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No-one seems absolutely sure of the origins of the name. It has variously been suggested that the name is a tribute to The Beatles' company Apple Corps, to Alan Turing, the father of computer science who killed himself by eating an apple laced with cyanide, or to Sir Isaac Newton, who is pictured sitting beneath an Apple tree in the very first company logo. The most prosaic explanation is that the founders simply wanted their company to come before Atari in the phone book.

The company's first computer, the Apple I, was nothing more than a motherboard, the rest you had to supply yourself. Assembled by Wozniak and Wayne, from parts acquired by Jobs, the first batch of 200 went on sale for $666.66 each.

Soon afterwards, having illustrated the Newton logo and written the Apple I manual, Wayne sold his 10 per cent holding in the company for $800. Shortly afterwards venture capitalist Mike Markkula invested $250,000 - money which financed the building of the company's first 'proper' computer, the Apple II, which was unveiled in April 1977.

Apple's annual sales rose from just $174,000 in its first year to a

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billion dollars in 1982, at which stage Wayne's holding would have been worth in the region of $6bn. Wayne later said that he had no regrets.

A decade later Wayne explained his decision to Owen W Linzmayer, the author of Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer, Inc.

'I had already learned what gave me indigestion,' he said. 'If Apple had failed, I would have had bruises on top of bruises. Steve Jobs was an absolute whirlwind and I had lost the energy you need to ride whirlwinds.'

Meanwhile Woz and Jobs set about making the Apple II into the first truly popular personal computer and on working on its successor the Apple III. However the emergence of the first IBM PCs, running a DOS operating system, soon began to take market share from Apple, particularly in the business sector, where the Apple II had never been as popular as it had with home users.

In 1981 Woz crashed his private plane, suffering short-term memory loss as a result. After he recovered he decided to return to university and although he remained an Apple employee until 1985, his contribution had effectively ended.

'I didn't think, I'm going to change the world,' Woz said in a recent interview. 'No, I'm just going to build the best machines I can build that I would want to use in my own life. Steve [Jobs] was much more further-thinking. When I designed good things, sometimes he'd say, "We can sell this". And we did. He was thinking about how you build a company, maybe even then he was thinking, "How do you change the world?". He spoke like that.'

While Wozniak was studying, Jobs and Apple set about changing the world.

Part 2 - The Macintosh and Siberia to follow tomorrow