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Early Apple Computer Company check, 6 x 3, filled out and signed by Jobs, "steven jobs," payable to Elizabeth Holmes for $17, July 29, 1976; also endorsed on the reverse by Holmes. Headed "Apple Computer Company," the check uses Apple's first official address at "770 Welch Rd., Ste. 154, Palo Alto"—the location of the answering service and mail drop that they used while still operating out of the famous Jobs family garage. In very fine condition.
During this period in the summer of 1976, roughly four months after founding the Apple Computer Company, Jobs and Wozniak were hard at work building their first product. Initially conceived as a kit to be soldered together by the end user—like most enthusiast computers of the era—the Apple-1 became a finished product at the behest of Paul Terrell, owner of The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, one of the first personal computer stores in the world.
Terrell offered to buy 50 of the computers—at a wholesale price of $500 a piece, to retail at $666.66—but only if they came fully assembled. With this request, Terrell aimed to elevate the computer from the domain of the hobbyist/enthusiast to the realm of the mainstream consumer. Wozniak later placed Terrell's purchase order in perspective: 'That was the biggest single episode in all of the company's history. Nothing in subsequent years was so great and so unexpected.'
In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes appears as an influence in the early Apple story as part of the small, informal circle Jobs pulled into the garage operation. Isaacson describes Jobs recruiting friends and family to help fulfill the first Apple-1 orders: "The Jobs house in Los Altos became the assembly point for the fifty Apple I boards that had to be delivered to the Byte Shop…All available hands were enlisted: Jobs and Wozniak, plus Daniel Kottke, his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes (who had broken away from the cult she'd joined), and Jobs's pregnant sister, Patty…Holmes, who had taken jewelry classes, was given the task of soldering chips. 'Most I did well, but I got flux on a few of them,' she recalled. This didn't please Jobs. 'We don't have a chip to spare,' he railed, correctly. He shifted her to bookkeeping and paperwork at the kitchen table, and did the soldering himself…After thirty days Apple was on the verge of being profitable…Elizabeth Holmes officially became the part-time bookkeeper at $4 an hour, driving down from San Francisco once a week and figuring out how to port Jobs's checkbook into a ledger" (pp. 67–68).
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