Peyton Powell

Staff Writer

Photo courtesy of wikimedia commons

Where would we be with our computers and our phones? More specifically, where would we be without Apple products? If it weren’t for this day, April 1st, 1976, the world may never have known what the technology craze was all about, because on that day 42 years ago, three men decided to create the Apple company in a garage.

Before the foundation of the Apple Computer Company, two of its founders Jobs, ad Wozniak withdrew from their attending universities, Reed College, and UC Berkeley respectively. After withdrawing from university, Wozniak started designing a video terminal that was able to log on to computers at Call Computers. Jobs and Wozniak, sometimes termed the “two Steve’s,” who were old friends, began to reconnect at a local Homebrew Computer Club meeting, after Wozniak approached Jobs with his completed computer based off the $20 ‘6502’ chip which he designed the computer around. Jobs quickly took interest and started thinking of a commercial aspect of the small machine. Ronald Wayne then joined on to the team by helping assemble the computers.

At the time of the company’s official launch, the three where working on the Apple I, with Jobs working on getting the parts needed, and Wayne, and Wozniak building the computers. The men had previously approached Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop showing off the idea to their computer, and Terrel offered to buy 50 computers at $500 apiece. This project would prove to be financially harsh, because none of the three had a lot of money, and in order to buy the parts, they needed the money. Banks were hesitant to give the financial support to the Apple Computer Company, until he meets Mike Markkula, who co-signed a bank loan for $250,000. The Apple Computer Company was officially launched by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on April 1st, 1976 in Los Altos, California, after receiving the financial support they direly needed.

The name of Apple was chosen for many reasons, and one of them was that it was first alphabetically before its rival, Atari, and would appear first in everything, and the second thing was that Jobs had “happy memories” of working on an apple farm in Oregon during a summer. With everything officially developed for this new company, Ronald Wayne decided to leave the company because of the similarity to a previous company that he worked for, that ended up failing. After Wayne left, Jobs and Wozniak continued with the company, the two Steve’s acting as co-founders, and they eventually built 200 Apple I’s.

After the release of the Apple I, came a range of many different computers, and then eventually phones, music players, and tablets. Like the ever-changing devices, the company was also ever changing. Soon after the Apple I was done, Wozniak moved away from Apple, and then in 1985, after differences with CEO John Scully, Steve Jobs left the company. Jobs, however, soon returned to Apple in 1997, and remained at the company until he resigned due to his health.

The Apple Company has revolutionized so many things since its creation on April 1st, 1976, and if it weren’t for that day, we may not have half the things we do today. The iPod, MacBook, and iPhone will forever be known to our generations, but to get to where we are now, we had to start from the beginning.