but only a third the $677,196 paid for an Apple-1 Computer prototype from the mid-1970s, also last year.
The latest check to come up for auction lists Apple’s first official address at 770 Welch Rd, Ste 154, Palo Alto. The auction house said the address is “the location of an answering service and mail drop that they used while still operating out of the famous Jobs family garage”.
An executive at the auction house told the Mercury News that the artifact comes from a private collector who has had it in his collection since the 1990s.
RR Auction, a Jobs and Apple memorabilia specialist, calls Radio Shack an “unsung hero” of the personal computing revolution. It also notes that co-founder Steve Wozniak would spend hours roaming the aisles of the store.
It said “the biggest tech innovations of the 20th century are all, in varying degrees, indebted to the Boston-based electronics store” and the described the item on sale as “a superb check signed by the innovative persona”.