Art News

Sotheby’s New York announces the sale of the contract that founded Apple Computer Company

NEW YORK, N.Y.- On 13 December 2011 Sotheby’s New York is to offer the founding partnership agreement of the Apple Computer Company – the firm that revolutionized technology, business, personal computing and the world. The 1976 document, which once belonged to Ronald G. Wayne, one of Apple’s founders along with Steven P. Jobs and Stephen G. Wozniak, is the first chapter in the story of one of America’s most important companies. The contract, along with the agreement documenting Ron Wayne’s withdrawal from the company for $800, will be offered as a single lot in the Fine Books and Manuscripts sale and is estimated to fetch $100/150,000.* In 1974 Steve Jobs left Reed College and was given a job at Atari by Al Alcorn, the company’s chief engineer. It was whilst working on the night shift that he met Ron Wayne, a 41 year old who had started a business that later failed. Jobs would tell his biographe