Woz Apple SchematicsSource: RR Auction

What you need to know

  • Someone just paid more than $630,000 for some pieces of paper with Steve Wozniak's schematics on them.

Boston-based RR Auction just sold some pieces of paper for more than $630,000. Oh, and those pieces of paper included hand-drawn schematics for an Apple II computer. And they were drawn by Steve Wozniak.

Yes, that Steve Wozniak. Here's the auction.

The documents consisting of 23 total pages of work-in-progress notes and diagrams for the Apple II breadboard, which includes:

  • 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.

Woz Apple SchematicsSource: RR Auction

Accompanied by a signed letter of provenance from Wozniak: "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."

So the only question left is this – would you spend that kind of money on something like this? And if you did, what on Earth would you do with those pieces of paper once they arrived?!