Apple Inc.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak work in their garage.
Ten years have passed since the launch of the iPhone, 40 years since Apple was officially founded, and 41 years since the company itself was founded.
Needless to say, the company has changed dramatically since 1977, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak moved from the Jobs family garage to the company’s first official corporate address, 20863 Stevens Creek Blvd. (Building 3, Suite C) in Cupertino, California.
The couple had begun shipping their first computer, a bare board called the Apple I. It had neither a keyboard nor a screen and functioned more like a kit that computer hobbyists could put together if they knew what they were doing.
Most people don’t know that Apple still has its first official office.
Two early Apple employees, Bob Martinengo and Mark Johnson, talked to Business Insider about what it was like working with the two Steves back when nobody knew what Apple was. They shared this collection of images from Apple’s early days with us. We combined them with some other early Apple images from Business Insider’s archives. A handful of Steve Jobs’ old business cards were auctioned off in 2015, and we have images of those, too. And finally, Apple employee No. 8, Chris Espinosa, recently tweeted some images from his archive.
Scroll down to take a look at the origins of the world’s most important technology company. ↓↓↓
Early Apple images are relatively rare. In the 1970s, people didn’t use cameras on a daily basis. These images are notable because they show life at Apple before everyone realized the company was going to change the world. To them, it was just a paycheck.
“It was obviously a lot of fun,” says Martinengo. (He now works at AMAC Accessibility, a company that makes products and services for students with disabilities.)
Brennan, then 22, had become Jobs’ girlfriend in high school when she was 17, a relationship he later ended when she became pregnant. Jobs disowned the child, Lisa, although he had named the Apple Lisa machine (developed in 1978) after her. Jobs did not admit that Lisa was his daughter until she was a teenager.
This 1978 photo shows more of the Apple II team, including Steve Jobs.
Johnson, like Martinengo, was busy assembling the Apple II. “This photo (above) was taken on a Friday,” says Johnson. “We were waiting for UPS to pick up the 57 finished Apple II computers. The photo was taken because that was the first time we tested, assembled and shipped 57 units in one work week. It was a huge accomplishment for the team at the time.”
Note that in this photo, Jobs appears to be arguing with Mike Scott, the company’s first president, who was brought in to keep Jobs in check. This was a typical incident, Johnson says.
Elmer Baum was an engineer. “He was an experienced, responsible person they brought with them,” says Johnson. “He worked in manufacturing and engineering. He was a little grumpy and always said something like, ‘Kids, get off my lawn!'” Baum’s nephew Jesse Berger tells us, “He had a wonderful sense of humor, especially about himself, and found it amusing to work with all these computer geniuses…After being a pioneer in early wireless communications and working on secret programs during and after World War II, he was excited to be back working on groundbreaking projects.”
Here is an early set of Apple corporate files.
This picture comes from the collection of Digibarn.
Mike Markulla was the venture capitalist who provided Apple’s first real funding and installed real management. He used to drive a Corvette Stingray. (Johnson, who was a teenager at the time, said he once rode in it.)
Markulla invested the first $250,000 of venture capital in Apple.
Here’s another shot of the Apple II team crew, with the product on a set of shelves in the background.
Kottke, another hardware engineer, has become something of an archivist of early Apple memorabilia.
The conditions in the office were primitive.
This floor plan (below) of the Stevens Creek office, drawn by Johnson, shows how small the company was at the time.
It was “a pretty small office space,” says Johnson. “This one office included the lobby and the cubicles with no partition. If you go to the right, you enter the manufacturing area. Incidentally, Apple occupied the adjacent office space to the right of Suite C. A smaller office space where Bill Fernandez designed circuit board layouts.”
In the office in Stevens Creek, Jobs and Wozniak worked right next to each other. That changed when Apple – now with around 30 employees – moved to its second, slightly larger office on Bandley Drive, also in Cupertino. There, Jobs and Woz sat as far away from each other as possible.
“In the short time I was there, the company went from a silly startup to a full-fledged production line,” Johnson says. It wasn’t a fun place to be, but rather a “day-to-day” corporate experience, he recalls.
“My only inside credit was that my mother had this relationship with Steve, Steve liked my mother. This was before the summer I started working at Apple. He had an interview on TV in Oakland and I was drafted to drive him in my VW Beetle. Steve was an exhausting, intense person even then.”
Click on the second photo in this tweet to see more views of the interior of the Stevens Creek office.
Here is a copy of the very first Apple letterhead that Johnson saved.
The Apple II was the machine that really put Apple on the map: an integrated home computer with a keyboard and screen that anyone could use.
Other key figures of this era included Andre Sousan, who was probably Apple’s first European sales manager, Sue Cabannis, the office manager, Gary Martin, who worked in accounting, and Don Bruener, a hardware engineer.
On January 2, 2017, Chris Espinosa, employee #8 who still works at Apple, tweeted: “40 years ago today, Woz got the key to 20863 Stevens Creek Blvd., Suite B3-C, which we rented for our first Apple office.”
This is a photo of Jobs sitting at the Good Earth restaurant, which was then located near the Apple office.
“He called me and @SquareNerd (Randy Wigginton, employee #6) and invited us to come over. The room was almost empty. Carpet on the left, linoleum on the right,” Espinosa tweeted:
“Woz, of course, knew all about these phones, but he had never had his own Centrex to play with. So he invented a game for us.”
“Each of us picked up a phone and put the receiver down first. Then we tried to dial the other person’s extension. To dial the number again, you had to hang up, leaving you free.”
“If you got called five times, you were out. We played the game for an hour and then went to Bob’s Big Boy down the street.”
“The next morning, Steelcase’s desks, bookshelves and lab tables came in. Marketing and administration on the carpet, engineering and manufacturing on the linoleum.”
“The first day it was just Woz, Jobs, Mike Markkula, Bill Fernandez and Rod Holt, and Randy and I hanging out.”
When the Apple II was released in the summer of 1977, it featured color graphics, so Jobs changed the company logo to an Apple silhouette with a rainbow.
Johnson says, “Steve Jobs commissioned a local shop to create an embroidered patch to commemorate the new company logo. These patches were given out by Steve to each employee. I’ve asked other early Apple employees on Facebook, but no one remembers them. If there’s another patch left, I’d love to know. This could be a pretty unique artifact from Apple’s early days.”
Gene Carter, an early Apple executive who worked with Markkula, tells us, “The embroidered Apple logo was something I did. We were at the computer show in Anaheim – as I recall – and we wanted to distinguish the Apple people from the crowd. My daughter was flag girl at Saratoga High and had the letter ‘S’ embroidered on her sweatshirts. I had the logo made for us by the same company. Mike Markkula and I went to Macy’s and bought white sweatshirts for everyone to wear to the show and had the logo printed on the chest of the sweatshirt. That was 1978.”
As this old set of business cards shows, Apple later moved to 20525 Mariani Avenue, Cupertino.
The cards were auctioned off last year by the Marin School. They cover the years 1984 to 1990. The great thing about them is that they cover all three of Jobs’ jobs – at Apple, Next and Pixar.
The Stevens Creek building is still owned by Apple. This is what it looks like from the outside today.
You can Watch Espinosa’s Facebook Live tour of the building here.
Of course, people’s memories fade over time. If you think we’ve gotten any details wrong – or have more photos we could share – please email [email protected].
The post “Early photos of life at Apple with Steve Jobs from the company’s first employees” first appeared on Business Insider.
