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On April first, 1976, 3 entreprenurial young guys started Apple Computer, Incorporated, with the intention of creating & distributing truly personal computers. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, & Ronald Wayne started with a dream of creating computers smaller & more available to the public. They built their computers in Jobs' parent's garage & rolled out the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976, the same year they founded Apple. Eventually, 200 of these computers would be sold.

Steve Jobs approached a local pc shop, The Byte Shop, which ordered fifty units & paid five hundred dollars 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 number of techniques, including borrowing space from friends & family & selling various items (including a Volkswagen Bus), Jobs managed to secure the parts needed while Wozniak & Wayne built the Apple I kits.

The next year, the Apple II was introduced & almost immediately became much more popular than its competitors, the TRS-80 (which used cassette tapes for storage, & was known derisively as the TRasH-80) & the Commodore 64, even though 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 huge market for the Apple. The corporate market brought in many more software & hardware developers to the machine, plus it attracted home users in an effort to be compatible with their workplace computers.

Over the years, Apple Computer would release many more designs, with each one just slightly better than the last. 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 extremely 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 basic structure & form for the notebook computers we know today. This solidified Apple's reputation as a quality manufacturer of both desktop & notebook 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 eighty percent market share.

Reflecting this expansion into other markets, on January 9, 2007, they changed their name from Apple Computer, Incorporated 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 & notebook market. Their products have continued to evolve to meet the needs of both the corporate and individual user.

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