On April 1, 1976, three men signed a partnership agreement in Los Altos, California, creating Apple Computer Company. Steve Wozniak had designed a single-board computer, the Apple I, and Steve Jobs saw a market for it among hobbyists. Ronald Wayne, a colleague from Atari, drew the company's first logo and owned a 10 percent stake he sold back for $800 just twelve days later.
The Apple I was not really a computer in the modern sense but a bare circuit board that hobbyists still had to wire to their own keyboard, power supply, and television screen. Wozniak had shown early versions off at the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, where enthusiasts traded schematics and parts. Jobs recognized that even in that small niche, there was money to be made selling assembled boards rather than requiring buyers to source every chip themselves.
The company's first big break came almost immediately: the Byte Shop, a local computer store, ordered fifty fully assembled units for $500 each. To finance the parts, Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator.
Ronald Wayne's decision to cash out his stake for $800, spooked by the financial risk of a partnership where he alone had personal assets creditors could seize, has become one of technology's most expensive regrets; that stake would have been worth tens of billions of dollars decades later. Apple would go on to reshape personal computing, music, and mobile phones, but it began as three men in a garage betting on a hobbyist niche.