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Four decades of Apple

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When two men dropped out of Reed College and UC Berkeley in 1975, little did the world know that two drop outs would write history one day. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak - these two Steves gave the world a technology that has completely revolutionized human lives in the past four decades.

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Wozniak was belabored by the box of lights and circuit boards, so he created the first computer with a typewriter-like keyboard and the ability to connect to a regular TV with very limited resources. Jobs saw the computer and understood its brilliance, and sold his VW microbus to help fund its production. Wozniak sold his HP calculator, and together they founded Apple Computer Inc on 1 April 1976, alongside Ronald Wayne - now making Apple a 40-year-old company!

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Speaking to NPR in 2006, Wozniak explained that "When I built this Apple I… the first computer to say a computer should look like a typewriter - it should have a keyboard - and the output device is a TV set, it wasn't really to show the world here is the direction should go . It was to really show the people around me, to boast, to be clever, to get acknowledgement for having designed a very inexpensive computer."

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The name Apple was chosen because then-the-competitor in the technology industry was Atari and Apple Computer came before Atari alphabetically. Another reason was that Jobs had happy memories of working on an Oregon apple farm one summer.

Apple has covered a long distance since then. It is not just about technology or style statement; it is about willingness to improve, to adapt and to be a mark ahead of others. Apple has found much of its success in recent years by not being the first to market. It didn’t invent the MP3 player, the smartphone, the tablet, or the laptop—it just made well-built, easy to understand, and highly desirable versions of them. Apple has perfected the art of taking something someone is doing and doing it better. And today Apple has grown to become the most valuable company in the world when measured by market capitalization.

CIOL past and present of tech companies
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Apple’s market value and the stock price have been a series of increasing hills and holes since former CEO Steve Jobs returned to the company after 12-years and rolled out the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

You could argue that these charts suggest that Apple is following a similar path as the giants that have come before it—after their peak, a regression to a far lower mean became the norm—but Apple’s path isn’t identical. It hasn’t had one massive success that it’s built and iterated on for years, like Microsoft and Windows, but a few. It could well be that Apple is out of big ideas—seeing as Jobs was the one credited with bringing most of Apple’s revolutionary products, especially from the late ’90s until his death—but it’s hard to count out a company with over $200 billion in cash.

There are rumors and speculation that Apple is working on virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and cars — that could reset its course. But other companies already appear to be beating Apple to the punch in all these fields—Facebook's VR headset, Google's AI research, Tesla Motors latest car. But then we know what Apple can do; doing what it does the best - taking something someone is doing and doing it better.

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On completing four decades since its inception, the company chose to fly an old pirate flag over its headquarters in Cupertino — something that used to hang on the wall of the initial office when Apple was a startup.

Jobs used to say “it’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.” To inspire a sense of rebellion and independence — something that Jobs himself embraced.

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