Special Edition - The Apple Story.
Prologue.
The man who invented the computer was born in Devon, England, Britain on Boxing Day 1791. His name was Charles Babbage.
The company that perfected his computer was born in Calfornia, USA on April Fools Day 1976. Their name is Apple Computer.
Introduction.

The jump from Babbage has of course had a few incremental steps, most note worthy is that of British mathematician Alan Turing. Turing's design for a computer could input and output data, store programs and had processing control. Turing's design for a computer is the basis for all digital computers.

But this podumentry isn't about the birth of computers, it's about the Apple story.

Who created Apple? Well that's an easy one, Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak. Who made Apple successful? Ah, a little more difficult!
Was it Steve Wozniak for creating the Apple II?
Or howabout Dan Bricklin for the world's first critical application that only ran on the Apple II: Visicalc, the first computer spreadsheet.
Or perhaps it was Jef Raskin, the inventor of the first Apple Macintosh featuring the first commercial use of a Grahical User Interface an Mouse?
Or even Jonanthan Ives, the brilliant British designer who's iMac and iPod saved Apple from a tragic finale.
Or finally was it Steve Jobs who convinced us, the gullible public, for buying all this computer junk.

There is actually on simple answer to the question 'what made Apple successful', and that is 'creativity'. Creativity in Apple computers, and creativity in its users and loyal customers.

Condensing 30 years of history into 30 minutes isn't an easy task so I've split this podumentry into two parts, part two is out in 2 weeks. Another method in which I try to achieve this is to divide the story of Apple into three parts; Apple People, Apple Hardware & Apple Software. In this way I hope to present a balanced picture of Apple.

I will present 4 of these 3 part sections:


This week
Apple People: Steve Wozniak
Apple Hardware: Apple II
Apple Software: Visicalc

Apple People: Steve Jobs
Apple Hardware: Apple Macintosh
Apple Software: The Mac OS

In two weeks time
Apple People: John Sculley
Apple Hardware: Apple Newton
Apple Software: Apple Works

Apple People: Jonathan Ives
Apple Hardware: iPod
Apple Software: iTunes

Please note that this podumentry borrows heavily from Wikipedia, sometimes quoting unedited sections, it seemed silly to retype the sections for the sake of it! I would like to thank all those who have contributed to Wikipedia which has helped this podumentry.
Calfornia Dreaming.
Apple Computer was founded in Los Altos, California on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, to sell the Apple I personal computer kit at $666.66. They were hand-built in Jobs' parents' garage, and the Apple I was first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club.
Jobs and Wozniak, ("the two Steves") had been friends since 1972. Jobs managed to interest Wozniak in assembling a personal computer and selling it. Jobs approached a local computer store, The Byte Shop, who, after Jobs' famous persuasion, ordered fifty units and paid $500 for each unit. Jobs then ordered components from Cramer Electronics, a national electronic parts distributor. Using a variety of methods, including borrowing space from friends and family and selling various items including a Volkswagen Type 2 bus, Jobs managed to secure the parts needed while Wozniak and another friend, Ronald Wayne, assembled the Apple I. They were delivered in June, and paid for on delivery. Eventually 200 Apple I computers were built.
Apple People: Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak (or Woz) was born August the 11th 1950. He learned the basics of mathematics and electronics from his father. When Woz was 11, he built his own amateur radio station, and got a ham-radio license. At age 13, he was elected president of his high school electronics club, and won first prize at a science fair for a transistor-based calculator. Also at 13, Woz began designing his first computers (including one that could play tic-tac-toe), which laid the foundation for his later successes.
After dropping out of the University of Colorado, Woz and his neighbor, Bill Fernandez, built a computer together in Fernandez's parents's garage.  Fernandez introduced Woz to his best friend and classmate, Steve Jobs. Jobs, an ambitious "loner" who "always had a different way of looking at things," quickly befriended Woz, and they started working together.

Their partnership began by building a electronic device that allowed you make free telephone calls, Wozniak built and Jobs sold Blue Boxes for $150 apiece, splitting the profits.
Jobs and Wozniak came to the conclusion that a completely assembled and inexpensive computer would be in demand. They sold some of their prized possessions (e.g. Woz's HP scientific calculator and Steve Jobs' Volkswagen van), raised USD$1300, and assembled the first prototype in Jobs' bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs' garage. Their first computer was named Apple I, and was a fully assembled and functional unit that contained a $25 microprocessor (MOS 6502) on a single-circuit board with ROM. On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer Company. Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. The Apple I was priced at $666.66. Jobs and Wozniak sold their first 25 computers to a local dealer.
In addition to his hardware skills, Wozniak wrote most of the software that ran on the Apple. He wrote a Basic interpreter named Integer BASIC, a set of virtual 16-bit processor instructions known as SWEET16, a Breakout game.
Woz ended his full time employment with Apple for good on February 6, 1985, nine years after setting up the company, however he remains a major stockholder and important boardmember as well as friend to Steve Jobs. Wozniak then founded a new venture called Cloud 9 which developed home remote control switches, bringing the first universal remote control to market in 1987
Apple Hardware: The Apple II

The Apple II was Introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, and was designed and built by Steve Wozniak after completing the Apple I.
Unlike any other machine before it, the Apple II looked more like an appliance than a piece of electronic test equipment. This was a computer that would not seem out of place in the home, on a manager's desk, or in a classroom.
Here's an ad from around the time of its introduction.
Unique for its time were the machine's color and high-resolution graphics modes (which could be used on an ordinary television), its sound capabilities, and its built-in BASIC programming language. Compared to earlier machines, these features were well-documented and easy to learn. The Apple II thus marked the beginning of the personal computer revolution: it was a machine for the masses, not just hobbyists, scientists, and engineers. The Apple II was popular with business users as well as with families and schools, particularly after the release of the first-ever computer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, which initially ran only on the Apple II.
Apple Software: VisiCalc
Conceived by Dan Bricklin, refined by Bob Frankston, developed by their company Software Arts, and distributed by Personal Software in 1979 (later named VisiCorp) for the Apple II computer, it propelled the Apple from being a hobbyist's toy to being a much-desired, useful financial tool for business. This likely motivated IBM to enter the PC market which they had been ignoring until then. After the Apple II version, VisiCalc was also released for the Atari 8-bit family, the Commodore PET (both based on the MOS Technology 6502 processor, like the Apple), and the IBM PC.
According to Bricklin, he was watching his university professor at Harvard Business School create a financial model on a blackboard. When the professor found an error or wanted to change a parameter, he had to tediously erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table, triggering Bricklin to realize that he could replicate the process on a computer using an 'electronic spreadsheet' to view results of underlying formulae.
Apple People: Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was born February 24th 1955.
Here is Steve Jobs talking about his early years. Play clip.
And here's Steve Jobs talking about being sacked by John Sculley! Play clip.

After Apple Jobs created NeXT, the contributions of NeXT's engineers incidentally led the invention of The World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee the British developer of the original World Wide Web system created at CERN on a NeXT workstation. Jobs' insistence that average people should be able to write custom "mission-critical" applications formed the basis of Interface Builder, which Berners-Lee utilized to do just that — write a program entitled "WorldWideWeb 1.0".
Whilst away from Apple, Apple's reliance on ancient software and internal mismanagement, particularly its inability to release a major operating system upgrade, had brought it near bankruptcy in the mid 1990s. Jobs' progressive stance on Unix underpinnings was considered overly ambitious and somewhat backward in the 1980s, but his choice ultimately became an expandable, solid foundation for an operating system.

Apple would later acquire this software and with it Steve Jobs, under Jobs' leadership, Apple would experience a renaissance, and be the company we know it today.
Apple Hardware: The Macintosh.

The Macintosh followed the success of the Apple II, named after the McIntosh apple, the original Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984. It was the first commercially successful personal computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse instead of the then-standard command line interface.
The current range of Macintoshes varies from Apple's entry level Mac mini desktop, to its mid-range server, the Xserve.
The Macintosh project started in early 1979 with Jef Raskin, an Apple employee, who envisioned an easy-to-use, low-cost computer for the average consumer. In September 1979, Raskin was given permission to start hiring for the project, and he began to look for an engineer who could put together a prototype; Bill Atkinson.

Here is a clip from the famous 1984 advert for the Mac.

The Macintosh has grown and developed over the years, with it's software updating too. Later introductions to the Macintosh line included the Mac Portable in 1991 which became the PowerBook and now the MacBook Pro, the Power Mac in March 1994, the iMac in August 1998, the PowerMac G4 Cube in August 2000, and the Mac Server in September 2001
Apple Software: Mac OS
Mac OS, which stands for Macintosh Operating System, is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The original Mac OS is often credited for popularizing the graphical user interface successfully. It was first introduced in 1984 with the original Macintosh, the Macintosh 128K.

Apple deliberately played down the existence of the operating system in the early years of the Macintosh to help make the machine appear more user-friendly and to distance it from other operating systems such as MS-DOS, which were portrayed as arcane and technically challenging. Apple wanted Macintosh to be portrayed as a system "for the rest of us". Therefore the term "Mac OS" didn't really exist until it was officially used during the mid-1990s. The term has since been applied to all versions of the Mac system software prior to this as a handy way to refer to it when discussing it in context with other operating systems.

Mac OS in now devided into three catagories: Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X, and Mac OS X for Intel Processors.
The "classic" Mac OS is characterized by its total lack of a command line; it is a completely graphical operating system. Heralded for its ease of use. Mac OS originally used the Macintosh File System (MFS), a flat file system, this was replaced by the Hierarchical File System (HFS), which had a true directory tree.

The Classic OS is still supported and shipped in addition to OS X with PowerPC (but not Intel) Macs as late as early 2006.

Mac OS X brought Unix-style memory management and pre-emptive multitasking to the Mac platform. It is based on NeXTSTEP, the object-oriented operating system developed by Steve Jobs' NeXT company, which inturn is based on UNIX.

Every update to Mac OS X since the original public beta has had the atypical quality of being perceptibly more responsive than the version it replaced, the opposite to the trend of most operating systems. As noted by John Siracusa of Ars Technica:
"For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release—and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems."[1]