On April Fool's Day back in 1976, three entreprenurial young men started Apple Computer, Incorporated, with the intention of creating & distributing personal computers. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, & Ronald Wayne started with a dream of making computers smaller & more available to the public. They built their computers in Jobs' parent's garage and debuted the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976, the same year they started Apple. Eventually, 200 of these computers would be created.

Steve Jobs approached a local pc store, The Byte Shop, which ordered fifty 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 number of methods, including borrowing space from friends & family & selling various items (including a Volkswagen Bus), Jobs managed to acquire the parts needed while Wozniak & Wayne assembled the Apple I kits.

In 1977, the Apple II was introduced & quickly 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 major benefits 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 app" of the business world. This was a spreadsheet program called VisCalc. This developed 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 machines.

Over the years, Apple Computer would release many more designs, with each one just a little 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 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 general layout and 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 80% market share.

Reflecting this branching into other markets, on January 9, 2007, they changed their name from Apple Computer, Incorporated to simply Apple, Inc. While they have had their ups & downs over the years, Apple has remained a solid presence in the desktop computer & portable market. Their products have continued to develop to meet the needs of both the corporate and individual user.