Apple Timeline

Apple II

Wozniak had already moved on from the Apple I. Many of the design features of the Apple I were due to the limited amount of money they had to construct the prototype, but with the income from the sales he was able to start construction of a greatly improved machine, the Apple II; it was presented to the public at the first West Coast Computer Faire on April 16 and April 17, 1977. Onthe first day of exhibition, Jobs introduced Apple II to a Japanese chemist named Toshio Mizushima who became the first authorized Apple dealer in Japan.

The main difference internally was a completely redesigned TV interface, which held the display in memory. Now not only useful for simple text display, the Apple II included graphics, and, eventually, color. Jobs meanwhile pressed for a muchimproved case and keyboard, with the idea that the machine should be complete and ready to run out of the box. This was almost the case for the Apple I machines sold to The Byte Shop, but one still needed to plug various parts together and type in the code to run BASIC.

Building such a machine was going to be fiscally burdensome. Jobs started looking for cash, but Wayne was somewhat gun shy dueto a failed venture four years earlier, and eventually dropped out of the company. Banks were reluctant to lend Jobs money; the idea of a computer for ordinary people seemed absurd at the time. Jobs eventually met "Mike" Markkula who co-signed a bank loan for US$250,000, and the three formed Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. The name Apple was chosen because the company to beat in the technologyindustry at the time was Atari, and Apple Computer came before Atari alphabetically and thus also in the phone book. Another reason was that Jobs had happy memories of working on an Oregon apple farm one summer.

With both cash, and a new case design in hand thanks to designer Jerry Manock, the Apple II was released in 1977 and became the computer generally credited with creating the home computermarket. Millions were sold well into the 1980s. A number of different models of the Apple II series were built, including the Apple IIe and Apple IIGS, which could still be found in many schools as late as 2005.

Apple III
By the early 1980s, Apple Computer faced increasing competition. While the Apple II was already established as a successful business-ready platform because of Visicalc, Applewas not content. The Apple III (Apple 3) was designed to take on the IBM PC in the business environment.

The Apple III was a relatively conservative design for computers of the era. However, Steve Jobs did not want the computer to have a fan; rather, he wanted the heat generated by the electronics to be dissipated through the chassis of the machine, forgoing the cooling fan.

Unfortunately,the physical design of the case was not sufficient to cool the components inside it. By removing the fan from the design, the Apple III was prone to overheating. This caused the integrated circuit chips to disconnect from the motherboard. Customers who contacted Apple customer service were told to "drop the computer on the desk", which would cause the ICs to fall back in to place.

Thousands ofApple III computers were recalled and, although a new model was introduced in 1983 to rectify the problems, the damage was already done.


Apple IPO

On December 12, 1980, Apple launched the Initial Public Offering of its stock to the investing public. When Apple went public, it generated more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and instantly created more millionaires (about300) than any company in history. Several venture capitalists cashed out, reaping billions in long-term capital gains.

In January 1981, Apple held its first shareholders meeting as a public company in the Flint Center, a large auditorium at nearby De Anza College, which is often used for symphony concerts. (Previous meetings were held quietly in smaller rooms, because there had only been a...