Apple Computer Inc. was officially established on April 1st, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne to sell the Apple Computer. These computers were handbuilt by Jobs and Wozniak and they were sold as motherboards, which is less than a regular computer now days. The Apple I computer went on sale in July of 1976 for $666.66 which is around $2,800 in 2017. Listen to Steve Jobs at the right as he explains his experience.
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Ronald Wayne was a help in the very beginning of the company but once he second guessed himself, he left. In the beginning, they had no money, and they had no parts, so they looked at their friends from Atari to see if they could spare any parts. The company soon began to build over 50 computers for an order from the Byte shop and he took over his sister, Patties bedroom and the family garage to start his company. They had even rented a postbox so that the business would seem official. They figured that we can't just keep borrowing parts and then paying back afterwards, they wanted investors. Many people came to them to invest, but they got turned down. Until investor Mike Markkula. The first time that Jobs and Wozniak met Markkula, he showed up in a gold Corvette and immediately told both Jobs and Woz that they needed haircuts. But once he saw the computer, he was speechless and immediately invested $250,000 towards the Apple Computer II.
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Markkula instantly realized that the Apple II could be "much more than a toy for hobbyists or game players. It could be a truly useful tool, especially for regular folks who wanted to keep track of recipes or a bank account," (Blumenthal, 77) "This is the start of an industry," he told Jobs and Wozniak. Once the Apple II was released in April of 1977, it became an instant success. Within the first few months of sale, Apple computer "sold $744,000 worth of computers by the end of September, and even recorded a profit of almost $42,000 in its first year as a real company," (Blumenthal, 82).
The link to the right is a New York Times Article Published in 1979 titled, When a Computer Joins the Family. |
Because of Apple success with the Apple I and Apple II computers, the value of the company had grown by over 3 million dollars in 1977 alone. After making two successul computers, the Apple team knew that they had to continue making a new computer each year. They began working on a project that was called the Apple Lisa, named after Jobs recently born daughter. The Apple Lisa would be a less expensive, faster, and more reasonable computer for the everyday consumer. Then during 1983, the Apple Lisa was released and was much less successful than the company had expected.
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The Macintosh Computer was announced in 1984 and was a complete breakthrough for the company. It was announced during a commercial in the Super Bowl. The initial sale of the computer was extraordinary but in later months they didn't sell nearly as many computers as they would have liked. Because of his young age and little experience, the board did not think that Jobs was capable to be a part of the Apple team, so he was removed. "He considered going into politics, but he had never actually voted, which would have been a drawback. He was thirty years old, a millionaire, and a failure a the company that he cofounded. He didn't know what to do." (Blumenthal, 129).
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