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tation course that allowed him access to a computer he developed a program called EasyWriter, one of the first word-processing packages. It was, for a short time, the second best-selling program in America. Draper went on to write other applications, marketed under the 'Captain Software' label.

The Apple II filled a niche in the market, one that traditional computer manufacturers hadn't realized was there. The Apple was small and light, it was easy to use and could perform useful functions. A new purchaser could go home, take the components out of their boxes, plug them in, load the software, then sit down and write a book or plot a company's cash flow or play a game.

By any standards Apple's subsequent growth was phenomenal. In its first year of operation, 1977, it sold $2.5 million worth of PCs. The next year sales grew to $15 million, then in 1979 to $70 million. In 1980 the company broke through the $100 million mark, with sales of $117 million. The figures continued to rise, bounding to $335 million in 1981 and $583 million in 1982. Along the way the founders of Apple became millionaires. In 1980, when the company went public, Jobs became worth $165 million and Wozniak $88 million. Not bad for two guys who started out manufacturing blue boxes.

The story of Apple, though, isn't just the story of two young men who made an enviable amount of money. What Jobs and Wozniak began with their invention was a revolution. While Berkeley's Free Speech Movement and 'the summer of love' in Haight-Ashbury proved to be ephemera, the PC has brought a real change to society. It gave people access to data, to programs, to computing power they had never had before. In an early promotional video for Apple, an earnest employee says, 'We build a device that gives people the same power over information that large corporations and the government have over people.'

The statement deliberately echoes the 'power to the people' anthem of the Sixties. But while the political radicals were just posturing, the technological revolutionaries were delivering a product that brought the power of information to the masses. That the technological pioneers became rich and that the funky little companies they founded turned into massive corporations is probably testament to capitalism's capacity to channel change – or to co-opt a revolution.

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