A homegrown business run out of a garage by two California whiz kids, the
"perfect fruit" company, Apple, joins the ranks to be a Fortune 500 company.
Despite the ups and downs associated with running a Fortune 500 company, Apple
Computer constantly tries to keep up in the technological race. They recognize
that it takes more than just hot technology to sell computers. It also
takes an understanding of what people want and are going to do
with them, which they have accomplished. They constantly compete with other
companies, but have emerged today as one of the front-runners with the new and
innovative products taking them one step further towards the future.
Steve Jobs was born in 1955 and helped found Apple Computer with Wozniak. A college dropout, he became chairman in 1984 and then concentrated on marketing when he was with Apple.
Steve Wozniak was supposedly born in 1951 and was also a "self-taught"
college dropout. After a near fatal airplane accident in 1981, he returned to
college. Wozniak was an interesting man and a practical joker. In college, he
rigged TV sets in his freshman dorm to display a fuzzy picture and would get
the owners to touch the TV and do acrobatics before he would turn it back on.
Jobs and Wozniak had been friends ever since they attended Homestead
High School in Cupertino, CA. After calling the president of Hewlett-Packard
to ask for some parts for the computer he was working on, Wozniak landed a
job there. Jobs, on the other hand, was "a smelly, unattractive youth who
liked to tell the engineers they were dumb shits, so he wasnąt very popular
at Atari," (Rose 28) where he worked.