The Members Forum

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne formed Apple Computers on April 1, 1976. The coincidence of the date should not go unnoticed. The first commercially successful home computer, the Apple II, was released a year later.

Jobs’ early years prior to forming Apple played a great part in explaining the CEO that runs Apple today. He has said that people that didn’t share his counterculture roots couldn’t understand his way of thinking. Keep in mind that his counterculture roots included using LSD, which has a history of causing flashbacks and psychosis in some cases.

Prior to forming Apple, Jobs worked at Atari, and had been tasked with creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. For each chip that was eliminated from the machine, a bounty of $100 would be awarded. Jobs had no interest in actual engineering work, so he offloaded the task to his friend Steve Wozniak with a promise to split the bonus evenly. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50. Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $700 instead of $5,000, and that Wozniak’s share was $350. It was a taste of things to come.

After Apple took off, Jobs’ methods of doing business business savvy became apparent, showing a marked lack of humility. He was known as someone who ruled by force of personality, unwilling to hear viewpoints other than his own, ridiculing the ideas of others and bad-tempered outbursts. Fortunately for Apple, Jobs wasn’t running the company.

ZDnet has the details HERE!