The Early Years Of Apple Inc. :: Technology History

orchard apple tree was founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne10 (and later incorporated January 3, 19773 without Wayne, who sold his grant of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak) to sell the Apple I personal computing device kit. They were hand-built by Steve Wozniak1112 in the living room of Jobs parents radix, and the Apple I was start-off shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club.13 Eventually 200 computers were built. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips) not what is now considered a complete personal computer.14 The user was required to provide ii different AC input voltages (the manual recommended specific transformers), wire an ASCII keyboard (not provided with the computer) to a DIP connector (providing logic inverter and alpha lock chips in roughly cases), and to wire the video output pins to a monitor or to an RF modulator if a TV set was used.Jobs approached a local computer st ore, The Byte Shop, which legitimate fifty units and paid US$500 for each unit later on much persuasion. He then ordered components from Cramer Electronics, a national electronic parts distributor. Using a variety of methods, including borrowing space from friends and family and selling various items including a Volkswagen Type 2 bus, Jobs managed to secure the parts required while Wozniak and Ronald Wayne assembled the Apple I.15The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the setoff West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because it came with color graphics and an exonerated architecture. While early illustrations used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, this was rapidly superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 progress floppy disk drive and interface, the Disk II.Another key to headache for Apple was software. The Apple II was chosen by programmers Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston to be the desktop platform f or the first killer app of the business worldthe VisiCalc spreadsheet program.16 VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II, and the corporate market attracted many more(prenominal) software and hardware developers to the machine, as well as giving home users an additional reason to buy onecompatibility with the office.16 (See the timeline for dates of Apple II family model releasesthe 1977 Apple II and its younger siblings the II+, IIe, IIc, and IIGS.)According to Brian Bagnalls book, On the moulding (pg.