The Birth of Apple

Wozniak (left) and Jobs in their garage.

(Courtesy of Apple Computer)

It sounds like an April Fools Day joke: Two college dropouts screw a bunch of microprocessors on a plank of plywood and revolutionize the world. But it’s not. Thirty years ago today Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple Computer in Jobs’s parent’s garage. They were going to manufacture personal computers. They thought the machines had the potential to become as popular as ham radios.

Of course, the demand for their invention exploded, and computers are now ubiquitous fixtures in our lives. Nearly 200 million are sold each year, and those two ex-hippies are fabulously wealthy.

In the early 1970s computers were still mostly room-size behemoths that ground away in Defense Department offices or specialized research labs. But the 21-year-old Jobs, who worked at Atari, the video-game company, and 25-year-old “Woz,” who toiled at Hewlett-Packard making programmable calculators, were among the pathbreaking members of the Homebrew Computer Club, in Palo Alto, California. The club fiddled around with the Altair 8800, the first computer small enough for home use by an individual. It came in a kit and was marketed to the kind of people who could and would figure out how to build it.

Inspired by the Altair, Wozniak tried to get the people at Hewlett-Packard interested in his design for a pre-built personal computer, but they passed. He showed his invention to his high-school buddy Jobs. It wasn’t much to look at. It was just a logic board, or a set of microchips working in tandem, mounted on a piece of plywood and hooked up to a television. But their friends at the computer club loved it, and a local store offered to buy 50.

Wozniak sold his favorite calculator and Jobs hocked his Volkswagen minivan for seed money. The two hoped at most to break even. “When we started this little partnership, it was just like, Oh, this will be fun. We won’t make any money, but it’ll be fun,” Wozniak later recalled. They didn’t even quit their day jobs.

“The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life. My whole life had been designing computers I could never build,” Wozniak later said. They set up their operation in Jobs’s parents’ garage and christened their tiny company Apple because Jobs had enjoyed a summer working in an orchard in Oregon. They did a brisk business, and a year later they unveiled the Apple II. Compared to today’s sleek G5 iMacs, it was a terribly crude thing. But at the time, the stand-alone model in a friendly-looking plastic case was revolutionary. It even had a color display. It sold five million units between its 1977 unveiling and its discontinuation in 1993.

Jobs recruited a public relations firm, Regis McKenna, to launch a massive advertising campaign for the Apple II and secured additional investors. By 1980 the company had netted more than $100 million and, with 1,000 employees, had long since outgrown the garage. It went public that year with a historic stock offering. Apple soon faced competition from IBM, but it continued to distinguish itself with elegant design and an emphasis on user-friendliness.

Wozniak left Apple in 1981, after being injured in a plane crash, but Jobs continued, overseeing the design of two new models, the Lisa, released in 1983 with little success, and then the Macintosh. Jobs said he insisted that his computers be “insanely great.” The Mac didn’t sell well at first, and in 1985 Jobs was ousted from the company he had built. With subsequent design improvements the Mac battled back, and the operation recovered somewhat.

The real renaissance of Apple didn’t occur until Jobs returned to the company, in 1997. (Wozniak also came back, but in an advisory capacity. He dedicates most of his energy to teaching computer skills to students in Los Gatos and helping schools get wired.) Jobs announced an alliance with his competitor Microsoft and unveiled a line of affordable and stylish computers like the candy-colored first-generation iMacs.

Apple has remained successful with a record of unceasing innovation, even giving rise to a whole new kind of personal electronic device with the iPod. “Jobs doesn’t just care about winning. He’s willing to lose. He has done it often enough. He’s just not willing to be lame,” as a writer for Time magazine put it. With Jobs’s business and design savvy, Wozniak’s clunky invention has grown into sophisticated machines that tens of millions use—and are attached to—today. That humble prototype became one of the defining inventions of this computer age.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.