A brief history of Apple computers  

Apple was founded by Steven Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne on the 1st of April 1976. Prior to this, Jobs and Wozniak were writing Atari games for Hewlett-Packard. They exhibited their first computer which they called Apple I at the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was a handmade computer which sold for $666.66 in July of 1976.

However, on the first week of January 1977, Wayne left Apple but Wozniak and Jobs secured funding from Armas Clifford Markkula, Jr. So they were able to continue their business and introduced the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Fair on April 16, 1977. The Apple II has an open design, Disk II (5 ¼ floppy disk drive) with colour graphics. The colour graphics gave it a big advantage over it's competitors.

Apple continued to improve and produce the Apple II all throughout the 70s and on May 1980, the Apple III was launched. IBM and Microsoft were two of their closest rivals at that time.

Sometime in 1978, Jobs and some of his associates visited the research center of Xerox at Palo Alto California and after that, Jobs was convinced that graphical user interface (GUI) would dominate the screens of computers in the future. So in the same year, he began developing the Apple Lisa. But he was pulled from project Lisa to head the team developing the Macintosh. This was Jef Raskin's project. This created competition inside Apple between team Lisa and Macintosh. It was like a race to the finish line – to see which would be launched to the market first. Team Lisa won the race and it evolved into the first personal computer with a GUI available on the market. But Lisa was not meant to be number one. Due to its high price and narrow selection of software it did not capture the computer market.

Introduced in January of 1984 was Apple’s Macintosh. It featured a mouse and a radically new GUI. It was one of the most successful personal computers ever produced by Apple and it guaranteed the company’s survival for another 5 years. In 1989, Apple introduced an unwieldy computer which they called Macintosh Portable. This, however, was unsuccessful. Not to be discouraged by the failure, Apple kept on improving their portable Macintosh and in October of 1991, the Powerbook was launched.

Apple’s Powerbook line of laptops targeted the professional market and it became a big hit. Not only with professionals but also to general computer users. It was able to generate news in the computer industry because of its revolutionary design, very compact with active matrix display. It's layout would set the standard for all future laptop computers. Also, it received various awards such as the Industrial Design Excellence Award in 2001 and Laptop of the Year from Engadget in 2005. Powerbook was phased out with the launching of MacBook series in 2006. Apple continues to develop and improve their MacBook series of computers, and these improved Macbooks are still being produced and sold today.

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