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There is no better example of all this than Apple Computer, Inc., which is Silicon Valley’s most precocious child. Within eight years it has gone from a living room to a yearly sales rate of more than $1 billion while the stock market has placed a value of more than $2.5 billion on its shares. It took less time to reach the Fortune500 than any other start-up in the history of the index and it stands a good chance of falling among the one hundred largest U.S. industrial corporations before its tenth birthday. Two of its stockholders are said to be among the four hundred wealthiest people in the United States and well over one hundred of its employees have become millionaires. By most conventional standards Apple has dwarfed the accomplishments of any company born in Silicon Valley. It is larger than enterprises founded decades earlier, it has designed and introduced new products, and it hasn’t had to seek help from a corporate sugar daddy.

When I started to think about writing this book, Apple was already a large company. It was perched between the great success brought by the Apple II personal computer and the twin challenges of building and introducing a new round of machines and competing with the Juggernaut from Armonk, IBM. Apple’s early days were fast slipping into the stuff of folksong and legend and the personal-computer industry was maturing fast. Small companies that had managed to survive the early days were beginning to fall by the wayside. A few had emerged as leaders and Apple was one.

I thought that I could learn more about Silicon Valley, the start of a new industry, and life at a young company by focusing on one firm rather than by trying to come to grips with many. I was interested in whether image matched reality and whether public statements corresponded with private actions. I wanted to concentrate on the years before Apple became a publicly held company, examine the atmosphere that nourished the founders, and find out how their personalities came to affect the company. To a lesser extent I also wanted to come to terms with the conventional questions: Why? when? and how? “In the right place at the right time” clearly explains part of Apple’s success but dozens, if not hundreds, of other people who started microcomputer companies have failed.

For some months I enjoyed a carefully circumscribed freedom at Apple. I was allowed to attend meetings and watch progress on a new computer. But the company I saw in 1982 was very different from the little business that filled a garage in 1977. Consequently, I have scattered these corporate snapshots throughout the book. This isn’t an authorized portrait of Apple Computer nor was it ever supposed to be a definitive history. Apart from documents that were leaked, I had no access to corporate papers. The name of one character who appears briefly in the narrative, Nancy Rogers, has been changed, and some of the people mentioned in the text have either left the company or assumed different titles. I discovered quickly enough that writing a book about a growing company in an industry that changes with dizzying rapidity has at least one similarity to the production of a computer. Both could always be better if every new and enticing development were included. But like an engineer I had to bolt down and ship. So this is about Apple’s road to its first one billion dollars.

“Can we ship your party?” Jobs asked.

A large set of French windows rinsed the California sun. The filtered light, which had the long wash of fall, played along a rumpled line of suitcases, garment bags, backpacks, and guitar cases. The owners of the luggage were seated around a stone fire-place in generous crescents of straight-backed chairs. Most of the sixty or so faces fell into that blind gap that camouflages those between their late teens and early thirties. About a third were women. Most wore androgynous uniforms of jeans, T-shirts, tank tops, and running shoes. There were a few paunches, some