Jobs was marketing the Apple 1 at hobbyists like members of the Homebrew Computer Club, but when he and Woz sat down to design the Apple II, he had grander plans. The Apple I was the first single-board computer with a built-in video interface and onboard ROM that told the machine how to load programs from an external source. It was marketed in 1976 at a price of $666.

After offering it to HP, which turned it down, Apple Computer was formed to sell the machine. It was in Jobs’s garage that Wozniak designed the Apple 1 computer. The pair were both named Steve: Steve Wozniak was the visionary engineer who designed the machine, soon to be called the Apple I, and the now infamous Steve Jobs was the man who saw the commercial potential of computers in the home.Īside from troubling the phone company, the pair had legitimate engineering jobs: Wozniak was working at Hewlett-Packard, and Jobs at Atari.

The Apple IIGS, released in 1986, was Apple’s answer to Commodore’s and Atari’s next-generation machines.Īs every Mac-fan knows, the Apple story started in 1976 when two phone phreakers decided to make a computer. While the Mac was running rings around the IBM PC – in terms of usability if not sales – Apple decided on a different strategy to deal with the 16-bit home computer market. But by 1985, the era of 8-bit computers was coming to an end. The Apple II, introduced in 1978, was a phenomenally successful platform, eventually coming to possess a 20% share of the personal computer market in the US. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, computing made a great leap forward with the advent of 16-bit microcomputers like the Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, and Atari ST.

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