Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976,
by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.The company's
first product was the Apple I, a computer single-handedly designed and
hand-built by Wozniak, and first shown to the public at the Homebrew
Computer Club. Apple I was sold as a motherboard(with CPU, RAM,
and basic textual-video chips), which was less than what is now considered a
complete personal computer. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was
market-priced at $666.66 ($2,806 in 2016 dollars, adjusted for inflation)
Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated on January 3,
1977, without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and
Wozniak for $800.Multimillionaire Mike Markkula provided essential
business expertise and funding of $250,000 during the incorporation of Apple.
During the first five years of operations revenues
grew exponentially, doubling about every four months. Between September 1977
and September 1980 yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118m, an average annual
growth rate of 533%.
The Apple II, also invented by Wozniak, was
introduced on April 16, 1977, at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It
differed from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET,
because of its character cell-based color graphics and open architecture.
While early Apple II models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices,
they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 ¼ inch floppy
disk drive and interface called the Disk II.
The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for
the first "killer app" of the business world: VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program.
VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II and gave home users an
additional reason to buy an Apple II: compatibility with the office.
Before VisiCalc, Apple had been a distant third place
competitor to Commodore and Tandy.
By the end of 1970's, Apple had a staff of computer
designers and a production line. The company introduced the Apple III in
May 1980 in an attempt to compete with IBM and Microsoft in
the business and corporate computing market.
Jobs and several Apple employees, including Jef
Raskin, visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted
Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for the
option to buy 100,000 shares (800,000 split-adjusted shares) of Apple at the
pre-IPO price of $10 a share.
Jobs was immediately convinced that all future
computers would use a graphical user interface (GUI), and development of a GUI
began for the Apple Lisa. In 1982, however, he was pushed from the
Lisa team due to infighting. Jobs took over Jef Raskin's low-cost-computer
project, the Macintosh. A race broke out between the Lisa team and the
Macintosh team over which product would ship first. Lisa won the race in 1983
and became the first personal computer sold to the public with a GUI, but was a
commercial failure due to its high price tag and limited software titles.
On December 12, 1980, Apple went public at $22 per
share, generating more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in
1956 and immediately creating 300 millionaires.
