Apple Computerswas officially founded on 1 April 1976 in Cupertino by three partners: the 2 main ones are Stephen Wozniak ( Woz , 25 years old) and Steve Paul Jobs (21 years old, known more simply as Steve Jobs) and the minority one is Ronald Gerald Wayne .
The first logo depicts the image of Newton under an apple tree, while the first location is Jobs’ garage.
The “garge”
Jobs and Wozniak had known each other since high school and already in the early seventies they had created together a device called the ” Blue Box ” that allowed free telephone calls.
But the “first computer” saw the light in 1975 as an amateur project by Woz, presented at the Homebrew Computer Club of Palo Alto (California) and equipped with a Mos Technology 6502 CPU of 1MHz and 8KB RAM. The system has an essential design and can be connected directly to the television.
Jobs sees its potential and decides to try to sell it on the market as a “ready-to-use” solution, unlike what happened at the time where calculators were usually equipped with an assembly kit.
The computer is named Apple I.
One of the still existing examples of the Apple 1
At the beginning it is not at all easy to promote this new product, also because it is not clear to people what to do with a computer in the reference period. Jobs’ stubbornness, however, leads Apple to an agreement with the chainByte Shop ordering the first 50 Apple 1s.
To meet the requests, the newly created company needed liquidity (having to purchase the components necessary to produce the cards), and the interest of Clifford “Mike” Markkula Jr was decisive in meeting this need.
The first Apple 1s, upon delivery, were faced with the discovery of an unexpected situation: Paul Terrell (founder of Byte Shop) did not want a “card” but a complete system to use immediately.
This request initially put Jobs and his associates in crisis, who had planned to produce only the cards, creating a series of internal tensions that led Wayne to leave the scene.
But Apple has the challenge in its DNA and Terrell’s observations lead to the birth of a new project that will give life to the Apple II in 1977 , an evolution of the initial Apple I.
The Apple 2
The computer, offered at $1,195 (monitor excluded) is equipped with a plastic body and 12KB of RAM. This product will represent the fulcrum of Apple’s action for years.
For the launch of the Apple II, Jobs asked Rob Janoff (graphic designer) to rethink the logo, making it simpler: the iconic bitten apple was born .
