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Marked as check "No. 1," this historically important check pre-dates the official founding of Apple Computer, Inc.—some sixteen days later, on April 1, 1976, co-founders Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne would sign the partnership agreement that officially brought Apple Computer into existence. The agreement assigned 45% of the company to each of the Steves, and 10% to Wayne. It also required any expenditure over $100 to be approved by two of the partners—perhaps the reason that both Jobs and Woz signed this check.
During this early period, Jobs and Woz envisioned the Apple-1 as a bare-board kit to be soldered together by hobbyist users—their initial target market, Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club. As the two were effectively penniless, Jobs sold his beloved Volkswagen Bus and Woz sold his prized HP-65 pocket calculator to raise the initial working capital to fund the Apple Computer Company. In his autobiography iWoz, Wozniak recounts: 'To come up with the $1,000 we thought we'd need to built ready-made printed circuit boards, I sold my HP 65 calculator for $500. The guy who bought it only paid me half, though, and never paid me the rest...And Steve sold his VW van for another few hundred dollars. He figured he could ride around on his bicycle if he had to. That was it. We were in business.'
These early sacrifices are witnessed in Apple Computer's first bank statement, offered in this sale as Lot #6002, which shows that their very first deposit—a mere $500—came on the same day that they wrote this check. It also documents the $500 deduction from the account on March 23rd, matching the Wells Fargo stamp on the check's reverse.
Howard Cantin was the printed-circuit-board (PCB) layout engineer who translated Apple?1 designer Steve Wozniak’s schematic into the actual board that became the first product of Apple Computer Company in 1976. At the time, Cantin was working for Atari, Inc. and had experience doing PCB layouts for early Atari machines; Wozniak tapped him because he trusted Cantin’s craftsmanship for the delicate job of laying traces, component placement, and routing on a board intended for manufacture in small numbers.
Cantin’s involvement was crucial: although Wozniak’s design defined the logic, the aesthetics and manufacturability of the Apple-1 board depended on Cantin’s layout work. The board that Cantin laid out in 1976 used manual techniques (tape for trace routing) and helped form the physical foundation of what became one of the most celebrated early personal computers.
This inaugural Apple check thus stands as an extraordinary artifact from the very moment theory became product—when a visionary schematic, a garage workshop, and a fledgling partnership crossed the threshold into an operating business. Bearing the signatures of co-founders Jobs and Woz and issued to the craftsman who physically realized the Apple-1, it encapsulates the collaborative ingenuity and scrappy resourcefulness that defined Apple’s genesis. As the first financial instrument ever drawn on the Apple Computer Company’s original account, it is the foundational document that financed the creation of Apple's very first product and brought forth the personal computing revolution.
