Apple: a historical summary

In 1976, 3 enterprising young men founded Apple Computer, Incorporated, with the intention of creating & distributing personal computers.Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, & Ronald Wayne started with a dream of making computers smaller & more available to the public.Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, & Ronald Wayne started with a dream of making computers smaller & more available to the public.Eventually, two hundred of these computers would be sold.

Steve Jobs approached a local computer store, The Byte Shop, which ordered 50 units & paid $500 for each unit after much persuasion from Jobs, whose persuasive techniques have since become known as "the reality-distortion field".Jobs then ordered components from Cramer Electronics, a national electronics parts distributor. Using a number of methods, including borrowing space from friends & family & selling various items (including a Volkswagen Bus), Jobs managed to secure the parts needed while Wozniak & Wayne assembled the Apple I kits.

The next year, the Apple II was introduced & quickly became much more popular than its major competition, the TRS-80 (which used cassette tapes for storage, & was known derisively as the TRasH-80) & the Commodore 64, even though the price of the Apple was higher. One of the major advantages of the Apple was the development of the floppy disk drive & software.

The Apple II was selected by programmers to be the desktop platform for the first "killer application" of the business world. This was a spreadsheet program named VisCalc. This created a huge market for the Apple. The business market attracted many more software & hardware developers to the machine, plus it attracted home users who chose the Apple to be compatible with their workplace computers.

Over the years, Apple Computer would release many more designs, with each one just a little better than the previous one. In 1984, Steve Jobs was on hand to introduce the Mac as the "Computer for the rest of us". In 1989, Apple introduced the Macintosh Portable. However, this computer was actually quite bulky & cumbersome & was met with mixed reviews. At this point, Apple hired industrial designers to develop a better, more portable personal computer.

In 1991, the Apple PowerBook was introduced. The PowerBook would provide the basic structure & form for the laptop computers we know today.