Woz’s Schematics for Prototype Apple II Sell for $630,000

Steve Wozniak, in a letter accompanying the diagrams:

These documents, circa 1975, are my original Apple II prototype schematics and programming instructions. They are precious. On these work-in-progress diagrams, you can even see my breadboarding technique, where I’d go over drawn connections in red as I soldered the wires in. At the time, I favored using a purple felt tip pen for writing, so it’s interesting to see these notes decades on. The prototype was hand-wired while I was still an engineer at Hewlett-Packard’s Advanced Product Division, where I was involved in the design of hand-held calculators.

Indiana Jones voice: These belong in a museum.

I’m not joking. I don’t want to get all sappy here, but if Woz doesn’t design the Apple II, there’s no Apple. There’s no Mac in 1984, there’s no iPhone in 2007. There’s no NeXT in between, and a NeXTStep box is where the web was created. None of it happens like it did without these genius designs for that amazing computer.

★ Friday, 18 December 2020