History of Apple: How Apple came to lead the tech industry
The foundation of Apple: The third founder
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 where 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 a holding that today would be worth $72bn for just $500.
The foundation of Apple: How Jobs met Woz
Jobs met Woz at the Homebrew Computer Club; a gathering of enthusiasts in a garage in California's Menlo Park. 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. You can see this philosophy shining through in Apple's products today.
So he produced the the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV. 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 in 2006, he 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 the computer, recognised its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator, and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne.
The foundation of Apple: The inspiration for the name
The name was to cause Apple problems in later years as it came uncomfortably close to the Beatles' publisher, Apple Corps, but its genesis was innocent enough. Speaking to Byte magazine in December 1984, 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.'
The foundation of Apple: 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 if they shipped 50 units - Jobs had bigger ideas.
He priced the Apple I at $666.66, and inked a deal with the Byte Shop in Mountain View so supply it with 50 computers at $500 each. Byte Shop was going out on a limb: the Apple I didn't exist in any great number, 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 NextShark 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 to 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 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 Plus is a hardware clone of the Apple I, and ships at a far more affordable $199, fully built.
Tune in next time for more Apple history.
If you'd like to reminisce more visit our Apple History Zone, where you can find:
Apple timeline in pictures and video
24 milestones in the Mac's 30-year history