Who is started apple

The next product the two sold was the Apple I, which was a kit for building a PC. In order to do anything with it, the customer needed to add their own monitor and keyboard. With Wozniak doing most of the building and Jobs handling the sales, the two made enough money off the hobbyist market to invest in the Apple II. It was the Apple II that made the company. Jobs and Wozniak created enough interest in their new product to attract venture capital.

This meant they were in the big leagues and their company, Apple, was officially incorporated in The Apple II wasn't state of the art, but it did allow computer enthusiasts to create and sell their own programs.

Among these user-generated programs was VisiCalc, a type of proto-Excel that represented the first software with business applications. Although Apple did not profit directly from these programs, they did see more interest as the uses for the Apple II broadened. This model of allowing users to create their own programs and sell them would reappear in the app market of the future , but with a much tighter business strategy around it. By the time Apple went public in , the dynamic of the company was more or less set.

Steve Jobs was the fiery visionary, with an intense and often combative management style, and Steve Wozniak was the quiet genius who made the vision work. Apple's board of directors wasn't too fond of such a power imbalance in the company, however. Jobs and the board agreed to add John Sculley to the executive team in In , the board ousted Jobs in favor of Sculley. Steve Jobs was rich and unemployed.

Although he wasn't working at Apple, he was far from idle. During this time, from to , Jobs was involved in two big deals; the first of which was an investment. In , Jobs purchased a controlling stake in a company called Pixar from George Lucas.

The second was a return to his old obsession with computers, founding NeXT to create high-end computers. These were expensive machines with an operating system representing the best attempt yet at making the power of UNIX fit into a graphical user interface. Of these two deals, NeXT proved the most important, as it turned out Apple was looking to replace its operating system.

Apple bought NeXT in for its operating system, bringing Steve Jobs back to the first company he founded. The critical year in which Steve Jobs sold NeXT, the computer maker he had founded, to Apple, returning him to the company eleven years after he had been ousted. When Jobs returned, the company wasn't in a good place.

Apple had begun to flounder as cheap PCs running Windows flooded the market. Jobs found himself in the driver's seat again and took some drastic steps to turn around Apple's decline.

Jobs followed this up with a list of successes from the iPod in to the iPad in The years between saw Apple dominate the smartphone market with the iPhone, open up an e-commerce store with iTunes, and launch branded retail outlets called, what else, the Apple Store. Starting with the iPod in , and then continuing with the iPhone and iPad over the next decade, Jobs rejuvenated the ailing Apple, putting it at the forefront of technology and communications.

It's impossible to sum up Jobs' career in a single article, but a few lessons stick out. First, innovation counts for a lot, but innovative products fail without proper marketing. Second, there are no straight paths to success. Jobs did get wealthy very early on, but he would be a footnote today if he didn't return to Apple in the 90s.

As a boy, Jobs and his father worked on electronics in the family garage. Paul showed his son how to take apart and reconstruct electronics, a hobby that instilled confidence, tenacity and mechanical prowess in young Jobs.

While Jobs was always an intelligent and innovative thinker, his youth was riddled with frustrations over formal schooling. Jobs was a prankster in elementary school due to boredom, and his fourth-grade teacher needed to bribe him to study. Jobs tested so well, however, that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school — a proposal that his parents declined.

Lacking direction, he dropped out of college after six months and spent the next 18 months dropping in on creative classes at the school. Jobs later recounted how one course in calligraphy developed his love of typography. In , Jobs took a position as a video game designer with Atari. Several months later he left the company to find spiritual enlightenment in India, traveling further and experimenting with psychedelic drugs.

Back when Jobs was enrolled at Homestead High School, he was introduced to his future partner and co-founder of Apple Computer, Wozniak, who was attending the University of California, Berkeley. In a interview with PC World , Wozniak spoke about why he and Jobs clicked so well: "We both loved electronics and the way we used to hook up digital chips," Wozniak said.

I had designed many computers, so I was way ahead of him in electronics and computer design, but we still had common interests. We both had pretty much sort of an independent attitude about things in the world. They funded their entrepreneurial venture by Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak selling his beloved scientific calculator. Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry with Apple by democratizing the technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers.

The next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, however, resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. In , Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company's executives began to phase him out. Not actually having had an official title with the company he co-founded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and thus left Apple in Just as Jobs instigated Apple's success in the s, he is credited with revitalizing the company in the s.

In the ensuing years, Apple introduced such revolutionary products as the Macbook Air, iPod and iPhone, all of which dictated the evolution of technology. Almost immediately after Apple released a new product, competitors scrambled to produce comparable technologies.

In , Apple became the second-biggest music retailer in America — second only to Walmart, fueled by iTunes and iPod sales.

Apple has also been ranked No. This was, however, mostly due to the plans that Jobs had already set in motion before he left, most notably his deal with a tiny company by the name of Adobe, creator of the Adobe Portable Document Format PDF. Together the two companies created the phenomenon known as desktop publishing. Back in Sculley turned down an appeal from Microsoft founder Bill Gates to license its software. This decision would later come back to haunt him because Microsoft, whose Windows operating system OS featured a graphical interface similar to Apple's, became their toughest competition in the late s and throughout the s.

Over the course of a few years, Apple's market share suffered slowly after its peak in and by , experts believed the company to be doomed. It was not until , when Apple was desperately in need of an operating system, that it bought out NeXT Software Jobs' company and the board of directors decided to ask for some help from an old friend: Steve Jobs. Jobs decided to make some changes around Apple. He forged an alliance with Microsoft to create a Mac version of its popular office software.

Not long after this decision was the turning point for the company. Jobs revamped the computers and introduced the iBook a personal laptop followed by iPod, an mp3 player, which became market leader. The iPhone, a touch screen cellular phone, introduced in was one of the world' most successful products and the company has released several new versions since. Other popular products include iPad tablet and Apple Watch.

The popularity of iPhones made Apple the first company valued at one trillion dollars in and two years later it doubled that figure. If you have any further questions, please Ask A Librarian. The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to digital content are provided when available.

These freely available online resources provide more information on Apple's history and the current state of the company. Additional works on this topic in the Library of Congress may be identified by searching the Library of Congress Online Catalog under appropriate Library of Congress subject headings. Choose the topics you wish to search from the following list of subject headings to link directly to the Catalog and automatically execute a search for the subject selected.

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Search this Guide Search. This Month in Business History. The Founding of Apple Computers, Inc. Carol Highsmith, photographer. Passersby outside an Apple computer store in the Washington, D. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Print Resources The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. U64 K63 An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs. Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board.

Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era--the Golden Age of Apple.

Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple's creative process.