About TAM: About | Contact | FAQ | Disclaimer
 
1976 - 1979: The Beginning

1976: The Apple I design is finished. Originally, the two had intended to sell it to the other members of the Homebrew Computer Club, but as an employee of HP, Wozniak has to get a legal release from HP to produce electronic devices professionally. Hence, they offer their low-cost PC to Hewlett Packard first, but no one at HP is interested in it.
Old Logo After being turned down, Jobs insists on producing the Apple I on their own so he sells his old Volkswagen Bus and Wozniak sells his beloved programmable HP calculator. They gather around $1,250 and begin producing the first Apple I mainboards.

Early 1976: Jobs asks a former colleague from Atari, Ronald Wayne to join them in their startup. Wayne is 41 years old and works as draftsman at Atari. Jobs offers Wayne ten percent interest in the company and Wayne agrees, although he keeps his jobs at Atari and works at night for Apple. ¹

April 1st, 1976: Apple Computer is founded by Steven Wozniak, Steven Jobs and Ron Wayne. Ron Wayne designs the first Apple logo.

The Apple Logo

Early April 1976: The local computer store 'Byte Shop' orders 50 Apple I computers, where is is sold for $666.66. Jobs, Woz and Wayne face one major problem though: They don't have enough money to buy the parts for 50 Apple Is, each costing over $100 to build. Jobs persuades a local part supplier to give them the parts on 30 days' net credit.
The three assemble the Apple Is at night in their garage and manage to deliver the ordered Apple Is in ten days. ²

April 12th, 1976: Ron Wayne resigns from Apple Computer, with a one-time payment of $800. He felt that the financial risk was too great specially since Woz still hasn't got the legal release from HP.

May 5th, 1976: HP grants Wozniak the permission for the Apple I.

Fall 1976: Wozniak finishes work on the Apple ][ prototype. Jobs and Woz realize that this could become a major success. However, they still lack the funds to produce it is large quantities, so they offer it to Commodore, which just recently bought MOS Technology, the producer of the CPU used in the Apple ][. They are turned down again.

Apple II

1977: Apple is incorporated and hires their first ad agency. Rob Janov, employee of the agency designs the Apple logo that is still in use today.
Mike Markkula invests $92,000 in Apple.
Michael Scott becomes the first president of Apple.
The Apple ][ is released selling for $1,295.

1978: Jobs' daughter Lisa Nicole is born on June 17th.
Apple and Xerox sign an agreement that allows Xerox to invest one million dollars in Apple stocks (Apple goes public in 1980). In return Apple's engineers were allowed to study Xerox's PARC's graphical user interface. The PARC operating system was the first OS for the public market with a GUI. It was commercially unsuccessful, though.

1979: Apple ][+ is introduced selling for $1,195.

Early 1979: Jef Raskin begins working on a computer concept, based on a "design and implementation philosophy which demanded generality and human usability over execution speed and efficiency."³

July 1979: Apple begins working on Lisa, originally a $2,000 business computer. Ken Rothmuller becomes the project manager.

September 1979: Raskin is given permission by Markkula to form an offical project from his concept. The project is code-named 'Macintosh' after Raskin's favorite type of apples: McIntosh.

References
¹ Linzmayer, Owen (2004): Apple Confidential 2.0, No Starch Press, San Francisco
 
² Wozniak, Stephen: HOMEBREW AND HOW THE APPLE CAME TO BE, Atariarchives.org, http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php
 
³ Raskin, Jef (1996): About the history of the Macintosh, http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html

Related links
Picture credits
Old Apple logo: Apple Computer, Inc.
Apple rainbow logo: Apple Computer, Inc.
Apple II ad: Apple Computer, Inc.