Apple Inc. is 41 years old today!
TIME Magazine‘s 80th anniversary issue featured a look back over 80 years in a piece titled “80 Days That Changed the World,” published on March 31, 2003. Lev Grossman wrote about one such day that changed the world, the founding of Apple Computer, Inc. on April 1, 1976:
They were two guys named Steve, so Steve Jobs was called Steve and Steve Wozniak went by Woz. At 25, Wozniak was the technical brains. Jobs, 21, was the dreamer with a knack for getting others to dream along with him. They had gone to the same high school, and in the hazy years after graduation (both were college dropouts) a shared interest in electronics brought them together. Jobs didn’t yet have his own place, so when their formal partnership began, the decision was made in a bedroom at his parents’ ranch house in Los Altos, Calif.
Most computers in 1976 were room-size machines with Defense Department-size price tags, but Wozniak had been tinkering with a new design, and his computer was different. It wasn’t much to look at – just a bunch of chips screwed to a piece of plywood – but it was small, cheap and easy to use, and Jobs had noticed the stir it caused when they took it to a local computer club. “He said, ‘We’ll make it for 20 bucks, sell it for 40 bucks!'” Wozniak remembers. “I kind of didn’t think we’d do it.” Jobs came up with the name, inspired by an orchard in Oregon where he had worked with some friends: Apple Computer. “When we started the little partnership, it was just like, Oh, this will be fun,” Wozniak says. “We won’t make any money, but it’ll be fun.”
They didn’t go out and celebrate that day. Woz wouldn’t even quit his day job designing chips for calculators at Hewlett-Packard until months later, after Jobs had sold his Volkswagen bus for seed money. Nobody, not even Jobs, saw what was coming next: that Apple would create the look and feel of every desktop in the world and start our love affair with the personal computer.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Happy birthday, Apple!
SEE ALSO:
Co-founders Woz, Ron Wayne discuss founding Apple, Steve Jobs – August 26, 2011
‘Third founder’ Ron Wayne pulled out of Apple after 2 weeks; stake would be worth $23 billion today – April 24, 2010
I can’t help but love the global Apple family. An honor to be a part of y’all ☺️
Congratulations, …Think Different again.
Tim Cook, guided by Steve Jobs, got us to this milestone…time to soften your criticism, which isn’t hastening his departure in the least. Instead, focus on non-performing, somnambulant leeches like Eddy Cue and Jonathan Ive. With Cook steady at the helm, directing more productive and far-seeing lieutenants, Apple could be gangbusters again.
I’m not “softening” anything, sister…Cook is still thriving on the vestiges of Jobs’s vision. I do not share your adoration of social justice warrior bean counters who pontificate on what “news” I should read as determined by government mandate.
You have a short memory.
per MDN, February 11, 2017:
“Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, is calling for governments to launch a public information campaign to fight the scourge of fake news, which is ‘killing people’s minds,’” Allister Heath reports for The Telegraph. “In an impassioned plea, Mr Cook, boss of the world’s largest company, says that the epidemic of false reports ‘is a big problem in a lot of the world’ and necessitates a crackdown by the authorities and technology firms.”
“‘It has to be ingrained in the schools, it has to be ingrained in the public,’ said Mr Cook.
Wholeheartedly agree!
While we applaud the anniversary, we are not mindless blind to the clueless Cook missteps and product/software neglect we have endured in recent times.
Get a grip, @Herself.
My clarity differs from your clarity, in this way: the CEO is a scapegoat for Apple’s drifting vision and inattention to core supporters, and has earned every bit of opprobrium you and others cast at his feet of clay. But in pragmatic terms, that is nothing more than a vanity project, a way of feeling better about ourselves for standing up to what seems criminal neglect. The Board of Directors of Apple, Inc. supports the CEO for maintaining the corporation’s massive profits, which fulfils their mandate to protect and reward shareholders. It’s a money game despite their cant about caring and Jobsian principles. Thus, brandishing pitchforks against Castle Cookenstein is a waste of time.
As I see it, certain creatives at Apple are more to blame for the sorry state of affairs than the CEO, who has shown undue deference to some of them (possibly in light of their illustrious contributions to Apple’s success in the past, although it’s more believable that there are contractual beartraps). I mentioned Cue and Ive. They haven’t received the heat they deserve, partly because they are not in the limelight. Cue has become an ineffective clown, and Ive is a knight in indolent armour, accountable to no one.
My new idea is that to effect regime change, focus less on the leader and more on his flunkies. And once Cue has been replaced by almost anyone, and Ive has been shamed into moving on, bring back his nemesis Scott Forstall. That lad was brash, charismatic, and had some good ideas.
The CEO is not a scapegoat, agreed. But he is the boss and not getting the job done on so many levels except to please the profit equation. The buck stops with Tim. If he can’t rein in the incompent lieutenants and fix the buggy messes and sloppy supply chain shortages he needs to move on to AIDS or some form of green philanthropy …
Agreed, but as a practical matter I’m suggesting tactically recalibrating a targeting solution. Biz speak.
a fish rots from the head down…the previous administration is another good example.
A break from the past! No rot from this fresh, new administration. A few growing pains, perhaps, but as a student of Trump I see him cutting the same wide swath through political thickets that he did in the murky jungle of business dealings. It may appear to the innocent observer that, so far, the machetes of his safari bearers are ineffective against the tougher fibre of these new opponents with their constricting ecosystems of shibboleths and primitive fealties, but they will get through for sure, or if not they’ll go around; but they will get there. And if “there” needs to be redefined, they will do that. Success is guaranteed. Trust me.
“Gradually the whole thing began to build momentum. And at that point in time we had some feeling that we were on to something, but the feeling is so different than actually seeing it happen.
At one point I said to Woz: “Let’s start a company. Even if we don’t get our money back, at least we’ll have a company.” We had absolutely nothing to lose. I was 20 years old at the time, Woz was like 24, 25. We had no families, no children, no houses. Woz had an old car, I had a Volkswagen van. All we were gonna lose was our cars and the shirts off our back, we had nothing to lose, and we had everything to gain. We figured even if we crash and burn, and lose everything, the experience will have been worth ten times the cost. What did we have to lose? There was no risk.
Some time later after I had just come from an apple farm, I don’t eat meat and I was on one of my fruitarian diets, I told Woz: “Oh, I’ve got a name for the company: Apple Computer.” It sounded fun, spirited and not intimidating, Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer’. Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book. Woz said, “But what about Apple Records?” And I said, “They’re a different company.” So we said, “Okay, we’ll do Apple Computer.”
We started Apple in my parents garage on April Fools’ Day 1976. Apple was about as pure of a Silicon Valley company as you could imagine.”
Excerpt from “Steve Jobs: The Unauthorized Autobiography”
apple.co/1SOQQ5s
🎉Great post, thanks🎉
the best april joke ever
Hillary elections won the. Hacking of a Russian scandal. Microagressions need to 🛑. Safe space, not freedom of speech. Daycare for all
Happy Birthday Apple, I wish you many more.
It is too bad that Tim Cook is running the company now. He is unable to come out with new Mac’s, new Mac Pro’s, and ground breaking iPads. The new laptops are the worst rated. iCloud is a complete fiasco, Alexa not Siri is ruling the world, but we have a red iPhone.
He is relying on the phone and that is it. We need another Steve Jobs to run the company before Tim runs it into the ground.
I remember getting an Apple I in for repair years ago when I worked for a computer store in Hayward, CA. It was in a wooden case made out of plywood. I asked the guy if he wanted to sell it, but he was smart enough to hang onto it.
A few years later, the Macintosh came out and our store started stocking every software title that came out for it. We kept up until there were about 350 titles, and then we just stocked the top titles.
Those were exciting times.
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