Apple Inc.
1976–1980: Founding and incorporation

Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne as a partnership. The company's first product is the Apple I, a computer designed and hand-built entirely by Wozniak. To finance its creation, Jobs sold his Volkswagen Bus, and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator. Neither received the full selling price but in total earned $1,300 (equivalent to $7,000 in 2023). Wozniak debuted the first prototype Apple I at the Homebrew Computer Club in July 1976. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard with CPU, RAM, and basic textual-video chips—a base kit concept which was not yet marketed as a complete personal computer. It was priced soon after debut for $666.66 (equivalent to $3,600 in 2023). Wozniak later said he was unaware of the coincidental mark of the beast in the number 666, and that he came up with the price because he liked "repeating digits".

Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated on January 3, 1977, without Wayne, who had left and sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800 only twelve days after having co-founded it. Multimillionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 (equivalent to $1,257,000 in 2023) to Jobs and Wozniak during the incorporation of Apple. During the first five years of operations, revenues grew exponentially, doubling about every four months. Between September 1977 and September 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to US$118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533%.

The Apple II, also designed by Wozniak, was introduced on April 16, 1977, at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differs from its major rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because of its character cell-based color graphics and open architecture. The Apple I and early Apple II models use ordinary audio cassette tapes as storage devices, which were superseded by the 5 + 1 ⁄ 4 -inch floppy disk drive and interface called the Disk II in 1978.

The Apple II was chosen to be the desktop platform for the first killer application of the business world: VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program released in 1979. 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, but Apple II market share remained behind home computers made by competitors such as Atari, Commodore, and Tandy.

On December 12, 1980, Apple (ticker symbol "AAPL") went public selling 4.6 million shares at $22 per share ($.10 per share when adjusting for stock splits as of September 3, 2022), generating over $100 million, which was more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956. By the end of the day, 300 millionaires were created, including Jobs and Wozniak, from a stock price of $29 per share and a market cap of $1.778 billion.
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