What is the story is all about?
Just like any other youth during their time, except that the two are extra intelligent, they spent their time and ideas creating “things” for the mere fun of it without even thinking that the two of them already started the engine to revolutionize technology.
On the Apple Side of the story, Steve Jobs and his friend Wozniak started Apple Computers in the Jobs family garage after Steve sold his Volkswagen and Wozniak, his beloved scientific calculator. The duo created computers that are small and cheap which made is accessible to ordinary people. With the success of their first computer which they named Apple 1, they created another computer with the help of angel investor Mike Markkula and named it Apple 2 and with it came the start of a multi-billion dollar company. Apple ceased to be a partnership and was incorporated as a company.
On the Microsoft side of the story, Bill Gates with his pal, Paul Allen started their tracks as when they discovered that MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) was creating a mini-computer kit called Altair 8800. With their fascination and interest for personal computing, the two contacted the company and offered a still non-existing program that would make the Altair work. With luck, the President of the company accepted and the two spent their days writing the software at Harvard’s Computer Lab. The software worked perfectly and Allen was hired by MITS and Gates quit Harvard. Not long after, the two formed a partnership called Micro-Soft, a blend of micro-computer and software.
While Apple Inc. started smoothly, selling computers and increasing their stocks to more than a billion dollars, Microsoft on the other hand started on a shaky footing. Despite fees and royalties from MITS, it was not enough to meet their overhead. Microsoft continued to write software for other companies to keep up with his business. It wasn’t until IBM was looking for a software that would operate their upcoming personal computer and approached Microsoft. Bill Gates sells DOS, their “new” operating system to IBM. IBM agreed but the problem was DOS wasn’t developed yet. Bill Gates, promptly buys an operating system from another programmer worth $50,000 and the Microsoft Dynasty begins.
Meanwhile at Apple Camp, Steve wanted to see the Graphical User Interface (GUI) which has been developed by Xerox. He liked it and wanted to acquire it. The board of directors at Xerox apparently does not have the vision that Steve has and they rejected the idea and agreed to let Apple take everything they had.
The two starting giants eventually meet as Bill fears the fast growth of Apple and talks to Steve to have an alliance against IBM which the latter agreed not knowing of the deceit that Bill was planning. After having access to Apple machine, Bill was able to create an operating system similar to that of Apple’s Macintosh and called it Windows.
Along all of these, Steve Jobs transformed from a hippie to a psycho. Emotionally abusing his employees and forcing them to work for long and unreasonable hours, he was unaware of the chaos he was creating. He split his company and created two camps which started the rifts among his employees and that forced him to leave Apple. Years later, Steve went back to Apple who has now partnered with Microsoft.
