An Apple II Manual Signed by Steve Jobs Fetched $787,484 at Auction

A collection of Steve Jobs memorabilia including a signed Apple II manual, a business card, and a leather jacket worn by the Apple co-founder was recently sold off by RR Auction, and the prices fetched by some of these items might be higher than most people would expect.

The big ticket item was an Apple II manual that Jobs signed and inscribed with the following message: “Julian, Your generation is the first to grow up with computers. Go change the world!” (It was also signed by one-time Apple CEO Mike Markkula.) It fetched $787,484.

That manual was followed by a letter from Jobs explaining that he doesn’t sign autographs—which he then signed—that garnered a winning bid of $479,939 from someone with a very particular sense of humor.

A signed box of NeXTSTEP Software ($210,235), a copy of Macworld’s first issue signed by Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak ($201,021), and a Macintosh 128k logic board signed by Jobs and Jef Raskin ($132,049) rounded out the list of auctioned items with six-figure bids.

The collection also included a bounty of Apple hardware. Among the lots were an Apple II with a monitor and peripherals; an Apple IIc protoype; an Apple Lisa; and an Apple II floppy disk drive signed by Wozniak, an Apple Monitor made by Sanyo, and an Apple Newton MessagePad 120.

There were items from other companies, too, including a pair of prototype X-Y mice designed by Douglas Engelbart, an MITS Altair 8800, and the circuit board from a Busicom 141-PF calculator that RR Auction billed as “the first consumer product to incorporate a microprocessor.”