On April Fool's Day back in 1976, 3 entrepreneurial young guys created Apple Computer, Inc., with the intent to create and distribute truly personal computers. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne began with a dream of making computers smaller and more available to the public. They built their computers in Jobs' parent's garage & rolled out the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976, the same year they founded Apple. Eventually, 200 of these computers would be sold.
Steve Jobs approached a local pc store, The Byte Shop, which ordered fifty computer kits and paid five hundred dollars for each unit after much persuasion from Jobs, whose persuasive techniques have since become known as "the reality-distortion field". Jobs then ordered components from Cramer Electronics, a national electronics parts distributor. Using a number of techniques, including borrowing space from friends and family and selling various items (including a Volkswagen Bus), Jobs managed to acquire the parts required while Wozniak and Wayne put together the Apple I kits.
The next year, the Apple II was introduced and almost immediately became much more popular than its major competition, the TRS-80 (which used cassette tapes for storage, and was known derisively as the TRasH-80) and the Commodore 64, even though Apple II's price was higher. One of the big benefits of Apple's computer was the development of the floppy disk drive and software.
The Apple II was selected by programmers to be the desktop platform for the first "killer app" of the business world. This was a spreadsheet program called VisCalc. This developed a huge market for the Apple. The corporate market attracted many more software and hardware developers to the machine, plus it attracted home users who chose the Apple to be compatible with their workplace machines.
Over the years, Apple Computer would release many more designs, with each one just a little better than the last. In 1984, Steve Jobs was on hand to introduce the Mac as the "Computer for the rest of us". In 1989, Apple introduced the Macintosh Portable. However, this computer was actually quite bulky and cumbersome and was met with mixed reviews. At this point, Apple hired industrial designers to develop a better, more portable personal computer.
In 1991, the Apple PowerBook was introduced. The PowerBook would provide the general layout & form-factor for the portable computers we know today. This solidified Apple's reputation as a quality manufacturer of both desktop and notebook machines. The success of this portable led to increased revenues and growing popularity of Apple in the computer market, and was followed up by the addition of the Apple iMac to their line of personal computers, in 1998. They also branched out into the music arena with the development of the iPod personal music player, which went on to grab an 80% market share.
Reflecting this expansion into other markets, on January 9, 2007, they changed their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to simply Apple, Incorporated. While this company has had their ups and downs over the years, Apple has continued to be a solid presence in the desktop computer and notebook market. Their products have continued to expand to meet the needs of both the corporate and individual user.