personal computers before! The company earned $47 million in revenues in fiscal year 1979, making Steve Jobs a millionaire on paper (he owned $7 million worth of private stock). The company’s board of directors, including its new members such as Arthur Rock and Don Valentine, began to discuss taking Apple public.

Meanwhile, the engineers in Cupertino started working on Apple’s future. Several projects came into being in those early years. First, in late 1978, there was the Apple III, which was supposed to build on Apple II’s legacy. Woz did not partake in the project and was critical of it early on. There was also an obscure project called Macintosh, headed by computer scientist Jef Raskin. He started to assemble a small team to work on a computer “as easy to use as a toaster”, that he named after his favorite apple.

Steve Jobs was not involved in any of those projects.