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The Garage in Los Altos: How Two Steves Built a Revolution
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before the iPhone, before the iPod, before 'Think Different,' Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in a Los Altos garage with a circuit board and an idea most people thought was absurd. This is where it all began.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Apple was the most valuable company in the world, before the iPhone, before the iPod, before "Think Different," there was a garage in Los Altos, California. And inside that garage, two young men were building something that most people around them genuinely believed would go nowhere.
To understand where Apple came from, you need to understand Steve Wozniak first. Because in a very real sense, Apple didn't start with Steve Jobs.
Jobs was twenty-one years old in nineteen seventy-six. He hadn't built the Apple I.
The founding of Apple Computer Company is dated to April first, nineteen seventy-six. Jobs, Wozniak, and a third co-founder named Ronald Wayne signed the original partnership agreement.
The Apple II was a different machine entirely. Where the Apple I was a project, the Apple II was a product.
The Jobs and Wozniak dynamic deserves more than a passing mention, because it's genuinely unusual in the history of technology companies. Most founding partnerships have some overlap in skill, some competition in role.
It's worth being clear about what the competitive landscape looked like in the late nineteen seventies, because it shapes everything that followed. Apple was not alone.
Here's where it gets interesting, and why this origin story matters for everything that follows in Apple's history. Jobs was a founder in the truest sense.
The garage in Los Altos has become mythologized. Apple has leaned into the mythology.
By the early nineteen eighties, Apple was no longer a garage operation. It was a publicly traded company on its way to becoming one of the most closely watched businesses in America.
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