On April Fool's Day back in 1976, three entreprenurial young men founded Apple Computer, Inc, with the intent to make & distribute truly personal computers. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, & Ronald Wayne started with a dream of creating computers smaller & more available to the general population. They put together their computers in Jobs' parent's garage & debuted the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976, the same year they started Apple. Eventually, two hundred of these computers would be sold.

Jobs approached a local computer store, The Byte Shop, which ordered 50 computer kits & paid $500 for each unit 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 variety of methods, including borrowing space from friends & family & selling various items (including a Volkswagen Bus), Jobs managed to acquire the components 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 major competition, the TRS-80 (which used cassette tapes for storage, & was known derisively as the TRasH-80) & the Commodore 64, despite the fact that the price of the Apple was higher. One of the major benefits of Apple's computer 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 developed a huge market for the Apple. The business market brought in many more software & hardware developers to the machine, plus it attracted home users who chose the Apple to be compatible with their business machines.

Over the years, Apple Computer would release many more designs, with each one just slightly better than the previous one. 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 quite 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 general layout & form-factor 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, Inc to simply Apple, Inc. While they have had their ups & downs over the years, Apple has remained a solid presence in the desktop computer & notebook market. Their products have continued to evolve to meet the needs of both the business and individual user.

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