Apple, Inc.

For one of the world's most valuable companies, Apple surprisingly got its start in a hobbyist's club. Steve Wozniak, one of the two founders of Apple, who had by then dropped out of college, was so inspired by his first visit to a meeting of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyists’ club in 1975, that he determined to build a computer from scratch to impress the club members. Even though by his own admission, Steve had "no money and no training", he studied books on electronics, and picked up tricks and techniques from other hobbyists at the club to hand-build the computer alone, soldering mostly off-the-shelf components to a generic breadboard. The result was the first Apple computer.

Wozniak's design used a Motorola 6502 microprocessor as the CPU, running at 1 MHz. It had 4 kilobytes of main memory, expandable to 8 kilobytes on board, or 64 Kilobytes externally. In comparison, today's computers run a thousand times faster and contain a million times more main memory! The computer came with a BASIC interpreter written by Wozniak that could be used to write programs and play simple games. The computer could be connected to an ordinary cassette player to save programs on cassettes.

Once Steve Wozniak had built the computer, his friend Steve Jobs suggested that they sell the circuitry of the computer etched on a single circuit board. Buyers would then solder components onto the circuit board to build their own computer. Steve Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator and Steve Jobs, his Volkswagen van to fund this venture. On April 1, 1976, they formed the Apple Computer Company (now called Apple Inc.) to sell the computer. They decided on the name "Apple" since Jobs had just returned from Oregon where he had spent time on an apple orchard there. They sold each unit for $666.66, a price Wozniak claims to have chosen solely because he liked recurring numbers!

Apple Inc's next computer, Apple II became a best seller and one of the first mass-produced personal computers. Apple followed it with the iMac, a pastel-colored all-in-one computer in 1998. The company has diversified since those days. It introduced the iPod, a portable media player in 2001, which was discontinued in 2022. It introduced the iPhone, a line of wildly successful smartphones in 2007, and iPad, a line of tablet computers in 2010.

Steve Wozniak left Apple Inc in 1985 to pursue other interests. In 1990, he provided some of the initial funding for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international non-profit digital rights group. Steve Jobs also left Apple in 1985, but returned in 1997 to lead it through various innovative products until he passed away in 2011. Apple became the first publicly traded US company to be valued at over one trillion dollars in 2018. It is considered one of the bellwether technology companies of the 21st century.