The Vintage Computer

Apple Computer was established on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. They were hand-built by Wozniak and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips)—not what is today considered a complete personal computer. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at US$666.66. The few surviving examples of the original Apple can fetch several thousand dollars in todays collectors market.

The Apple II was introduced on April 16, 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because it came with color graphics and an open architecture. While early models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface, the Disk II.

The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first serious application of the business world, the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. VisiCalc created a business market for the Apple II, and gave home users an additional reason to buy an Apple II—compatibility with the office. By the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line. The Apple II was succeeded by the Apple III in May 1980 as the company competed with IBM and Microsoft in the business and corporate computing market.

The company was called "Apple Computer, Inc." for its first 30 years, but dropped the word "Computer" on January 9, 2007 to reflect the company's ongoing expansion into the consumer electronics market in addition to its traditional focus on personal computers.