Apple Inc. Founded: The Tech Revolution Begins

Three men signed a partnership agreement on April 1, 1976, to sell circuit boards assembled in a Los Altos garage. Steve Jobs was 21, Steve Wozniak was 25, and Ronald Wayne was 41. Wayne drew the company's first logo, wrote the partnership agreement by hand, and then sold his 10 percent stake back to Jobs and Wozniak twelve days later for $800. That share would eventually be worth over $300 billion. The company's first product, the Apple I, was essentially a bare circuit board that buyers had to supply their own case, keyboard, and power supply to use. Wozniak designed it because he wanted a personal computer and couldn't afford one. Jobs recognized that other people would want one too. They sold about 200 units at $666.66 each, mostly through Paul Terrell's Byte Shop in Mountain View. The revenue funded development of the Apple II, which became one of the first mass-produced personal computers when it launched in 1977. The Apple II transformed the company from a garage operation into a real business. VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, ran exclusively on the Apple II and gave businesses a concrete reason to buy a personal computer for the first time. By 1980, Apple's annual revenue had reached $117 million, and the company's IPO generated more capital than any since Ford Motor Company went public in 1956. Jobs was 25 years old and worth $250 million. The path from garage to global dominance was anything but smooth. The Apple III was a commercial failure. The Lisa flopped. Jobs was forced out of his own company in 1985 after a boardroom power struggle with CEO John Sculley. Apple nearly went bankrupt in the mid-1990s, its market share dwindling to under 4 percent. Jobs returned in 1997 and launched the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad in succession, each product redefining its category. Apple became the world's most valuable public company, a distinction that originated with a partnership agreement signed on April Fools' Day.