If it weren’t for a Volkswagen bus and a calculator, Apple might never have existed.
Five decades ago, the late cofounder Steve Jobs was in his early twenties and strapped for cash, but hooked on the idea that everyone should be able to own a home computer. The only problem? Like many founders, he didn’t have enough money to bring his vision to life.
So Jobs sold off his Volkswagen bus while fellow cofounder Steve Wozniak got money for his programmable calculator, raising $1,300 to pay for the prototype’s parts. The first Apple computer, the Apple I, was born on April Fools’ Day, 1976; on Wednesday, the $3.7 trillion business celebrates its 50th birthday.
And the sacrifice paid off. A local computer dealer placed a $50,000 order for 100 units soon after it launched, with the product mainly bought up by hobby enthusiasts. But it made the entrepreneurial duo enough money to create Apple II for the mass market—the first personal computer to include a keyboard and color graphics. A year after its 1977 debut, it made nearly $3 million.
“I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25,” Jobs told PBS in 1996. “And it wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money.”
The days of selling their belongings to fund their fledgling business were long behind them.
From college dropout to $10.2 billion net worth: Jobs’ path to Apple success
Jobs didn’t discover his passion for technology in a college class; at the age 12, the entrepreneur had already found his true calling, and took a massive leap of faith to pursue his dreams.
A young Jobs thumbed through the yellow pages, and hunted down the phone number of Hewlett-Packard cofounder Bill Hewlett, ringing him up for a favor. At the time, the tween was in need of spare parts to build a frequency counter. But what he received was far better than some nuts and bolts; Hewlett offered Jobs an internship at the iconic $17.4 billion tech company, where he serendipitously met a talented engineer: Wozniak.
Together, the pair started their first business, illegally selling “blue boxes” that allowed users to make free, long-distance telephone calls. Jobs reminisced about those years in the early 1970s as a “magical” time in his life that sent him on the path to soon create Apple.
“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas,” Jobs said in the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A 100-Year Renaissance. “If we hadn’t…made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.”
Jobs later enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Ore., but his days of higher education were short-lived. He dropped out after just one semester, inevitably working for legendary brand Atari as a technician and games designer at just 18 years old. That would be the last time Jobs worked under somebody else; just two years later, Apple I hit the market, and Jobs was well on his way to becoming one of the most visionary tech pioneers in modern history.
Fast-forward five decades later, and Apple is the second most valuable company in the world. The business sits in fourth place on the Fortune 500, having sold more than 3 billion iPhones, and boasting more than 100 million Mac users globally.
At the time of his passing in 2011, Jobs was estimated to be worth $10.2 billion. Although he had enough money to buy a whole fleet of luxury cars shortly after founding Apple, selling his Volkswagen proved to be a critical sacrifice in making it to the top.
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on December 19, 2025.
