Fifty years ago today, two guys from California pulled what was one of the more long-game April Fool’s pranks ever: they founded a company called Apple Computer. They were going to sell programmable circuit boards to people who wanted such a thing. Their headquarters were in a garage.
If Apple Computer wasn’t specifically intended as an April Fool’s joke, it still looked foolish to anyone outside the small community of hackers who represented Apple’s potential customer base. It wasn’t at all clear in 1976 that personal computers represented an industry with potential, at least not as a mass-market product. Apple’s founders, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, were more known for their business selling illegal blue boxes than for any legitimate consumer product. Unpolished and weird, neither came off as people who any sensible investor would entrust with millions. (This was before being unpolished and weird was considered a sign of genius.)
And yet fifty years later, here we are. As of this morning, Apple was worth $3.74 trillion.
Today, though, I’m not thinking of Apple the $3.74 trillion corporation. I’m thinking of Apple the idea; Apple as its purpose was envisioned on April 1, 1976, by the specific people who started it. Today’s #notesArt is inspired by Apple’s first logo, which you have probably never seen, created by Apple’s third co-founder, who you have probably never heard of.
Apple’s third co-founder is a guy named Ronald Wayne. He was a co-founder of Apple for several weeks before leaving the company, concerned about what Apple’s likely implosion might do to his finances. Like I said, that was not an unrealistic concern in 1976.
I don’t know what the initial conversations around Apple’s first logo were. It was replaced relatively quickly by the rainbow fruit we know so well, designed by Rob Janoff. Prior to that, though, Wayne had taken a strikingly different approach: an intricate engraving of Isaac Newton, in that famous instant before the apple falls on his head, jarring him into a consequential moment of reflection. That logo, the “Newton Shield” as they called it, is not exactly practical by product standards. It clearly wouldn’t reproduce well on a computer case, and is more reminiscent of a 19th-century bicycle company than a 20th-century tech company, but it’s still strangely haunting.
The way I’ve drawn it today is a bit different than the original logo. That’s not Isaac Newton sitting under the tree. That’s us. The people who own computers. Like, own them.
Apple gave us computers that were personal. Untethered from organizations; machines you didn’t have to rent from a corporation, or visit in a university. Something you could set up in your own house, and use however you wished, without anyone else’s oversight or permission. Personal in that these computers were owned and managed by people. Computers you could use while you were sitting under a tree, rather than trapped in an office or lab. That kind of personal.
That idea, which would have sounded absolutely delusional on April 1, 1976, is no longer foolish. Over the past fifty years, it’s evolved to a level of self-evidence usually associated with laws of nature. Today, it’s the room-sized computers that are the exception. Of course a computer should be personal. It’s the most personal object most of us will ever own.
Happy April Fool’s day.