It’s one of those legendary stories used to inspire millions of people with ideas and dreams of making it big: “Just look at Apple, it started in a garage!”
Well apparently that’s not entirely true. Apple co-founder Steve Wosniak has been recounting the company’s early days once again and this time he’s mythbusting.
As tech folklore tells it, Steve Jobs’ parents garage in Los Altos, California was the birthplace of the company, where the two computing whiz kids spent countless hours working on designs that would eventually change the world.
However, In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek he says the stories of he and Jobs slaving away among lawnmowers, tool boxes and household oddities in the mid-70s aren’t entirely true.
He said: “The garage is a bit of a myth. We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. We did no manufacturing there.
“We would drive the finished products to the garage, make them work and then we’d drive them down to the store that paid us cash. There were hardly ever more than two people in the garage and mostly they were sitting around kind of doing nothing productive.
“The garage didn’t serve much purpose, except it was something for us to feel was our home. We had no money. You have to work out of your home when you have no money. We outgrew that garage very quickly.”
So there goes that romantic little movie-inspiring tech tale. What next? Are we going to suddenly discover that Facebook wasn’t really started by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard dorm? Wait, what’s that you say, Mr. Winklevoss?
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
