December 14, 1999: Apple acquires the domain name www.iphone.org, prompting years of speculation that Cupertino is considering building a cellphone.
While the news generates interest, some take it as a warning sign. Apple only recently abandoned the kind of non-computer projects like games consoles, PDAs and digital cameras that proved to be dead ends earlier in the decade.
An Apple phone could never be a thing, right?
December 12, 1980: Apple goes public, floating 4.6 million shares on the stock market at $22 per share.
In the biggest tech IPO of its day, more than 40 out of 1,000 Apple employees become instant millionaires. As Apple’s biggest shareholder, 25-year-old Steve Jobs ends the day with a net worth of $217 million.
December 8, 1975: San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur Paul Terrell opens The Byte Shop, one of the world’s first computer stores and the first to sell an Apple computer.
Years before Apple would open its own retail outlets, the Byte Shop stocks the first 50 Apple-1 computers built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
December 6, 2000: Apple’s stock price falls after the company posts its first quarterly loss since Steve Jobs’ return to the company in 1997.
Shares tumble $3 to just $14 a share as doom-predicting pundits worry that the big Apple comeback might come screeching to a halt.
Little did they know….
A vintage handwritten spec sheet in which Steve Jobs called the Apple-1 motherboard a “great deal” has failed to sell at auction.
The document, written in the mid-1970s, was up for auction as part of Bonham’s “History of Science and Technology, Including Space History” collection. Its asking price was $60,000. However, the bidding “only” reached up to $28,000, thereby failing to meet its reserve. A couple of historical Apple items did sell, but for less than expected.
Steve Jobs’ hands-on approach to just about every project at Apple is part of his legend.
Ron Johnson, Apple’s first head of retail, offers fascinating detail about Jobs and the work leading up to the first Apple Store during a recent episode of the Gimlet podcast Without Fail hosted by Andy Blumberg.
Jobs was demanding and described by many as often difficult to work with. But Johnson says working with Jobs was a “gift.”
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had little time or interest in signing autographs for fans.
But if you are in possession of the rare exception, you have a signature considered the most valuable, according to a guide that tracks the values of the most sought-after autographs.
Steve Jobs was renowned for being hands-on when it came to overseeing Apple’s iconic ad campaigns. But if you really want an Apple ad that had Jobs’ writing all over it, you need to start scouring your personal savings.
That’s because a handwritten document describing the spec of the Apple-1 — Apple’s first ever computer — is coming up for auction this month. In it, Jobs’ describes the computer’s printed circuit board, which was being sold for $75, as a “real deal.”
November 29, 1995: Capitalizing on the success of Toy Story, Pixar floats 6.9 million shares on the stock market. The IPO makes Steve Jobs, who
owns upward of 80 percent of the company, a billionaire.
After the windfall, one of the first people Jobs calls is his friend Larry Ellison, already a member of the billionaire’s club.
“Hello, Larry?” Jobs tells his friend on the phone. “I made it.”
November 26, 1984: “The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC,” claims Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in a BusinessWeek cover story.
The claim would seem almost unthinkable coming out of Gates’ mouth just a few years later. But it comes at a time when Microsoft is best known as one of the biggest Mac developers.
