Employee #1: Apple
Conversation with Bill Fernandez, who introduced Steve Jobs to electronics, and then to Steve Wozniak. “Jobs had bicycled over to my house and we were going to hang out and I needed to go to Mr. Taylor’s house to get some parts, so we walked across the street. Woz was out washing his car and I thought, ‘Well you know, here are two electronics buddies. They might be interested in meeting each other and doing electronics stuff.’ So we walked over to the car and I introduced them” (6,500 words)
.. Across the street and three houses over was the Wozniak family. Jerry Wozniak was a mathematician and engineer, he was a real genius and worked on top secret projects at Lockheed. He had two sons and a daughter. His eldest son, Steve Wozniak, was into electronics... He and I were both deeply introspective, very philosophical. Neither of us wanted to play the social games that you needed to play to be accepted into any of the numerous cliques that define the social scene for 13 and 14 year olds in junior high school. So we eventually gravitated towards each other and started hanging out. We became fast friends. I got him interested in electronics and so….. It turned out that Woz loved pranks and Jobs had a very countercultural streak. One of the first projects they collaborated on was this huge sign of a hand with the middle finger raised. It was a huge cloth poster and they put it up on the roof of our school and weighted the ends with rocks, I think. This was the end of the building that all of the parents faced during graduation. And the idea was that during graduation they would cut some strings which would release this thing to roll down over the side of the building and it said, “Best Wishes, Class of ‘72!” and it was giving them the finger... Then a couple of things happened. He started working on building his own computer and he started attending the Homebrew Computer Club that was happening at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC.So all of those things happened at the same time and then as his computer came together he would take it and show it off after the meetings. At some point there was enough interest shown that Jobs became aware of this.
.. Basically Jobs said, “You know, we could make printed circuit boards and just sell the computer already assembled so people wouldn’t even have to buy all the parts on the open market and figure out how to wire them together. We could just do it for them.” And so that was the beginning of Apple Computer.