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In 1976, three enterprising young guys started Apple Computer, Incorporated, with the intent to create and distribute personal computers. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne started with a dream of making computers smaller and 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 founded Apple. Eventually, 200 of these computer kits would be built.

Steve Jobs approached a local electronics shop, The Byte Shop, which ordered 50 computer kits and 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 variety of methods, including borrowing space from friends and family and selling various items (including a Volkswagen Bus), Jobs managed to acquire the parts needed while Wozniak and Wayne built the Apple I kits.

In 1977, the Apple II was introduced and almost immediately became much more popular than its major competition, the TRS-80 (which used cassette tapes for storage, and was known derisively as the TRasH-80) and the Commodore 64, even though the price of the Apple was higher. One of the big benefits of the Apple was the development of the floppy disk drive and software.

The Apple II was selected by programmers to be the desktop platform for the first "killer application" of the business world. This was a spreadsheet program named VisCalc. This developed a huge market for the Apple. The corporate market attracted many more software and hardware developers to the machine, and it also attracted home users who chose the Apple 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 Apple Macintosh as the "Computer for the rest of us". In 1989, Apple introduced the Macintosh Portable. However, this computer was actually extremely bulky and cumbersome and 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-factor for the laptop computers we know today. This solidified Apple's reputation as a quality manufacturer of both desktop and laptop machines. The success of this laptop led to increased revenues and 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 and downs over the years, Apple has continued to be a solid presence in the desktop computer and notebook market. Their products have continued to develop to meet the needs of both the corporate and individual user.

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