Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne came together in a suburban bedroom in Los Altos, Calif., to found Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. This true story differs from the popular narrative of the Two Steves forming Apple in Jobs’ garage in two ways. Placing the founding in a bedroom or a garage is just a semantic quibble, but many Apple fans have lost the name of Ronald Wayne to history. Here is the story of Apple, with all three co-founders included, from Owen Linzmayer’s “Apple Confidential”:

Jobs was freelancing at Atari in the early 1970s when founder Nolan Kay Bushnell hired Wayne as chief draftsman (badge #395) for the video game maker. Despite the difference in their ages, Jobs and Wayne became casual friends and would often have philosophical discussions on the ethics of making money. Desiring a tie-breaker in any potential conflicts with Woz, Jobs enticed Wayne to become a partner in Apple by offering him 10 percent interest in the company.

“Either I was going to be bankrupt or the richest man in the cemetery,” Wayne recalls thinking. Since Apple was far from a sure thing, Wayne retained his day job at Atari and worked nights on the original Apple logo and documentation for the Apple I.

Meanwhile, Jobs was hustling up customers. At a Homebrew Computer Club meeting (the club met monthly at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center auditorium in Palo Alto), Jobs gave a demonstration of the Apple I to Paul Jay Terrell, who operated the Byte Shop–arguably the first retail computer store chain in the country, which opened its doors on December 8, 1975 (Terrell’s birthday). Terrell was intrigued and asked Jobs to keep in touch.

The next day, a barefooted Jobs dropped in on Terrell at his store in Mountain View and exclaimed, “I’m keeping in touch.” To Jobs’ utter amazement, Terrell agreed to buy 50 computers for $500 each, cash on delivery. There was only one catch to the $25,000 order: Terrell wanted fully assembled computers.

The trio had originally planned to produce bare circuit boards for $25 each and sell them for $50 to hobbyists who would populate them with the necessary chips and other parts. They didn’t have the money necessary to buy all of the parts required to build 50 complete computers, but Jobs was undaunted. On April 6, he obtained a three-month $5,000 loan from Elmer and Allen J. Baum (one of Woz’s coworkers at Hewlett-Packard), then convinced suppliers to extend 30 days’ credit on $15,000 worth of parts.

The young, ambitious Jobs had no qualms about going into debt to fulfill the Byte Shop order, but the seasoned Wayne was anxious. He wasn’t convinced Terrell would pay for the computers, and the partnership agreement meant that he had unlimited personal liability for any debts incurred by Apple. Just four years prior, Wayne underwent the emotionally painful experience of folding Siand, his …read more
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