Graynomad:
Holy crap Lefty, that beats them all I think. For maybe a $100 you could have been America's richest man.
Rob
In my dreams. They weren't offering to sell a share of their company, heck at the time I don't know if they had even incorporated yet. The populated original apple board they were selling was priced at either $666.66 or $777.77, I forget which, and I thought that was pretty high even at that time. If they had offered to sell it as a bare unpopulated PCB and included a programmed ROM I might have given it a consideration. Where Steve and Steve really 'lucked' out was some very knowledgeable silicon business types took them under wing and showed them how to set up a real company, get some venture capital and design a more consumer friendly model, the Apple II, which took off immediately and everyone knows the rest of that story.
I also worked for around 6 months for a start-up company called MicroPro in Rohnert Park, CA around 1977/78 which was trying to decide to sell CP/M application software only or package it with hardware. I was hired for the hardware side, but alas they decided to sell only software, so I left for more secure employment. They about a year or two later, as about their fourth software offering, started selling a word processor application that was to become pretty popular and made the founder(s) zillionaires, called.....Word Star.
Lefty