Jobs and Wozniak put together their first computer, called the Apple I. They

marketed it in 1976 at a price of $666. The Apple I was the first single-board computer with built-in video interface, and on- board ROM, which told the machine how to load other programs from an external source. Jobs was marketing the Apple I at hobbyists like members of the Homebrew Computer Club who could now perform their own operations on their personal computers. Jobs and Wozniak managed to earn $774,000 from the sales of the Apple I. The following year, Jobs and Wozniak developed the general purpose Apple II. The design of the Apple II did not depart from Apple Iصs simplistic and compactness design. The Apple II was the Volkswagon of computers. The Apple II had built-in circuitry allowing it to interface directly to a color video monitor. Jobs encouraged independent programmers to invent applications for Apple II. The result was a library of some 16,000 software programs.

For the Apple II computer to compete against IBM, Jobs needed better marketing skills. To increase his marketing edge he brought Regis McKenna and Nolan Bushnell into the company. McKenna was the foremost public relations man in the Silicon Valley. Nolan Bushnell was Jobsصs former supervisor at Atari. Bushnell put Jobs in touch with Don Valentine, a venture capitalist, who told Markkula, the former marketing manager at Intel, that Apple was worth looking into. Buying into Apple with an investment variously estimated between $91,000 and $250,000, Markkula became chairman of the company in May 1977. The following month Michael Scott, who was director of manufacturing at Semi-Conductor Inc., became president of Apple. Through Markkula, Apple accumulated a line of credit with the Bank of America and $600,000 in venture capital from the Rockefellers and Arthur Roch.

Quickly setting the standard in personal computers, the Apple II had earnings of $139,000,000 within three years, a growth of 700 percent. Impressed with that growth, and a trend indicating an additional worth of 35 to 40 percent, the cautious underwriting firm of Hambrecht AND Quist in cooperation with Wall Streetصs prestigious Morgan Stanley, Inc., took Apple public in 1980. The underwriters price of $22 per share went up to $29 the first day of trading, bringing the market value of Apple to $1.2 billion. In 1982 Apple had sales of $583,000,000 up 74 percent from 1981. Its net earnings were $1.06 a share, up 55 percent, and as of December 1982, the companyصs stock was selling for approximately $30 a share.

Over the past seven years of Appleصs creation, Jobs had created a strong productive company with a growth curve like a straight line North with no serious competitors. From 1978 to 1983, its compound growth rate was over 150% a year. Then IBM muscled into the personal computer business. Two years after introducing its PC, IBM passed Apple in dollar sales of the machines. IBMصs dominance had made its operating system an industry standard which was not compatible with Appleصs products. Jobs knew in order to compete with IBM, he would have to make the Apple compatible with IBM computers and needed to introduce new computers that could be marketed in the business world which IBM controlled.

Jobs in 1981 introduced the Apple III, which had never fully recovered from its traumatic introduction, because Apple had to recall the first 14,000 units to remedy design flaws, and then had trouble selling the re-engineered version. Jobs designed the Macintosh to compete with the PC and, in turn, make Appleصs new products a success. In an effort to revitalize the company and prevent it from falling victim to corporate bureaucracy, Jobs launched a campaign to bring back the values and entrepreneurial spirit that characterized Apple in its garage shop days. In developing the Macintosh, he tried to re-create an atmosphere in which the computer industryصs highly individualistic, talented, and often- eccentric software and hardware designers could flourish.

A Software Company

After leaving Apple, Jobsص new revolutionary ideas were not in hardware but in software of the computer industry. In 1989 Jobs tried to do it all over again with a new company called NextStep. He planned to build the next generation of personal computers that would put Apple to shame. It did not happen. After eight long years of struggle and after running through some $250 million, NextStep closed down its hardware division in 1993. Jobs realized that he was not going to revolutionize the hardware. He turned his attention to the software side of the computer industry.

Jobs feels software programs have gotten bigger, more complicated, and much more expensive to produce. Object-oriented programming changes that by allowing gigantic, complex programs to be assembled like Tinker toys. Programmers will use pre- assembled chunks of code to build 80 percent of their program thus saving an enormous amount of time and money.

The criticism Jobs received from building the NextStep comupter was that he failed in trying to build a second computer empire. Jobsصs goal was to produce a NextStep computer for $3,000 that would land on the desk of every college student. In designing the NextStep computer, he ignored the demands of thecomputer market. Even his own experts were saying: زKeep in touch with the intended customers and avoid the pitfall of anerobic isolation; do not assume that the customers will pay any price to secure the lastest computer technology; ease the way for customers to adopt a new standard by providing software and hardware bridges that help connect older machines to the new ones.س According to developers, he disregarded every one of these lessons when he launched NextStep computer.

In mid 1989, after long delays which Jobs was never blamed for, NextStep finally introduced a $7,000 monochrome system. The system had no floppy disk, virtually no useful software applications, and a slow magneto-optical disk. When the NextStep computer was introduced, the academic world and corporate America rejected it. In the end, only about 50,000 NextStep machines were ever built, and in February 1993 Jobs announced that NextStep would stop producing hardware and focus all its enery on the NextStep operating system. The operating system was promised to run on a wide variety of platforms. The companyصs management had decimated. In the past few months virtually all of NextStepصs vice presidents had quit. Van Cuylenburg said the quitting of viceصs presidents was due to his own toughness. He said, زIصve put pressure on the company, and not everyone was willing or able to accept it. NextStep had too many vice presidents when I arrived, so Jobs and I decided to eliminate some.س