Before there was an iPod, an iPhone, an iPad, or an Apple Watch—before there was a Macintosh or Apple II or even an Apple-1—there were a couple of kids who came of age in Silicon Valley in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were brought together by a shared fascination with electronics. Supported by friends, family, and a burgeoning community of hobbyists, technologists, and entrepreneurs, just as the microprocessor was ushering in a new era, they channeled their strikingly different skills into joint projects.
On April 1, 1976, along with Jobs’s former coworker Ronald Wayne, the two Steves formed a partnership to market Wozniak’s latest invention, a microcomputer kit for electronics hobbyists. They called it Apple Computer Company.
Today, as Apple turns 50, its presence in our lives is so pervasive—2.5 billion of the company’s devices are in active use—that its unlikely origin story is more resonant than ever. To tell it, I turned to the people who lived it:
