Check signed by Steve Jobs 11,128 days before the iPhone was announced is sold at auction

Riddle me this Batman. When is a $4.01 check worth $46,043? When the check was written and signed on July 23rd, 1976 by the late Steve Jobs and was drawn on the Apple Computer Company corporate account at Wells Fargo Bank, that's when. It was written to Radio Shack (for batteries, we'd bet). The check, as noted, fetched 11,482 times the amount it was written for during the Fine Autograph and Artifacts auction held by RR Auction from November 17 to December 6.

The check was written more than four years before Jobs, Wozniak, and others became millionaires when Apple went public on December 12th, 1980. The stock has split five times since the IPO which means those lucky enough to have purchased the stock on that date paid the equivalent of 10 cents per share for the stock.

Speaking of money, if bidding for the check was too rich for your blood, two items signed by Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne (the third partner when Apple was incorporated who left the company 12 days later) were auctioned as one lot. The lot contained a replica of the Apple-I manual and a photo of the Apple II. Expected to fetch over $200, the lot was sold for $491.

A first-generation 8GB iPhone still sealed in the box went for $10,456. The reason that it didn't attract a higher bid like the record $158,644 that an OG iPhone was purchased for this past summer, is due to the amount of the unit's storage. The 4GB model, like the one that set the world record for an auctioned first-gen iPhone, is the rarest model of all because it was available only from June 29th until September 4th, 2007. On the latter date, Apple stopped selling the 4GB variant and reduced the price of the 8GB model to the old 4GB price of $399 from $599.

By the way, according to RR Auction, without Radio Shack there might never have been an Apple and there might never have been an iPhone. Steve Wozniak was using Radio Shack's TRS-80 Micro Computer System to help him build the Blue Box that he sold to consumers to help them illegally make free long distance calls. Wozniak and Steve Jobs, for the first time, were partners on this venture (sort of like the first time John Lennon met Paul McCartney) and the pair sold 200 boxes at $150 each.

Today, Apple is once again a $3 trillion company and Radio Shack's IP was sold this year to a company called Unicomer Group.