History of Apple

The history of Apple

Our Apple history feature includes information about The foundation of Apple and the years that followed, we look at How Jobs met Woz and Why Apple was named Apple. The Apple I and The debut of the Apple II. Apple's visit to Xerox, and the one-button mouse. The story of The Lisa versus the Macintosh. Apple's '1984' advert, directed by Ridley Scott. The Macintosh and the DTP revolution.

We go on to examine what happened between Jobs and Sculley, leading to Jobs departure from Apple, and what happened during The wilderness years: when Steve Jobs wasn't at Apple, including Apple's decline and IBM and Microsoft's rise and how Apple teamed up with IBM and Motorola and eventually Microsoft. And finally, The return of Jobs to Apple.

The foundation of Apple

The history of everyone's favourite start-up is a tech fairytale of one garage, three friends and very humble beginnings. But we're getting ahead of ourselves…

The two Steves - Jobs and Wozniak - may have been Apple's most visible founders, but were it not for their friend Ronald Wayne there might be no iphone, ipad or imac today. Jobs convinced him to take 10% of the company stock and act as an arbiter should he and Woz come to blows, but Wayne backed out 12 days later, selling for just $500 a holding that would have been worth $72bn 40 years later.

How Jobs met Woz

Jobs and Woz (that's Steve Wozniak) were introduced in 1971 by a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, who went on to become one of Apple's earliest employees. The two Steves got along thanks to their shared love of technology and pranks.

Jobs and Wozniak joined forces, initially coming up with pranks such as rigging up a painting of a hand showing the middle-finger to be displayed during a graduaction ceremony at Jobs' school, and a call to the Vatican that nearly got them access to the Pope.

The two friends were also using their technology know-how to build 'blue boxes' that made it possible to make long distance phone calls for free.

Jobs and Wozniak worked together on the Atari arcade game Breakout while Jobs was working at Atari and Wozniak was working at HP - Jobs had roped Woz into helping him reduce the number of logic chips required. Jobs managed to get a good bonus for the work on Breakout, of which he gave a small amount to Woz.

The first Apple computer

The two Steves attended the Homebrew Computer Club together; a computer hobbyist group that gathered in California's Menlo Park from 1975. Woz had seen his first MITS Altair there - which today looks like little more than a box of lights and circuit boards - and was inspired by MITS' build-it-yourself approach (the Altair came as a kit) to make something simpler for the rest of us. This philosophy continues to shine through in Apple’s products today.

So Woz produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV as a screen. Later christened the Apple I, it was the archetype of every modern computer, but Wozniak wasn't trying to change the world with what he'd produced - he just wanted to show off how much he'd managed to do with so few resources.

Speaking to NPR (National Public Radio) in 2006, Woz explained that "When I built this Apple I… the first computer to say a computer should look like a typewriter - it should have a keyboard - and the output device is a TV set, it wasn't really to show the world [that] here is the direction [it] should go [in]. It was to really show the people around me, to boast, to be clever, to get acknowledgement for having designed a very inexpensive computer."

It almost didn't happen, though. The Woz we know now has a larger-than-life personality - he's funded rock concerts and shimmied on Dancing with the Stars - but, as he told the Sydney Morning Herald, "I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers." He came close to ducking out altogether, and giving the Club a miss.

Let's be thankful he didn't. Jobs saw Woz's computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator (which cost a bit more than calculators do today!), and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne.

Why Apple was named Apple

The name Apple was to cause Apple problems in later years as it was uncomfortably similar to that of the Beatles' publisher, Apple Corps, but its genesis was innocent enough.

Woz credited Jobs with the idea. "He was working from time to time in the orchards up in Oregon. I thought that it might be because there were apples in the orchard or maybe just its fructarian nature. Maybe the word just happened to occur to him. In any case, we both tried to come up with better names but neither one of us could think of anything better after Apple was mentioned."

According to the biography of Steve Jobs, the name was conceived by Jobs after he returned from apple farm. He apparently thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

The name also likely benefitted by beginning with an A, which meant it would be nearer the front of any listings.

The Apple Logo

There are other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple. The idea that it was named thus because Newton was inspired when an Apple fell out of a tree hitting him on the head, is backed up by the fact that the original Apple logo was a rather complicated illustration of Newton sitting under a tree.

Later the company settled on the bite out of an Apple design for Apple's logo - a far simpler logo design. These logos are probably the reason for other theories about the meaning behind the name Apple, with some suggesting that the Apple logo with a chunk taken out of it is a nod at computer scientist and Enigma code-breaker, Alan Turing, who committed suicide by eating a cyanide infused apple.

However, according to Rob Janoff, the designer who created the logo, the Turing connection is simply "a wonderful urban legend."

Equally the bite taken out of the Apple could represent the story of Adam and Eve from the Old Testament. The idea being that the Apple represents knowledge.

Selling the Apple I

Woz built each computer by hand, and although he'd wanted to sell them for little more than the cost of their parts - at a price at that would recoup their outlay as long as they shipped 50 units - Jobs had bigger ideas.

Jobs inked a deal with the Byte Shop in Mountain View to supply it with 50 computers at $500 each. This meant that once the store had taken its cut, the Apple I sold for $666.66 - the legend is that Wozniak liked repeating numbers and was unaware of the 'number of the beast' conection. 

Byte Shop was going out on a limb: the Apple I didn't exist in any great numbers, and the nascent Apple Computer Inc didn't have the resources to fulfil the order. Neither could it get them. Atari, where Jobs worked, wanted cash for any components it sold him, a bank turned him down for a loan, and although he had an offer of $5,000 from a friend's father, it wasn't enough.

In the end, it was Byte Shop's purchase order that sealed the deal. Jobs took it to Cramer Electronics and, as Walter  Isaacson explains in Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, he convinced Cramer's manager to call Paul Terrell, owner of Byte Shop, to verify the order.

"Terrell was at a conference when he heard over a loudspeaker that he had an emergency call (Jobs had been persistent). The Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had just walked in waving an order from the Byte Shop. Was it real? Terrell confirmed that it was, and the store agreed to front Jobs the parts on thirty-day credit."

Jobs was banking on producing enough working computers within that time to settle the bill out of the proceeds from selling completed units to Byte Shop. The risk involved was too great for Ronald Wayne, and it's ultimately this that saw him duck out.

"Jobs and Woz didn't have two nickels to rub together," Wayne told Next Shark in 2013. "If this thing blew up, how was that… going to be repaid? Did they have the money? No. Was I reachable? Yes."

Family and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they'd been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found.

As Michael Moritz explains in Return of the Little Kingdom , "Some energetic intervention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. Terrell couldn't even test the board without buying two transformers… Since the Apple I didn't have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funnelled in or out of the computer. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn't be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn't provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip… finally the computer was naked. It had no case."

Raspberry PI and the BBC's Micro Bit aside, we probably wouldn’t accept such a computer today, and even Terrell was reluctant at first but, as Isaacson explains, "Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay." The gamble had paid off, and the Apple I stayed in production from April 1976 until September 1977, with a total run of around 200 units.

Their scarcity has made them collectors' items, and Bonhams auctioned a working Apple I in October 2014 for an eye-watering $905,000. If your pockets aren't that deep, Briel Computers' Replica 1 Plas  is a hardware clone of the Apple I, and ships at a far more affordable $199, fully built.

When you consider that only 200 were built, the Apple I was a triumph. It powered its burgeoning parent company to almost unheard-of rates of growth - so much so that the decision to build a successor can't have caused too many sleepless nights in the Jobs and Wozniak households.