This Signed Steve Jobs Business Card Is Worth Crazy Money

How much would you pay for a hands signed business card by Steve Jobs? Well I hope whatever number you conjured in your head is north of NZ$302,000 because otherwise you’re dreaming, mate.

This rare collector’s item surfaced at an auction hosted by RR Auction. According to them they have offered 10 before, although not many from the circa 1983 era with its iconic ‘rainbow’ version of the Apple ‘byte’ logo, and certainly not many that Steve decided to sign himself. I mean why would he, his name was right there on it already. Less than five Jobs-signed Apple Computer business cards—from any period—have successfully passed grading authentication. A very slight stain on this piece is all that separates it from a completely perfect card, but it’s the mythology of Steve which has blown up it’s value. In the auction are computers used by others at Apple. Steve Wozniac’s CL 9 CORE Universal Remote Control from the period went for under a grand. Del Yocam who was in charge of the Apple II group and later became the companies first COO had a few pieces of his memorabilia on auction, including his personal Apple IIGS which went for a little under $2,000.

Bill Gates’ personal TRS-80 Model 100 sold for $25,000. It’s the last machine Bill used to code with his team before moving up the ranks. On the underside is a note left by Bill stating “I don’t need this anymore. It is MS property. I am going to start using the model 200.”

The note has been hand dated by someone else as January 27, 1986.

In an interview with the Smithsonian Institution, Gates affirmed that the Model T “was the last machine where I wrote a very high percentage of the code in the product. I did all the design and debugging along with Jey. And it is a cool user interface, because although most of the code is a BASIC Interpreter, we did this little file system where you never had to think about saving anything. You just had this menu where you pointed to things. It was a great little editor and scheduler. We crammed it all into a 32K ROM.”

That’s cool dude, but Steve Jobs signed some paper.