On April Fool's Day back in 1976, 3 entreprenurial young men created Apple Computer, Incorporated, with the intention of creating and distributing truly personal computers. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne began with a dream of making computers smaller and readily available to the general population. They built their computers in Jobs' parent's garage & debuted the Apple I personal computer kit in 1976, the same year they founded Apple. Eventually, 200 of these computers would be built.

Jobs approached a local pc shop, The Byte Shop, which ordered 50 computer kits and paid $500 for each kit 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 components needed while Wozniak and Wayne built the Apple I kits.

The next year, the Apple II was introduced and quickly became much more popular than its competitors, the TRS-80 (which used cassette tapes for storage, and was known derisively as the TRasH-80) and the Commodore 64, despite the fact that Apple II's price was higher. One of the major advantages of the Apple was the development of the floppy disk drive and software.

The Apple II was chosen by programmers to be the desktop platform for the first "killer application" of the business world. This was a spreadsheet program called VisCalc. This created a substantial market for the Apple. The business market brought in many more software and hardware developers to the machine, and it also attracted home users who chose the Apple to be compatible with their business 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 basic structure & form-factor for the portable computers we know today. This solidified Apple's reputation as a quality manufacturer of both desktop and laptop 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 eighty percent market share.

Reflecting this branching into other markets, on January 9, 2007, they changed their name from Apple Computer, Incorporated to simply Apple, Incorporated. While they have 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 develop to meet the needs of both the business and individual user.