April Fool's Day

Thanks to American Public Media and The Writer's Almanac —

Apple was founded on this date in 1976. The company was formed by Steve Jobs, his friend Steve Wozniak, and a man named Ronald Wayne, who had worked with Jobs at Atari. The partners planned to produce and sell Apple personal computer kits, hand-assembled by Wozniak. They weren't personal computers as we think of them today, but were rather just motherboards.

The company was incorporated the following January, but this time without Wayne; he had lost his nerve after a couple of weeks, and sold his 10 percent share back to Jobs and Wozniak for a little over $2,000. Had he held onto it, that share would be worth around $22 billion USD today.

Wayne said later that he did not regret selling the stock—he said, "I made the best decision with the information available to me at the time." He went into the stamp and rare coin business, and didn't own an Apple computer until last year when he was given an iPad 2.