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History Of Apple Computer

History
Main article: History of Apple
See also: Apple Inc. litigation

1976–1980: The early years
The Apple I, Apple's first product. Sold as an assembled circuit board, it lacked basic features such as a keyboard, monitor, and case. The owner of this unit added a keyboard and a wooden case.

Apple was established on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne,[10] to sell the Apple I personal computer kit. They were hand-built by Wozniak[11][12] and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club.[13] The Apple I was sold as a motherboard (with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips)—less than what is today considered a complete personal computer.[14] The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at $666.66.[15][16][17][18][19]

Apple was incorporated January 3, 1977[5] without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800. Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 during the incorporation of Apple.[20][21]

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 While early models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface, the Disk II.[22]

The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world—the VisiCalc spreadsheet program.[23] 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.[23] According to Brian Bagnall, Apple exaggerated its sales figures and was a distant third place to Commodore and Tandy until VisiCalc came along.[24][25]

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...