Founding and Leaving Apple Computer

In 1976, when Jobs was just 21, he and Wozniak started Apple Computer in the Jobs’ family garage. They funded their entrepreneurial venture by Jobs selling his Volkswagen bus and Wozniak selling his beloved scientific calculator. Jobs and Wozniak are credited with revolutionizing the computer industry with Apple by democratizing the technology and making machines smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers. Wozniak conceived of a series of user-friendly personal computers, and — with Jobs in charge of marketing — Apple initially marketed the computers for $666.66 each. The Apple I earned the corporation around $774,000. Three years after the release of Apple's second model, the Apple II, the company's sales increased by 700 percent to $139 million.In 1980, Apple Computer became a publicly-traded company, with a market value of $1.2 billion by the end of its very first day of trading. Jobs looked to marketing expert John Sculley of Pepsi-Cola to take over the role of CEO for Apple.The next several products from Apple suffered significant design flaws, however, resulting in recalls and consumer disappointment. IBM suddenly surpassed Apple in sales, and Apple had to compete with an IBM/PC-dominated business world.In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh, marketing the computer as a piece of a counterculture lifestyle: romantic, youthful, creative. But despite positive sales and performance superior to IBM's PCs, the Macintosh was still not IBM-compatible.Sculley believed Jobs was hurting Apple, and the company's executives began to phase him out. Not actually having had an official title with the company he co-founded, Jobs was pushed into a more marginalized position and thus left Apple in 1985.


NeXT

After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs began a new hardware and software enterprise called NeXT, Inc. The company floundered in its attempts to sell its specialized operating system to mainstream America, and Apple eventually bought the company in 1996 for $429 million.