Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs were the true founders of Apple. In 1976, Steven Wozniak designed what is now known as the Apple I. Jobs convinced Wozniak that he needed to try to sell the machine, and on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was created. However, the market was not ready for such an advancement in technology, thus setting back the take off of Apple until 1977. Apple began to increase development with the introduction of the Apple II. The Apple II, included color graphics and came in its own plastic casing. The first real computer to come pre-assembled, there for making it more attractive to a larger group of consumers. After the introduction of the Apple II, the orders for Apples increased dramatically.
During 1979, Jobs began working on the Macintosh, when Apple's "Lucy" project began to crumble. The "Lucy" project was originally Jobs idea after visiting the Xerox PARC research facility in Palo Alto. There Jobs first saw and realized the potential or graphical user interface. "I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still I though they had the gem of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day." So as Apple's sales began to tumble Jobs started Macintosh. The Macintosh idea was to be an inexpensive DOS PC that would be more user friendly then the hard to use DOS applications used by IBM and there clones. However in Job's stress for perfection, the Mac still ended up being around $1,000 more then most PC's. Sales still were quite profitable the first year, but soon consumers began to realize that the Mac had few applications, unlike DOS PC's with spreadsheets and databases to go along with word