The History of Apple
Steve Jobs was working at the Atari Corporation with his friend Steve Wozniak in the mid 70s when Wozniak began building a computer for his own personal use. The two had previously worked as summer employees at the Hewlett-Packard Company in Palo Alto, California and attended meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. They had also previously embarked on a business venture that had manufactured what was then called “blue boxes”, a device that allowed users to make unlimited illegal long distance calls over the AT&T telephone network.
Steve Wozniak was an ace electronics whiz and a bit of a hacker and spent a lot of time working on the minicomputers at Call Computer. Alex Kamradt ran the company and he was in the business of leasing computer time to a variety of users. After Steve Wozniak read an article on how to build a computer terminal in Popular Electronics magazine, he set out to build his own unit with the goal of being able to log on to the computers at Call Computer. Using only parts readily available from electronics suppliers, Wozniak managed to assemble what he called the Computer Conversor, which was an early video teletype machine which featured a 24-line by 40-column, uppercase only video interface. Alex Kamradt saw early on the potential use for such a device and he commissioned Wozniak to design the machine and later sold a few units through his company.
The popularity of newer microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 and the IMSAI inspired Wozniak to develop his project further and he decided to include a microprocessor into his video teletype and thereby make it functionally closer to a full blown computer. The problem was, the only two commonly available microcomputer CPUs available at the time—the Intel 8080 and the Motorola 6800—were priced a bit out of reach for the young Wozniak at $179 and $170 respectively. He then bided his time by learning even more about computer design while saving up the money to buy a CPU of his own.
The time was finally right in 1976 when MOS Technology introduced the 6502 CPU into the market for only $20. The 6502 chip was fairly close in functionality to the Motorola 6800 CPU that Wozniak was eying, having been designed by the same development team. Since he had already made extensive design groundwork on paper for the 6800 he only needed to make minor modifications in order to utilize the newer, cheaper CPU chip. He quickly wrote a new version of the BASIC computer language for the chip and started to design a computer to run it.
After he had completed assembly on the machine, he then brought it to the Homebrew Computer Club meeting and that is where Steve Jobs first saw Wozniak’s work. Jobs was sufficiently impressed by Wozniak’s computer and the two agreed to start a company for the purpose of manufacturing and selling the computers and Apple was born.
The tenacity and hard-nosed business sense of Steve Jobs was apparent early on in Apple formative years. The means with which they were able to produce their first batch of computers was remarkable in its sheer audacity. Jobs approached The Byte Shop, a local computer store and asked if they would be interested in selling the computers that Apple planned to produce. Byte Shop owner Paul Terrell agreed to purchase the computers if they came fully assembled and placed an order for 50 units of the computer with an agreed price of $500 each. This left Jobs with the problem of sourcing out—and funding—the parts needed in the manufacturing of the computers. Armed with nothing more than the purchase order from Byte Shop, he then went to Cramer Electronics and somehow convinced the electronics company to provide him with the parts he needed on the strength of the purchase order from The Byte Shop. The agreement was that he would produce and deliver the computers within the period of 30 days and would use the money earned to pay for the electronic parts. Cramer Electronics then contacted Paul Terrell in order to confirm the validity of the purchase owner. When Terrell learned of Jobs’ scheme to pay off the electronics purchase, he was sufficiently impressed at Jobs’ ingenuity and assured Cramer Electronics that if Apple was able to deliver on their terms, Jobs would have the financial means to pay for the purchase. Cramer Electronics agreed to the arrangement and Jobs and Steve Wozniak along with a small team of technicians worked around the clock building and testing the computers and managed to deliver them to Terrell in the agreed upon time period. The Apple team made enough money to pay off Cramer Electronics with enough left over to work on manufacturing their next batch of computers.
This initial offering of Apple (which came to be known as the Apple I) introduced a few new features that were previously unavailable on computers in a similar class. While many computers of that period did not have any visual display, the Apple I allowed users to plug the unit into a television for display purposes. The Apple I also included the startup code in ROM, which made starting up the computer easier for users. The computer eventually became a runaway success, being a masterpiece in design elegance and simplicity and earned Wozniak the reputation of being a master designer.
Throughout the years, Jobs has cultivated an image as an enigmatic often temperamental but always enthusiastic and motivational business icon. Although many people both in and out of the Apple corporation look at him with a sort of awe and sometimes even with something approaching fanatical fervor, it has to be said that he can also be quite aggressive and demanding and many of his former employees and co-workers dreaded meeting him in the halls and elevators. In fact in the years when Apple was forced to terminate a number of employees, the term “Getting Steved” was used to describe the summary firings that were common in those times. Nevertheless he has and continues to be the visionary and driving force behind the success of the Apple Corporation.