Apple, Microsoft, and the PC Revolution

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met in the early 1970s and shared an interest in electronics and the emerging hobbyist computing scene centered on clubs such as the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley. Wozniak, a gifted self-taught engineer then working at Hewlett-Packard, designed the Apple I in 1976, a single-board computer that Jobs recognized could be sold as a product rather than shared freely among hobbyists. On April 1, 1976, Jobs, Wozniak, and a third partner, Ronald Wayne, who sold his 10 percent stake back to the other two for $800 just twelve days later, founded Apple Computer, funding initial production partly by selling Jobs's Volkswagen van and Wozniak's programmable calculator. The Apple II, released in 1977 with Wozniak's engineering and marketed with Jobs's growing sense of design and business strategy, became one of the best-selling personal computers of the era and helped make Apple a publicly traded company by 1980, an offering that made Jobs, then 25 years old, a multimillionaire. Wozniak gradually stepped back from full-time involvement with Apple during the 1980s, while Jobs went on to champion the Macintosh project before being pushed out of the company in 1985 after a power struggle with chief executive John Sculley, only to return in 1997 when Apple acquired his subsequent company, NeXT.