New $1 US coins to feature Steve Jobs and Cray-1 supercomputer — US Mint’s 2026 American Innovation Program to memorialize computing history

Steve Jobs and the Cray-1 supercomputer are joining the heads of former presidents and the Statue of Liberty as icons on United States coinage. As part of the 2026 crop of American Innovation $1 coins, California and Wisconsin will see two titans of computing history canonized on official U.S. currency by the U.S. Mint.

In a press release, the Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Mint released the next four $1 coins to feature “American innovation and significant innovation and pioneering efforts of individuals or groups”. This ninth year of the American Innovation coin program features icons from California, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, with each state’s icon selected with the help of governors and other state officials.

California’s Steve Jobs coin features a young Steve Jobs sitting cross-legged in a “quintessentially northern California landscape of oak-covered rolling hills”. The coin, designed and sculpted by Elana Hagler and Phebe Hemphill, features the luminary behind innovating and marketing the Apple company, who helped shape the future of personal computing. The coin features in equal measure the natural beauty of California and the likeness of the man himself; this is due to Jobs frequently citing the state of California as a unique creative muse for himself.

“California has a sense of experimentation about it, and a sense of openness about it—openness and new possibility—that I really didn’t appreciate till I went to other places,” said Jobs of the state.

Written on the top border of the coin is the phrase “make something wonderful”, part of a popular quote spoken by Jobs, as well as the title of the book of Jobs’ writings released posthumously in 2023. Steve Jobs founded Apple alongside Steve Wozniak in 1976, releasing the Apple I personal computer that year and the highly influential Apple II the following year. In Jobs’ second stint at Apple beginning in 1997, he oversaw the release of the iPhone, MacBook Air, iMac, and a host of other enormously influential personal computing products. Jobs died in 2011 from cancer complications and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2022.

Wisconsin’s coin features not a person, but one of the most important computers in history. The Cray-1 supercomputer is one of the best-known supercomputers of all time, thanks to both its incredible innovation in construction and its unique visual design. The Cray-1 was invented by Seymour Cray, the father of supercomputing, at Cray Research Inc. in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. The Cray-1 held the record of the world’s fastest supercomputer from 1976 to 1982 at a whopping 170 MFLOPS, thanks to its innovative use of integrated circuits.

The coin displaying the Cray-1 displays the iconic top-down footprint of the computer, with a circular arrangement of computer banks flanked all around by the world’s most expensive love seat. The “Cray-1 Supercomputer” moniker is displayed emerging from the C-shaped machine, along with the signatures of artist and sculptor Paul Romano and John P. McGraw.

The coins will be released alongside currency displaying Iowa’s Norman Borlaug and Minnesota’s invention of mobile refrigeration in 2026. The American Innovation program will continue until 2032, until it has featured an important innovation from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the five U.S. territories. Previous coins in the collection featuring computing history include New Hampshire’s coin, displaying Ralph Baer’s Handball video game for the Magnavox Odyssey, the first in-home video game system.

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