In 1976, three entreprenurial young men founded Apple Computer, Inc., with the intention of creating & distributing personal computers. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, & Ronald Wayne began with a dream of creating computers smaller & readily available to the public. They put together their computers in Jobs' parent's garage and debuted the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976, the same year they started Apple. Eventually, 200 of these computer kits would be built.

Jobs approached a local pc store, The Byte Shop, which ordered 50 computer kits & paid $500 for each kit after much persuasion from Jobs, whose persuasive techniques have since become known as "the reality-distortion field". Jobs then ordered components from Cramer Electronics, a national electronics parts distributor. Using a variety of techniques, including borrowing space from friends & family & selling various items (including a Volkswagen Bus), Jobs managed to acquire the parts needed while Wozniak & Wayne put together the Apple I kits.

In 1977, the Apple II was introduced & quickly became much more popular than its major competition, the TRS-80 (which used cassette tapes for storage, & was known derisively as the TRasH-80) & the Commodore 64, despite the fact that Apple II's price was higher. One of the big advantages of the Apple was the development of the floppy disk drive & software.

The Apple II was chosen by programmers to be the desktop platform for the first "killer application" of the business world. This was a spreadsheet program called VisCalc. This created a substantial market for the Apple. The business market brought in many more software & hardware developers to the machine, plus it attracted home users in an effort to be compatible with their business machines.

Over the years, Apple Computer would release many more designs, with each one just slightly better than the previous one. In 1984, Steve Jobs was on hand to introduce the Mac as the "Computer for the rest of us". In 1989, Apple introduced the Macintosh Portable. However, this computer was actually quite bulky & cumbersome & was met with mixed reviews. At this point, Apple hired industrial designers to develop a better, more portable personal computer.

In 1991, the Apple PowerBook was introduced. The PowerBook would provide the general layout and form-factor for the notebook computers we know today. This solidified Apple's reputation as a quality manufacturer of both desktop & portable machines. The success of this notebook led to increased revenues & growing popularity of Apple in the computer market, and was followed up by the addition of the Apple iMac to their line of personal computers, in 1998. They also branched out into the music arena with the development of the iPod personal music player, which went on to grab an 80% market share.

Reflecting this expansion into other markets, on January 9, 2007, they changed their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to simply Apple, Inc. While this company has had their ups & downs over the years, Apple has continued to be a solid presence in the desktop computer & portable market. Their products have continued to develop to meet the needs of both the business and individual user.

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