When you think of Apple in 2026 you probably think of the range of iPhones released every September, the iPad, and possibly the variety of accessories lining Apple Store walls, but there was a time before all those products, a time even before the iPod.
Birth of a Silicon Valley legend
Legend has it that Apple was founded in a garage, the way all great Silicon Valley startups began. According to David Pogue this in one myth that’s persisted for decades, and Apple was in fact founded in a bedroom. Yet the Jobs family garage was used as Apple’s first production facility where friends and family assembled what would become the Apple I circuit boards.
Ultimately this doesn’t matter. Apple was created by Silicon Valley thanks to so many perfect factors that the creation of one of the world’s largest companies seems both enviable and impossible. All the circumstances that turned orchards into a valley that fostered the creation of the personal computer and so many other tech startups also nurtured a generation capable of building the future.
To this day, Silicon Valley fosters innovation and startups even as the key technology is born elsewhere. The computer wasn’t even invented in California based on work not even done in the US, the growth of building and room sized computers happened on the east coast along with the transistor, but eventually the seeds would be planted.
It wasn’t just the defence industry fuelling the creation of Silicon Valley—those engineers were the parents of the baby boomers who would create the personal computer, however first silicon needed to take over the orchards of San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. One of the inventors of the transistor, William Shockley, left Bell Labs to found his startup Shockley Semiconductor in his home town of Palo Alto. He was a not regarded as a good manager, but he’d been good at recruiting, attracting brilliant young engineers to his lab but losing eight of them to Fairchild Semiconductor, a new division of east coast based Fairchild Camera and Instrument. Fairchild birthed one of the first integrated circuits and several new startups were created throughout the 60s as various engineers left, including two of the original “traitorous eight” to leave Shockley, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore who founded in 1968 a company they eventually called Intel.
In a valley full of engineers, their baby boomer children were in the right place at the right time, and many received excellent educations. Homestead High School in Cupertino, which had a hands on electronics course, would produce not only both Apple founders but several other early Apple employees. Jobs was four years younger than Wozniak and they didn’t cross paths at Homestead but Jobs’ friend Bill Fernandez lived on Wozniak’s street introduced them. While Jobs’ is famous for dropping out of Reed College, Woz would take years off while attending college, and both would end up working for electronics companies in the valley—Woz at HP, Jobs at Atari.