Technically, Apple was born on April 1, 1976 in Cupertino. But in reality the decision to create a company, today we would say “launch a startup”, was about a month earlier. In fact, on March 1, 1976, Steve Wozniak completed the first version of a new type of personal computer. He had made it for fun, in his spare time. Wozniak was 25 and worked at Hewlett-Packard. His father designed satellites and he grew up surrounded by electronics. It was thanks to this passion that at some point, in 1971, he had met Steve Jobs, five years his junior, becoming his friend.
Innovation Almanac – February 24, 1955
The first 21 years of Steve Jobs’s life
by Riccardo Luna
“Woz” was then studying computer science at Berkeley (after being expelled from a Colorado university for breaking into the university’s computer system); and in the evening he designed circuits and devices that did strange things, often jokes, at some point even video games. He decided to suspend his studies to earn some money working at Hewlett-Packard but he had this passion, designing computers, which he did not have the money to make. Then in January 1975 Popular Electronics magazine came out with the historic cover dedicated to the Altair 8800, “the first kit to make a mini computer”. It was the beginning of it all.
On March 5, in a garage in Menlo Park, Wozniak, together with about thirty people, including Bill Gates, founded the Homebrew Computer Club, the home-made computer club. And she starts designing “her” home-made computer. It takes him a year because along the way he changes the project to make it cheaper and more usable (the Altair 8880 interface was a panel of lights and switches). Hewlett-Packard, for which Wozniak was still working, shows no interest in the project (it seems that five times they have declined the request to view it). Then Woz introduces him to his friends at the club but here Steve Jobs intervenes, who has just turned 21, has been friends with him for a while and has a business sense, or better still, of the future that few have. It is Jobs who convinces Woz not to sell that project, not to give it away but to make a company with it, to build that computer and sell it.
It will be called Apple I, a few months later it will be on the market at the highly symbolic price of $ 666.66 (the devil, however, has nothing to do with it: the price was established so that net of the retailer’s share, the company would return $ 500 clean). About 200 copies were sold in one year.