January 2, 1979: Entrepreneurs Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston incorporate their company Software Arts to publish a little program called VisiCalc.
The first spreadsheet software for the Apple II, the $100 VisiCalc ultimately becomes personal computing’s first “killer app.” It helps transform personal computers from “cool to have” toys into “must have” business accessories.
December 25, 1977: Steve Wozniak spends the holidays building a prototype of the Disk II, the Apple II’s revolutionary floppy disk drive.
“I worked all day, all night, through Christmas and New Year’s trying to get it done,” Wozniak would later recall in his autobiography, iWoz. “[Early Apple employee] Randy Wiggington, who was actually attending Homestead High, the school Steve and I had graduated from, helped me a lot on that project.”
Wiggington takes December 25 off. Woz does not.
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.
September 27, 1979: Years before the Macintosh will ship, Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin clash for the first time over the direction of the R&D project to produce the revolutionary computer.
Raskin, the founder of the Macintosh project, wants to produce a machine that’s affordable to everyone. Apple co-founder Jobs wants a computer that’s going to be the best, regardless of price.
Guess who won?
August 3, 1977: The first affordable, mass-market personal computer makes its debut… and, contrary to what you might think, it’s not the Apple II.
Although Tandy’s TRS-80 arrived the year after the Apple I and a few months after the Apple II, it proved to be the first “Apple killer” on the market: pre-dating later rivals like IBM as Apple’s first big tech industry opponent. And, for the longest time, it seemed to be on course to win…
July 20, 1978: Apple DOS makes its debut on the Apple II, giving Apple its first official operating system.
A command line interface with green text prompts on a black background, Apple DOS looks incredibly primitive next to today’s graphical user interfaces. Nonetheless, for Apple users this was the macOS Sierra of its day.
July 1, 1976: The Apple 1 goes on sale, becoming the first computer ever sold by the Apple Computer Company.
Arriving the same month Jimmy Carter was nominated for U.S. president, Family Feud debuted on TV, and the United States celebrated the 200th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, the Apple 1 is only produced in small numbers, and sells for the unusual price of $666.66.
