The first project realized
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met at school, sharing a passion for electronics.
The first project the two boys worked on together was the “Blue Boxe”, a device that allowed you to make calls completely free of charge.
While Woz was busy designing this device, Jobs took care of its marketing, managing to sell it to a good number of people.
About 1975 Jobs and Woz began the realization of the first computer project, almost exclusively on paper, since the processors then on the market had a cost of about 170 dollars, too high for their possibilities.
A year later the 6502 chip was marketed for a modest price of $ 25, which allowed Woz to buy it and start adapting his paper projects to make a real computer.
In 1976 the first computer, called “Apple I” was terminated by Woz and, as happened with the Blue Boxing device, Jobs took care of its commercialization.
At the HP company, Woz had a contract that obliged him to present all his inventions first of all to it.
Thus, Jobs and Woz presented the company with their first designed computer but the company rejected it, not believing in the usefulness of the project.
Jobs and Woz reacted by founding Apple Computer Co. on April 1, 1976 with Ronald Wayne. The company had the Newton figure as its logo.
Jobs did not give up and continued to present the Apple I project in search of buyers and managed to get a contract, with a shop that sold computers, for the sale of 50 copies for an amount equal to 500 euros each.
This contract, however, provided for the sale of the fully assembled product, so the three partners had to proceed with the assembly of all the models and, not having a factory or the money to start one, they were forced to proceed with the assembly in the garage of the Jobs family, to avoid losing the deal.
The advantage of Apple I was that it was very simple but powerful, Woz had managed to design it with much fewer elements than the others on the market and for this reason it was also the cheapest.
The Apple I project was created with many financial constraints, but thanks to the sale of the 50 computers, Woz had much more resources to work on the Apple II project.
The design of the Apple II , however, proved to be much more expensive than the initial budget, and Jobs asked Wayne to commit financially to the project. Wayne refused, however, and left the company.
At this point Jobs starts looking for new lenders and finds Mike Markkula investing $ 250,000 in Apple Computer.
The Apple II contained many innovations over the Apple I, was capable of displaying graphics and using colors, and was equipped with a keyboard.
Before the Apple II was put on the market, Jobs strongly wanted to change the logo of the company, considering the figure with Newton too complicated and not very impactful, so the logo of the bitten apple was created, then however not gray but colored like a rainbow.
The Apple II was introduced to the market in 1977, this moment is believed to have marked the beginning of the era of Personal Computers.
The era of Personal Computers
The 1980s were very important for Apple, which emerged in the Personal Computer market.
Given the rapid growth of the sector, many companies began to produce and sell PCs, including the giant IBM.
Meanwhile, the Apple company lost another of its founders, Steve Wozniak left the company in 1981 due to an accident with a private plane.
Apple II was widely used among small companies, but Jobs’ company decided to work on a new project to secure a wider market, and to succeed in this intent it forced the designers to produce a new computer quickly and with very high blood pressure.
Thus was designed the Apple III, which even the creators were not satisfied with, who had to create it with time limitations and business choices.
The most serious mistake that was made in the design of the Apple III was not to have a cooling fan, which Jobs considered not aesthetically pleasing.
Apple III turned out to be a disaster, too expensive and underperforming.
The company went public and despite the failure of Apple III, its stock saw its value grow 1700% in just one year, making it the fastest growing company globally.
In 1983 John Sculley joined Apple, to whom Jobs proposed the position of CEO.
Jobs, visiting the Xerox PARC has the opportunity to observe the Alto system known as Xerox Alto, thanks to this experience he understands that the computers that would be sold in the near future would have been completely different and revolutionary: easier to use and more interesting for most of the population.
Thus, Apple decides to devote itself to the design of a new type of computer: the Lisa and Macintosh projects.
Lisa was marketed in 1983 and had a cost of about 10 thousand euros, a product too advanced and too expensive for those times.
Lisa was another failure and the project was abandoned three years later.
Steve Jobs thus began working on the Macintosh, initially conceived as an economic version of the Lisa.
The Apple Macintosh was launched on the market in 1984, through a commercial called “1984”, aired during the hugely popular SuperBowl:
The Macintosh goes on sale for just under $ 2,500 and is still considered the basis of modern computers today.
The Macintosh was the key to Apple’s success , even if it was not very successful in terms of sales.
Apple was heavily penalized by the release of Microsoft ‘s Windows # The history of Microsoft # which, although less advanced, enjoyed the advantage of diffusion. Since the release of Windows, Apple has lost more and more market share in the world of PCs.
The beginning of the crisis
During 1985, conflicts between Steve Jobs and Sculley begin to develop within Apple.
Their controversies were due to the fact that Jobs considered Sculley incompetent and the latter considered the founder of Apple a danger to the integrity of the company itself.
This conflict came to a head in May of ’85 when Sculley removes all operational responsibilities from Steve Jobs, rendering him irrelevant to the company.
So the founder of Apple # Book – Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson # on September 17, 1985 makes the decision to leave the company he created and nurtured. From this moment on, Apple will be the protagonist of years of deep crisis.
The most important mistake Sculley made in recent years was to allow Microsoft to use the graphic elements of the Macintosh interface, in exchange for Microsoft’s commitment to produce Word and Excel for the Mac.
Even today, Microsoft uses some elements and functions of the Mac.
After leaving Apple, Steve Jobs founded NeXT Computer which shortly after, failing to acquire enough market share, moved towards closure.
At the same time, Apple was in a deep crisis and with no idea to design.
So it was that in 1996 the Apple board of directors decided to acquire NeXT Computer for 400 million dollars, so as to be able to use the operating system developed by the company for future Macintoshes.
On September 16, 1996 Steve Jobs becomes CEO with a symbolic fee of one dollar a year and in a few months he manages to resurrect the Apple company, launching successful projects such as the iMac.
A strategic move was also to change the color of the logo of the bitten apple from the rainbow to the simple white apple, more elegant.
The most successful projects were the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. In 2001 the first Apple Store was opened, which soon spread almost all over the globe.
Farewell to Steve Jobs
In 2011 Steve Jobs passed away due to a serious illness. The Apple founder had left his post as CEO to COO Tim Cook two months earlier.
The death of Steve Jobs affected the whole world that still remembers him today as a visionary man who, with his ingenuity, was able to influence our lives indelibly.
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