Apple Computer

Apple Computer, Inc., major manufacturer of personal computers with headquarters in Cupertino, California. Apple designs, produces, and sells personal computer systems for use in business, education, government, and the home. Its products are sold in more than 120 countries and include personal computers, printers, monitors, scanners, software, and networking products.

Apple was formed by Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak in 1976 to market the Apple I, a computer circuit board that they had designed and built in Jobs’s garage in Los Altos, California. They scrapped their plan to sell the board alone when Jobs’s first sales call yielded an order for 50 units. They were, however, sold without monitor, keyboard, or casing.

The company was incorporated in January 1977 by the charismatic Jobs, the meditative inventor Wozniak, and their new partner and chairman, Mike Markkula. Markkula brought credibility, maturity, engineering and product management experience, and an extremely broad-based knowledge of the business world, as well as investment cash of his own and contacts among Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists.

Markkula also recruited all of Apple’s outside board members and lured away managers from other major high-technology firms, including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and National Semiconductor.