In April 1976, three months before the American bicentennial, two guys no one had ever heard of formed a little company called Apple.
They were building what were called “microcomputers.” The traditional tech companies of the time built large mainframe computers. Small computers were of interest to hobbyists. They were a bit like toys. But the two nobodies, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were working out of a house in suburban California, believed they could make microcomputers that nontechnical people would find useful in everyday life.
“We didn’t get the flying cars that ‘The Jetsons’ promised us,” said Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington whose book “The Code” describes the history of Silicon Valley. “But we walk around with supercomputers in our pocket, and these supercomputers were invented by two long-haired, vegetarian college dropouts who didn’t bathe very often and worked out of a garage.”