The Apple I was the first product of Apple Computer Company and the machine that launched the firm. The Apple I Operation Manual, printed by Apple Computer Company at 770 Welch Road in Palo Alto, presents it as a working computer rather than a kit: the manual’s sections cover the specifications, getting the system running, using the built-in system monitor, a 6502 hex monitor listing, hardware notes, instructions on expanding the system, and full schematics. It was sold as an assembled and tested circuit board, which set Apple apart from the bare-parts kits common at the time.
At the center of the design was the MOS 6502 microprocessor, the inexpensive chip that made a personal computer affordable. Steve Wozniak built the board with an unusually small parts count, integrating a video terminal section so the machine could drive a display directly, along with a monitor program in read-only memory that let the user examine and change memory and run programs. A buyer still had to add a keyboard, a power supply, and a case, but the core computer was finished and functional out of the box.
The Apple I emerged from the Homebrew Computer Club, the hobbyist group where Wozniak demonstrated his designs. The Computer History Museum’s April 1976 photograph, catalog record 102660089, shows Wozniak with the Apple I motherboard and Jobs holding a keyboard, documenting the machine at the moment the partnership formed around it. An early order from the Byte Shop retailer turned the design into a commercial product and gave the new company its first real sales.
Only a small number of Apple I units were ever made before the company moved on, which makes surviving examples rare and valuable today. Its technical importance, though, is out of proportion to its sales: it proved that a single engineer could build a complete, usable computer around the new microprocessors and sell it as a product, and it directly set the stage for the Apple II.
The Apple I matters as the bridge between the hobbyist kit era and the finished personal computer. It carried Apple’s founding pattern, Wozniak’s spare engineering paired with Jobs’s push to ship a real product, and everything the company became grew out of this first single-board machine.