Steve Jobs’ Personal Apple 1 Relic from 1976

I just won Steve Jobs’ original Apple 1 rainbow ribbon cable, used to connect the motherboard to the keyboard (example below). On the left is a standard 16-pin connector that fits the same DIP socket used for logic chips and memory back then, long before standard USB connectors.

This cable is a 1976 relic from his Apple garage startup days and appears to have been used and removed from the keyboard. It is iconic to me as a colorful adjunct to the Apple logo, and it carried on as the ribbon cable for the Apple ][ disc drive. It was playful and fun, unlike the beige blight of the PC, an offense to Jobs’ design sensibilities.

I just love this stuff. My first computer was the Apple ][ with the ribbon-cable going to the Disc ][. I covered it in 6-color  logo stickers and inserted extra memory chips that my Dad made at Mostek (below).

In college, when I built a 68000-based talking computer, I used the same ribbon cable to connect to the keyboard-equivalent (also below).

And then I finally met Jobs, and he recruited me to join him at NeXT. I wrote a eulogy covering those days in BusinessWeek, and as they used to say at Apple, I will bleed 6 colors forever.