In 1976, the Apple 1 – built by Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak – went into production in a spare bedroom of Jobs’s home in Los Altos, Calif. It was the first ready-out-of-the-box computer to hit the market; all previous computers came as kits. The Apple 1 was followed in 1981 by IBM’s 5150 and the Commodore 64.
A buyer would have had to design most of his or her own software for these early home computers. They would also be literally millions of times slower than today’s machines: the Apple 1 came with 4 kilobytes of RAM - random access memory - where a typical personal computer sold today comes with 2-4 gigabytes (that’s 2-4 million kilobytes) of RAM.
Source: Digibarn Computer Museum, The Apple Museum
