Steve Wozniak invented the personal computer

Apple started out in a garage in 1976

Shifting the focus of personal computing from businesses to everyday consumers, Apple found early success with the Apple II, which sold 6 million units, and the Macintosh, which featured a user-friendly graphical interface.

One of Apple's first computers sold for $375K at an auction

An operational Apple I, the first model of personal computer made by Apple, sold for $375K at an auction. The machine was first sold in 1976 and has a handwritten serial number by Steve Jobs himself. The auction, provided rare insight into the beginnings of the influential tech company.

Apple’s third cofounder was its angel investor

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are well-known for cofounding Apple, but the company had a third founder who acted as an angel investor: Mike Markkula, who invested $250K in 1977.

Steve Jobs changed the world with Apple and Pixar

The devices Jobs introduced during his time at Apple, including the iPad and iPhone, were imitated by competitors, ultimately helping to create the numerous options consumers have today. In addition to leading Apple, Jobs also helped turn Pixar and the software startup NeXT into success stories.

Bob Noyce coinvented the integrated circuit, cofounded Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, and is considered one of the founders of Silicon Valley

Some even called Noyce the “Mayor of Silicon Valley.” According to Steve Jobs, he was the “ultimate inventor, rebel, and entrepreneur.” This Founders episode dissects an article from 1983 that explains Noyce’s lasting impact.

Before starting Apple, Steve Jobs cold-called HP at 12 years old and got a summer job

As a leader, Jobs was both admired and resented for his unwavering commitment to his vision, which led him to push his colleagues beyond their limits. Jobs once told a rival computer executive that he'd make a product so good, they'd buy one for their kid.

Long before Coachella, Steve Wozniak attempted a similarly-minded festival

In 1982, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak was on a hiatus from Apple after a near-fatal plane crash. In his spare time, he decided to throw a festival that would bring together cutting-edge music and technology—a Woodstock for the 1980s. The result was the US Festival, an early ancestor of Coachella that brought world-class acts like Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac, Talking Heads, the Grateful Dead, and the Ramones to a rustic venue outside Los Angeles.

A short biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs led Apple for almost a quarter century, first from 1976 through 1985 and then from 1997 through just before his death in 2011. A brief synopsis of his career underscores the impact he made during that timespan, across everything from technology to smartphones, moviemaking, retail and much more.

Steve Jobs was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom

In 2022, the White House posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Steve Jobs, recognizing Jobs’s work as the cofounder and longtime CEO of Apple, as well as a longtime leader at Pixar.

Steve Jobs founded NeXT while on a break from Apple

While Steve Jobs was on a hiatus from working at Apple, he founded a company called NeXT and helped lead the release of its operating system NeXTSTEP. The operating system was used to create the first app store of sorts, as well as the first web browser.

Watch Steve Jobs introduce the first iPad

Apple's cofounder debuted the first iPad in 2010, framing it as a third category of personal electronics between the laptop and the smartphone. Steve Jobs showed off how thin the device was (for the time) and explained how it was better than smartphones and laptops for browsing the web.

The Macintosh popularized GUI and mouse navigation for personal computing

A graphical user interface that utilized windows, icons, and pull-down menus, rather than text-based commands, contributed to the device's success after its January 1984 launch. Its original sound system—capable of playing four voices—was developed after non-technical staff suggested the machine should play music.

Your iPhone started with a Cold War secret

Silicon Valley wasn't supposed to happen. A stretch of California orchard land somehow became the place that built the modern world: chips, PCs, the internet, the smartphone, and now AI. But the real story isn't the garage myth. It's a series of contradictions hiding in plain sight.

Jony Ive helped popularize Apple with iconic product form factors

Appointed SVP of industrial design in 1997 and chief design officer in 2015, Ive was responsible for the translucent plastic shells found on early iMacs and the iBook G3. He also oversaw the construction of Apple Park—the company's headquarters.

Microsoft's initial successes came from promising products that did not yet exist

In discussions with teams responsible for MITS's Altair 8800 and IBM's PC, Bill Gates and Paul Allen claimed to have created ready-to-use software. Code for the former was not completed until Paul Allen's flight to MITS' headquarters, where the software was successfully tested for the first time.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet, released with Apple II's personal computer in 1979

Before 1979, managers were essentially information processors working off paper ledgers. Scenario modeling was slow, manual, and expensive. Companies were understood as organizations that built things with financial analysis as secondary. VisiCalc made calculation so cheap that you could work iteratively, setting out forecasts and tweaking assumptions until you got the answer you wanted. Oks argues It created a new way of seeing the world.

A timeline of computer history

The earliest computers bear little resemblance to the computing devices that most people rely on today. This timeline graphic from the Computer History Museum tracks their evolution, from the early days of bulky mainframes that only experts generally used through to the personal computing revolution and on to the modern mobile era. Readers will learn important context ahead of the next major computing platform shift.

NASA purchased about 60% of all integrated circuits from 1961 to 1965

The US government adopted the new technology to support the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer, which would help astronauts fly to the moon. This drove manufacturing up and costs down, setting the stage for the modern computing era.

Married computer scientists at Stanford University built the router that became the foundation for Cisco

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner were both computer scientists at Stanford University in 1984 when the pair created a router that connected computers on different networks. The pair asked for Stanford's permission to manufacture the router, but the university declined, and the couple decided to leave their jobs to launch Cisco, one of the tech companies that powers the internet.

The first computer virus was created by a USC doctoral candidate in 1983

A year after creating malware in a controlled experiment that multiplied until it took over all of a computer's memory, Fred Cohen went public with his research and its risks. He called the self-replicating software a "computer virus," a term Cohen's advisor, Leonard Adleman, coined to describe its infectious behavior. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

A conversation about open-source software with Linus Torvalds, who invented Linux

Originally written as part of a personal project, Torvalds acknowledges that Linux's growth came from opening it up to a community of users who could each work on different components, including those that were not his strength, such as the user interface. He also admits to being an engineer, rather than a visionary, relating more to Thomas Edison than Nikola Tesla.

Computer pioneer Alan Turing was also an elite runner

Alan Turing is credited with helping to found modern computer science, in addition to cracking the Nazi code known as Enigma. Beyond these world-historical achievements, the British mathematician also nearly represented his country in the Olympics in the marathon, running just 11 minutes slower than the eventual gold recipient at the 1948 games. Read more on this lesser-known aspect of the man here.

Bill Bowerman got the idea for the breakthrough waffle-knit running shoe from a waffle iron

Nike cofounder Bill Bowerman was trying to find new ways to create traction for his runners on artificial turf. He looked at the waffle iron and realized that the pattern would work for the shoes’ soles.

Credit for inventing the laser was fought over for nearly three decades

Although Theodore Maiman built the first working laser in 1960, Gordon Gould coined the term earlier. Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow of Bell Labs filed a patent after Gould came up with the idea and name, but before Gould filed his patent.

George Westinghouse purchased Tesla's AC technology patents for $60,000

The seven patents in alternating current motors and power transmission formed the basis for a system of technologies including generators, transformers, and lighting. Nikola Tesla spent half the funds on a new laboratory to develop new inventions.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

Jimmy Carter signed a 1978 bill that legalized home brewing, a move credited with kick-starting the craft beer industry.

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

An initial public offering or 'IPO' is the process of a private company becoming public by putting shares of the company on the stock market for purchase.

About 2,000 US babies are born annually without some portion of their limbs, potentially leading to a lifetime of pricey prosthetics.

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

The US Constitution is widely regarded as the longest-standing written national constitution still in force—see how it has influenced rights worldwide.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

The hormonal disorder PCOS was renamed PMOS in 2026, a move designed to improve care and research by shifting the focus to the hormonal causes of this condition that affects 1 in 8 women.

Brandi Chastain, the star of the 1999 US victory over China in the 1999 Women's World Cup, was a last-second choice to take the penalty kick that sealed the victory.