History of Apple Inc.

Apple Inc., originally Apple Computer, Inc., is an American multinational corporation that creates and markets consumer electronics and attendant computer software, and is a digital distributor of media content. Apple's core product lines are the iPhone line of smartphones, the iPad line of tablet computers, and the Mac line of personal computers. The company offers its products online and has a chain of retail stores known as Apple Stores. Founders Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne created Apple Computer Co. on April 1, 1976, to market Wozniak's Apple I desktop computer, and Jobs and Wozniak incorporated the company on January 3, 1977, in Cupertino, California. For more than three decades, Apple Computer was predominantly a manufacturer of personal computers, including the Apple II, Macintosh, and Power Mac lines, but it faced rocky sales and low market share during the 1990s. Jobs, who had been ousted from the company in 1985, returned to Apple in 1997 after his company NeXT was bought by Apple. The following year he became the company's interim CEO, which later became permanent. Jobs subsequently instilled a new corporate philosophy of recognizable products and simple design, starting with the original iMac in 1998. With the introduction of the successful iPod music player in 2001 and iTunes Music Store in 2003, Apple established itself as a leader in the consumer electronics and media sales industries, leading it to drop "Computer" from the company's name in 2007. The company is also known for its iOS range of smartphone, media player, and tablet computer products that began with the iPhone, followed by the iPod Touch and then iPad. As of June 30, 2015, Apple was the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization, with an estimated value of US$1 trillion as of August 2, 2018. Apple's worldwide annual revenue in 2010 totaled US$65 billion, growing to US$127.8 billion in 2011 and $156 billion in 2012.

1971–1985: Jobs and Wozniak

Pre-foundation

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, referred to collectively as "the two Steves", first met in mid-1971, when their mutual friend Bill Fernandez introduced then 21-year-old Wozniak to 16-year-old Jobs. Their first business partnership began in the fall of that year when Wozniak, a self-educated electronics engineer, read an article in Esquire magazine that described a device that could place free long-distance phone calls by emitting specific tone chirps. Wozniak started to build his original “blue boxes”, which he tested by calling the Vatican City pretending to be Henry Kissinger wanting to speak to the pope. Jobs managed to sell some two hundred blue boxes for $150 each, and split the profit with Wozniak. Jobs later told his biographer that if it hadn't been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple." By 1972, Jobs had withdrawn from Reed College and Wozniak from UC Berkeley. Wozniak designed a video terminal that he could use to log on to the minicomputers at Call Computer. Alex Kamradt commissioned the design and sold a small number of them through his firm. Aside from their interest in up-to-date technology, the impetus for the two Steves seems to have had another source. In his essay From Satori to Silicon Valley (published 1986), cultural historian Theodore Roszak made the point that Apple Computer emerged from within the West Coast counterculture and the need to produce print-outs, letter labels, and databases. Roszak offers a bit of background on the development of the two Steves' prototype models. In 1975, the two Steves started attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. New microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 and the IMSAI 8080 inspired Wozniak to build a microprocessor into his video terminal circuit to make a complete computer. At the time the only microcomputer CPUs generally available were the $179 Intel 8080 (equivalent to $1,071 in 2025), and the $170 Motorola 6800 (equivalent to $1,017 in 2025). Wozniak preferred the 6800, but both were out of his price range. So he watched, and learned, and designed computers on paper, waiting for the day he could afford a CPU. When MOS Technology released its $20 (equivalent to $113 in 2025) 6502 chip in 1976, Wozniak wrote a version of BASIC for it, then began to design a computer for it to run on. The 6502 was designed by the same people who designed the 6800, as many in Silicon Valley left employers to form their own companies. Wozniak's earlier 6800 paper-computer needed only minor changes to run on the new chip. By March 1, 1976, Wozniak completed the machine and took it to a Homebrew Computer Club meeting to show it off. When Jobs saw Wozniak's computer, which later became the Apple I, he was immediately interested in its commercial potential. Initially, Wozniak intended to share schematics of the machine for free, but Jobs insisted that they should instead build and sell bare printed circuit boards for the computer. Wozniak originally offered the design to Hewlett-Packard (HP), where he worked at the time, but was denied by the company on five occasions. Jobs eventually convinced Wozniak to go into business together and start a new company of their own. In order to raise the money they needed to produce the first batch of printed circuit boards, Jobs sold his Volkswagen Type 2 minibus for $1,500, and Wozniak his HP-65 programmable calculator for $500.

Apple I and company formation

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