Here are some interesting facts about Apple you never knew:
How did the name "MAC" orginate ?
One story has it: Steve Jobs work picking McIntosh apples in the orchards in Oregon during his college summer holidays. The "Mac" is just an abbreviated play on the McIntosh spelling of the apple variety. Another story has it the man who first envisioned the project, Jef Raskin loved to eat Macintosh apples, so he picked the name. Since Macintosh is a variety of apple it would have been easy for them both to agree on the name Macintosh because it reminded them of their favorite fruit and Apple PC’s represented a revolutionary new idea.
The original Logo for Apple was a picture of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an Apple tree. It was created by co-founder Ronald Wayne. Around 1978 it was changed to a rainbow colored Apple. Naturally the Beetles had a major problem with Apples logo because they had established Apple as the name of their record label in 1968.
Who was the little know orginal 3ed Partner of Apple - Ron Wayne ?
Early in 1976: Jobs asks a former colleague from Atari, Ronald Wayne to join them in their startup. Wayne is 41 years old and works as draftsman at Atari. Jobs offers Wayne ten percent interest in the company and Wayne agrees, although he keeps his jobs at Atari and works at night for Apple. ¹ The local computer store 'Byte Shop' orders 50 Apple I computers, where is is sold for $666.66. Jobs, Woz and Wayne face one major problem though: They don't have enough money to buy the parts for 50 Apple Is, each costing over $100 to build. Jobs persuades a local part supplier to give them the parts on 30 days' net credit. The three assemble the Apple Is at night in their garage and manage to deliver the ordered Apple Is in ten days. ² Ron Wayne resigns from Apple Computer, with a one-time payment of $800. He felt that the financial risk was too great specially since Woz still hasn't got the legal release from HP. He was worried the store would not buy the computers and then he would be liable to pay back the debt for the parts Jobs was purchasing.
Excerpts from The Apple Museum: http://www.theapplemuseum.com/index.php?id=55
The Very First APPLE Logo by Apples 3ed Partner Ron Wayne
¹ Linzmayer, Owen (2004): Apple Confidential 2.0, No Starch Press, San Francisco
² Wozniak, Stephen: HOMEBREW AND HOW THE APPLE CAME TO BE, Atariarchives.org, http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php
³ Raskin, Jef (1996): About the history of the Macintosh, http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html
Who became the 3ed Partner that The WOZ says deserves more credit
for Apple's success then him ?
Mike Markkula (above) handing Jobs his own $250,000 investment in Apple. With-out Mike's money Apple may not have stayed in business. Mike contributed business experience and the funding that Jobs and Wozniak could not provide to become Apples new 3ed partner. The WOZ who had little interest in business, credits Markkula's conribution to Apples success, saying it exceeded his own.
Yet, it is Mr. Jobs, a bearded and barefoot visionary toiling in his parents' garage in the late 1970's, who is still the most publicized Apple founder. And it is Mr. Jobs's buddy, Stephen Wozniak, amiable but sometimes enigmatic, who gets credit as the hacker-inventor genius founder.
But invariably, the founding role of Mr. Markkula, 12 years senior to Mr. Jobs, is described as little more than the experienced executive who brought ''adult supervision'' to the fledgling Apple Computer. Markkula's role in Apple's success is little know and under appreciated. As a former Intel product- marketing manager Markkula had already made a small fortune on his stock options and had retired early in 1975 at age 38. Mr. Markkula was a corporate veteran compared with the younger men. The three were brought together by a pair of seasoned Silicon Valley executives, Regis McKenna and Don Valentine, who correctly guessed that Mr. Markkula might be willing to invest some money and management time in the Jobs-Wozniak effort to build and market a new kind of personal computer.
But less well known is that Mr. Markkula, besides playing president and camp counselor, is also himself a hands-on computer buff.
It was Mr. Markkula, for example, who instructed Mr. Wozniak to design the floppy disk drive for the Apple II, after discovering that a checkbook balancing program he himself had written took far too long to load into the machine from the computer's original tape drive. The floppy disk, a new approach, helped Apple differentiate its early computer from competitors' machines.
And it was Mr. Markkula who wrote several of the early software programs for the Apple II -- and freely distributed them -- under the pen name Johnny Appleseed.
And later, this engineer with a hobbyist's passion for personal computing became Apple's best product tester, often finding dozens of flaws in hardware or software that was supposedly ready to ship, according to early Apple employees.
The point is that rather than being the executive's executive, as he has so often been described, Mr. Markkula was really more the engineer's engineer.
In the beginning, Mr. Markkula considered Apple a temporary avocation and he promised his wife, Linda, that he would spend no more than four years at the start-up. But he soon discovered within himself a remarkable aptitude for the details needed to build a high technology company. It was indeed Mr. Markkula who served as Mr. Jobs's management mentor at Apple, teaching him how to run a business.
Floyd Kvamme, an early Apple marketing executive, recalls the Markkula method. On Mr. Kvamme's first day at the company, Mr. Markkula told him to go out and buy an Apple Computer, then take it home and set it up, to better understand the customer's needs.
''Mike was a tremendous contributor,'' said Mr. Kvamme, who is now a venture capitalist. ''But he didn't like the public eye. He liked worrying about products.''
Mr. Markkula, serving one of his stints as Apple's chairman, was the one who originally gave the computer scientist Jef Raskin the go-ahead to start designing the Macintosh computer in 1979. And it was Mr. Markkula subsequently who prevented Mr. Jobs, then heading the rival Lisa computer development effort, from killing the Macintosh project.
Only later, when he realized that the Lisa would fail, did Mr. Jobs take over the Macintosh effort, pushing Mr. Raskin aside with Mr. Markkula's acquiescence
Excerpts from a New York Times Sunday May 4th, 2008 Article : An Unknown Co-Founder Leaves Apple
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D05E2DC1F31F932A3575AC0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2