The auction continued in much the same hot-and-cold fashion. A confidential 1948 Progress Report on the Automatic Computing Engine that included source code for programs written by Alan Turing—one of the founders of computer science—failed to sell, while volume 57 of Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, from 1938, which published Shannon's master's thesis, sold for $15 600. (The American Institute of Electrical Engineers was a predecessor of the IEEE.)

But when it came to the auction's star attraction, the booksellers were brushed aside. Lot 238 comprised eight sheets of dog-eared typewritten paper with a typo in the title: "Outline of Plans for Development of Electronic Computors [sic]." Written in 1946 by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, coinventors of the seminal ENIAC computer, the "Outline" is the founding document of the commercial computer industry. It is the business plan for the first computer company, the Electronic Control Co., and includes a list of potential customers and uses for computers. The ECC was later bought up by Remington Rand Inc. and would go on to produce the influential Univac computer, which brought computing into businesses and governments around the world.

As the bidding kicked off on Lot 238, one person repeatedly raised a paddle, quickly outbidding everyone in the room. The dealers and collectors who had been bidding throughout the auction, and who generally recognized each other, twisted in their seats trying to make out an unfamiliar man and woman sitting together near the back. "Who are those people?" muttered one. But any computer historian would have recognized the man: Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp., cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and currently chair of the nonprofit Open Source Applications Foundation. Kapor is one of the original computer-software millionaires minted in the 1980s, now given to philanthropy.

Soon Kapor was bidding against only one other, a phone-in bidder known as 851. But Kapor was not to be beaten. Bidder 851 folded, and the software magnate snapped up the "Outline"—for a princely $72 000, or $9000 per page. Afterward, Kapor stated he simply had a list of lots he liked, with the criterion being that "each item had some personal resonance." It wasn't too surprising to find Eckert and Mauchly's plan on a wish list belonging to the founder of a famously successful computer software company. Asked what he thought of the business merits of the "Outline," Kapor told IEEE Spectrum that Eckert and Mauchly "underestimated both the budget and the time to market pretty dramatically. But they nailed the idea there was a large market for computing devices. The plan was quite farsighted."

For now, Kapor plans to put high-quality scans of the entire "Outline" online and is considering displaying it in the offices of the Open Source Applications Foundation, in San Francisco

When the auction ended soon after, Norman shook Kapor's hand and congratulated him on his "good taste." The auction had fetched $714 000. Norman was philosophical about the outcome—only about half the items had sold, but those that were bought did well. "It's a spotty result, but the highs were very good. Whenever you do something new, you don't know what to expect." Norman hopes that, now that he has shown there's some life in the market, collectors may come forward individually to purchase unsold items from him. Having become something of an expert on the history of computers through his collecting, he plans to release a book on the subject targeted at a much more general audience than his first $500 tome.

"I did this as an adventure," said Norman, "and it's sent me down interesting paths."