Apple

The funding was a Volkswagen minibus and a programmable calculator. Jobs sold the van, Wozniak sold his HP-65, and the Apple I went out as a bare circuit board at $666.66 - no case, no keyboard, no monitor, because a fully assembled board was itself the innovation when the alternative was a kit. Around two hundred were sold, and the order that mattered came from Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop, who took fifty.

Wozniak had shown the machine at the **Homebrew Computer Club**, and that detail links this entry to another on this timeline. Steve Leininger, the engineer Tandy hired to design the TRS-80, was a Homebrew member too. **Two of the three machines in what Byte magazine called the 1977 Trinity came out of the same hobbyist meeting in Silicon Valley**, which is a reasonable claim for the most productive room in the history of the industry.

Mike Markkula, an Intel veteran, provided $250,000 and the adult supervision, and the company incorporated in January 1977 - by which time Wayne was already gone. The Apple II arrived that April with a case, a keyboard, colour graphics and expansion slots, and it is the machine that made personal computing a market rather than a hobby.

**And then it lost.** The Tandy entry on this timeline records that in 1980 Tandy shipped three times as many computers as Apple, because Tandy had seven thousand shops and Apple had dealers. Apple's advantage was slower and more durable: open expansion slots meant other companies could build cards for it, and VisiCalc - the first spreadsheet - shipped on the Apple II first. A machine that other people can extend and write software for accumulates reasons to buy it. A machine sold off a convenient shelf accumulates only sales.

The 1980 listing raised $110M. The Lisa in 1983 cost $9,995 and failed. The Macintosh in 1984 was the right idea shipped underpowered. Jobs recruited John Sculley from Pepsi with a line that has outlived both products - whether he wanted to sell sugared water for the rest of his life, or come and change the world - and in September 1985 Sculley removed him from the company. Wozniak had already left in February to become a schoolteacher.

**The interesting decade is the bad one.** Apple spent the 1990s demonstrating the limits of a closed system in a market that had standardised on somebody else's, and by 1997 its worldwide share was around three per cent. Jobs, meanwhile, had founded NeXT and bought Lucasfilm's computer graphics division, which became Pixar.

So the return happened through an acquisition, and it is the most consequential one on this page: **Apple bought NeXT, and NeXT's operating system became the foundation of macOS, and NeXT's founder became Apple's chief executive.** A company acquired a supplier and got a new leader, a new kernel and a new decade out of it. Every iPhone runs a descendant of software written by the company Apple's ousted founder built while he was gone.

What follows is well documented elsewhere and does not need retelling here. The part worth keeping on a page about lineage is the shape: **Apple is the only company on this timeline that was overtaken, nearly died, bought the company its exiled founder had built, and came back to become the first American company worth three trillion dollars.** Every other recovery story here ends in an acquisition by somebody else.