Steve Jobs’ Plan for Atari ‘Astrochart’ Among New Items Up for Auction

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If you’ve ever dreamed of owning the heatsink or a cable from Steve Jobs’ very own Apple 1, then today is going to be a very good day for you. Both these pieces of, um, history are available for purchase as part of an auction of Jobs-related ephemera entitled “Steve Jobs & the Computer Revolution: The Apple 50th Anniversary Auction.”

The auction’s catalog includes a strange assortment of items, from the historic to the mundane. It feels like someone went through Jobs’ bedroom and found a couple of boxes of random items at the back of his closet, and it appears that scenario isn’t a million miles from what actually happened: the auctioned items originate with Jobs’ stepbrother John Chovanec, who inherited the contents of Jobs’ bedroom after the computing pioneer’s death from pancreatic cancer in 2011.

Still, amongst the random Pixar business cards (yours for just $300!) and ancient iPhones, there’s some genuinely fascinating stuff on sale, including some hardware of genuine historical significance. The highlight of the latter category is the auction’s headline item: the first known prototype of the Apple 1’s main circuit board, which could be yours if you can meet the whopping reserve price of $50,000.

As well as his own company’s devices, Jobs also owned all manner of other early microcomputers, including some rare and unusual models. For example, there’s one of the first 100 Commodore PETs, the 1977 machine that represented Commodore’s first foray into the world of personal computing and was also a highlight of 1970s industrial design: unlike the better-known VIC-20 and Commodore 64, the PET was an all-in-one model that incorporated a screen, tape deck and keyboard, all of which were housed in a white sheet metal upper case that could be popped open like a car hood to reveal the computer’s circuitry.

earliest known fiberglass prototype used to validate Apple’s first computer

There’s also one of two known all-black versions of the prototype Atari 5200 known as the Atari Video System X. The device dates back to 1982, but Jobs appears to have purchased this prototype in 2001 from Atari Museum founder Curt Vendel.

Despite the auction’s title focusing solely on Jobs, there are also some items that belonged to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. For our money, the Woz-related highlight is absolutely a pair of very groovy rainbow logo-shaped sunglasses. (If nothing else, it’s a miracle that they’ve survived nearly half a century without one of the stems atop each lens breaking off.)

Perhaps most interesting, however, is a ten-page memo that a 20-year-old Jobs prepared for Atari in 1975, while he was working for the company as a technician. The document is a series of equations for a project called “Astrochart,” designed to calculate the position of each planet in the solar system at a given time (and do so using “reletively [sic] limited size of reference storage”). RR Auction describes the project “as an astrology/horoscope application.”

It’s unclear how or where Astrochart was to be used—in 1975, Atari was developing its VCS console, which would eventually be sold as the Atari 2600. That console could run a variety of cartridge-based games, but it certainly wasn’t capable of general-use computing, and it’s hard to imagine Atari trying to sell a planet position calculator as a standalone title.

In any case, as far as we can tell, Astrochart never saw the light of day. However, the idea of an automated horoscope clearly interested someone at Atari, because a similar project entitled “Atari Astrology” surfaced early last year on the abandonware site AtariMania. Sadly, it met a similar fate to Astrochart: as per the program’s listing on that site, “the only mention of the program is from a catalog dated late 1980, and the title appears to have been quickly dropped.”

The auction‘s catalog is online now, and bidding will conclude on January 29. You can check out the Apple-1 Celebration Board in more detail in the video below.

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