“Desire for great things”: 50 years of Apple through the eyes of those who never left there

CUPERTINO, Calif. — In 1976, Chris Espinosa rode his Puch moped about a mile and a half every Wednesday afternoon, parked and went to work. At just 14 years old, he still had to go to school and didn’t have a driver’s license. But his employer, Apple Computer, had customers who wanted to try their first computer, and Espinosa was responsible for demonstrating it.

Espinosa’s work changed many times in these 50 years. But he still works for Apple.

Espinosa, now 64 years old, is part of an increasingly rare group in today’s economy: people who have spent their entire lives working for a single company. It’s even harder to find someone like him in Silicon Valley, where companies are born and die overnight and software engineers, product managers and others change jobs every two years.

This Wednesday (1st), Apple turned 50 years old. Few have witnessed his transformation as closely as Espinosa, his longest-serving employee. When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak signed the documents to create Apple in 1976, the fruit orchards of Silicon Valley had not yet been taken over by business parks. Espinosa became the No. 8 employee at the young startup that assembled computers by hand in Jobs’ childhood home.

“It was a time of great promise and also of great apprehension,” Espinosa said. “The possibility of having a great idea, starting a company and then either not finding your customers and closing, or not being able to manage the growth and also closing — that was simply the rule.”

In half a century, Apple has risen, fallen and risen again. A kind of mythology formed around the company as it became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Jobs, who died in 2011, was so idolized that he became the subject of at least two films, one of which was nominated for two Oscars.

Today, Apple is worth around US$4 trillion, makes more than US$100 billion a year in profit and has 2.5 billion cell phones, tablets, computers, headphones and smart watches in use around the world. These devices have shaped the computing and entertainment industries. Between its supply chain and its retail business, Apple has become the benchmark for how to be a global technology company.

Employees who join a growing company like Apple early can also reap huge financial benefits. The 2,000 shares Wozniak gave Espinosa shortly after Apple went public in 1980 — as part of the “Woz Plan,” in which he offered his shares to early employees — would today be worth nearly $57,000 each, a total of $114 million. Espinosa did not reveal further financial details.

But Apple, which dropped “Computer” from its name in 2007, faces the issues that plague mature companies. She is a political actor who has to deal with the ebb and flow of tariffs, antitrust scrutiny and geopolitical turmoil. The iPhone is almost two decades old, which leads to expectations that its manufacturer will present new products. And like other tech giants, Apple is under pressure to ride the wave of artificial intelligence.

Before becoming an industry colossus, Apple germinated among electronics hobbyists in Silicon Valley. Jobs, Wozniak, Espinosa and other early employees attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. They found kindred spirits to poke around and talk about computers at the Homebrew Computer Club, a group that met in Menlo Park, California.

Espinosa met Jobs at the Byte Shop, a computer store that had locations in Mountain View, California, and other cities in the Bay Area. It was there that Jobs recruited Espinosa to write computer programs in BASIC, a now unfashionable programming language, for the Apple II, which would become one of the first popular personal computers.

“It was really, really fun, because it was the time when people were starting the whole industry from scratch,” Espinosa said. Whether it was computer stores or commercial software, he added, “all these things needed to be invented.”

In 1978, Espinosa took his only hiatus from Apple, for a stint at the University of California, Berkeley. Even so, he worked part-time for the company and spent nights writing the user manual — with more than 200 pages — for the Apple II. In 1981, Jobs convinced Espinosa to drop out of college and return full-time to Apple.

Four years later, however, Jobs had left Apple after a power struggle with then-CEO John Sculley. Over the next decade or so, the company became rudderless and fell into financial decline.

“There were a lot of threads of continuity at Apple that remained — still this desire to do great, values-driven things,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s chief marketing officer, who joined in 1986 and has served the longest among the current leadership. “But there were also many ways in which we lost our way.”

While this was happening, Apple laid off employees “again and again and again,” Espinosa said. His manager told him that he had been spared because he had worked at the company for so long that his severance package would be too expensive.

“I was wondering what I was going to do, because I didn’t have a college degree and I had only worked at one company,” Espinosa said. Then he thought, “I was here when we turned on the lights. I might as well stay until it’s time to turn them off.”

Then came what Espinosa called “a turning point” for Apple: the return of Jobs in 1997. The company’s first 20 years were an era of “arrogance,” Espinosa said. But the next 30 years, with the launch of the iPod and iPhone, are what define consumer electronics today.

“The idea of ​​having a computer at home, or one that you carried with you all the time, or one that you strapped to your wrist — that was not only unthinkable, it was probably scary and weird” in the 1970s, Espinosa said.

Today, Espinosa works on the operating system for Apple TV, the company’s streaming device.

As much as Apple has changed over the last 50 years, Silicon Valley has changed too. Many of the companies that have come and gone, Espinosa said, “were conceived by some smart guy who thinks he’s Steve Jobs, who wants to find his Steve Wozniak, get venture capital and finance an unproductive, unsuccessful company.”

“The model that’s out there is not designed for stability, it’s not designed to do things in the interest of the customer,” he said. “A lot of the technology sector today is just looking for the next bubble and getting out before it bursts, and that’s not what we do here.”