Rare original advertising flyer from the Apple Computer Company, which was handed to the consignor by Steve Jobs in his Los Altos 'Apple garage' in the fall of 1976. The dual-sided sheet, 8.5 x 11, lists information and pricing for the Apple-1 desktop computer, the Apple Cassette Interface with included BASIC tape, and Apple 4K Byte RAM expansion memory. The front side is headed "Apple Introduces the First Low Cost Microcomputer System with a Video Terminal and 8K Bytes of RAM on a Single PC Card," with lower informational text and an image of the Apple-1 motherboard. The reverse shows an image of the Apple Cassette Interface above a pricing chart and Ron Wayne's original Apple logo, with text to left margin and the original slogan: "Byte into an Apple." Both sides bear the company's mailing address and phone number: "770 Welch Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94304, (415) 326-4248." In very good to fine condition, with light creasing, light dampstaining along the lower edge, and faint lines on the back from onetime storage in a magnetic photo album.
Accompanied by a letter of provenance from the original recipient, a high school classmate of Jobs' at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California: "This advertisement for the Apple I computer system was given to me by Steve Jobs in the fall of 1976 when I was hanging out in his garage computer shop. We had become friends in high school."
The Apple-1 was originally conceived by Steve Jobs and Steve 'Woz' Wozniak as a bare circuit board to be sold as a kit and completed by electronics hobbyists, their initial market being Palo Alto's Homebrew Computer Club. Seeking a larger audience, Jobs approached Paul Terrell, owner of The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, one of the first personal computer stores in the world. Aiming to elevate the computer beyond the realm of the hobbyist, Terrell agreed to purchase 50 Apple-1 computers, but only if they were fully assembled. The Apple-1 thus became one of the first 'personal' computers which did not require soldering by the end user. All together, over a span of about ten months, Jobs and Wozniak produced about 200 Apple-1 computers and sold 175 of them.
The Apple-1 Cassette Interface (ACI) provided the ability to save memory contents onto a standard audio tape, and later load the contents back into the computer's memory. Revolutionary for the time, Steve Wozniak designed the ACI to use only 6 integrated circuits, compared to other solutions which used 50 to 100 integrated circuits. This allowed Apple to sell their solution for less than their competitors; the Apple ACI also operated at four times the speed of its contemporary competitors.
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