Apple Computer Company began as a partnership formed in the spring of 1976 to sell a single-board computer that Steve Wozniak had designed for his own use. The Computer History Museum preserves photographs from April 1976 that document the moment: in catalog record 102660089, taken that month, Steve Wozniak sits at a table with the Apple I motherboard and a display while Steve Jobs stands in the foreground holding a keyboard. The third founding partner, Ronald Wayne, drew up the agreement and held a small share but left the partnership within weeks, leaving Wozniak and Jobs to build the company.
The first product was the Apple I, sold as an assembled circuit board. The Apple I Operation Manual, printed by Apple Computer Company at 770 Welch Road in Palo Alto, describes a system built around the MOS 6502 processor with a built-in monitor program and a video terminal section, sold to buyers who supplied their own keyboard, power supply, and case. It established Apple’s pattern of pairing Wozniak’s tight, economical engineering with a finished, ready-to-use product rather than a kit of parts.
The Apple II, introduced in 1977, turned the company into a business. The Apple II Reference Manual, published by Apple in January 1978, documents a complete 6502 machine with built-in BASIC in firmware, color graphics, and the row of internal expansion slots that let third parties build hardware for it. That open, expandable design made the Apple II the platform on which the spreadsheet VisiCalc and thousands of other programs ran, and the steady sales of the Apple II funded everything Apple attempted next.
By the early 1980s Apple was reaching past its own hardware roots toward the graphical interface ideas demonstrated at Xerox PARC. The Lisa, released in 1983, and the Macintosh, released in 1984, brought a bitmapped screen, windows, icons, and a mouse to commercial machines. The Macintosh in particular, launched with a famous national advertising campaign, became the company’s defining product line and carried the graphical user interface into mainstream computing.
In its first eight years Apple compressed the entire arc of the personal computer’s arrival. It took the machine from a hobbyist’s board sold to members of the Homebrew Computer Club, through the mass-market Apple II that put a real computer in homes and schools, to the Lisa and Macintosh that defined how ordinary people would interact with computers for decades. The company it became was built on that founding combination of Wozniak’s engineering and Jobs’s insistence on a finished product.