Apple at 50 Part 1: The Garage That Started It All — $1,300, a VW Bus, and a Hand-Carved Wooden Computer (1976)

This is Part 1 of a 7-part series: "Apple at 50: The Wild, Brilliant & Sometimes Crazy Story." From a garage in Los Altos to the most valuable company on Earth.

On April 1, 1976, three very different people sat down in a suburban home in Los Altos, California, and signed a simple three-page contract.

Steve Jobs was 21 years old — charismatic, intense, and convinced the world needed personal computers.
Steve Wozniak was 25 — a brilliant engineer who could design entire computers in his head.
Ronald Wayne was 41 — the only adult in the room, with a mortgage, a car, and a steady job at Atari.

They called their new company Apple Computer Co.

There was no office. No investors. No employees. Just $1,300 in cash, a cluttered garage at 2066 Crist Drive, and one big dream: build computers that normal people could actually use.

The Real Garage Story (Not the Myth You’ve Seen)

You’ve probably seen the famous photo of Jobs and Wozniak working in the garage. It’s real — but it was staged later for publicity.

In reality:

• Most of the early design work happened in Wozniak’s apartment or at the Homebrew Computer Club, a legendary group of electronics hobbyists in Silicon Valley
• The Jobs family garage became the assembly line and shipping department
• Jobs’ bedroom was also used as a workspace when the garage got too crowded

As Wozniak himself said in a 2014 interview: "We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. The garage didn’t serve much purpose, except it was something for us to feel was our home."

They were building the Apple I — not a finished computer, but a bare circuit board. No keyboard, no monitor, no case. Just the brain. Jobs had the vision and salesmanship. Wozniak had the engineering genius. Wayne was there to keep the young company from falling apart.

The First Big Sale

Jobs walked into a local computer store called The Byte Shop in Mountain View and convinced the owner, Paul Terrell, to buy 50 fully assembled Apple I boards for $500 each — cash upfront.

To fulfill the order, they needed parts. Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus. Wozniak sold his HP programmable calculator. Together, they scraped together the money and worked day and night hand-soldering the boards in the garage.

The Apple I sold to the public for $666.66 — a price Wozniak chose simply because he liked repeating digits. (It caused some concern among those who noticed the "number of the beast" connection, but Wozniak has always maintained it was just math: he wanted a 33% markup on the $500 wholesale price, and $666.66 was the result.)

The $800 Mistake That Still Hurts Today

Just 12 days after signing the partnership agreement, Ronald Wayne got nervous. He worried the young company might rack up debts that he — as the only co-founder with real assets — would be personally responsible for.

So he sold his 10% stake back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800.

A few years later, he received another $1,500 to fully give up any future claims.

Wayne has said many times he has no regrets — he was simply protecting his family. But it remains one of the most expensive business decisions in history.

What the Apple I Looked Like

The photo above shows an original Apple I computer on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Note the hand-carved wooden case with "APPLE COMPUTER" burned into the wood — this wasn’t an Apple-designed enclosure. The Apple I shipped as a bare circuit board; users built their own cases out of wood, metal, or whatever they had. This particular unit’s wooden case perfectly captures the handmade, garage-era spirit of the company’s founding.

Of the approximately 200 Apple I units produced, only about 60–70 are known to survive. Working units have sold at auction for over $900,000.

Why This Garage Moment Still Matters in 2026

Fifty years later, Apple is one of the most valuable companies on Earth — worth over $3 trillion. But the spirit of that garage is still deeply embedded in Apple’s DNA:

• The obsession with making technology personal and beautiful
• The belief that hardware and software should be designed together
• The willingness to bet everything — literally selling your car — on a vision that others think is crazy

Every time you pick up a beautifully designed product that "just works," you’re feeling the echo of two young guys tinkering in a suburban garage with almost no money, but an enormous belief that computers could change the world.

Series Roadmap

Photo: Original Apple I computer at the Smithsonian. Photo by Ed Uthman, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Sources:

• Fast Company: How Apple Became Apple — The Definitive Oral History
• TIME: Here’s What Happened to Apple’s Third Co-Founder
• CNBC: Ronald Wayne Sold His Stake for $800
• Wikipedia: Apple I
• Computer History Museum: Personal Computers Gallery