Jason Snell, for The Verge:

When you think of Apple, you probably think of the iPhone, or maybe the Mac, or perhaps you’ve got fond memories of the iPod. But Apple’s 50-year run of creating tech products that people fall in love with — sometimes a lot of people, sometimes just a hardy few — would never have happened if it weren’t for a product and platform that’s been gone for decades.

Apple would never have made it if it weren’t for the Apple II, the company’s first hit product and the first one to generate the amount of devotion we’ve now come to expect from fans of Apple’s products. Their slogan was, and still is, “Apple II Forever!”

Harry McCracken:

As Apple turns 50, its presence in our lives is so pervasive—2.5 billion of the company’s devices are in active use—that its unlikely origin story is more resonant than ever. To tell it, I turned to the people who lived it:

• Apple’s two living cofounders, Wozniak and Wayne
• Mike Markkula, the early retiree from Intel whose guidance and money turned the garage startup into a company
• Some of Apple’s earliest staffers, including Bill Fernandez, its first full-time employee, and Chris Espinosa, who’s still there today
• Regis McKenna, the Silicon Valley marketing guru who established Apple as a brand
• Liza Loop, the educator who became Apple’s first user
• Ron Rosenbaum, the Esquire writer whose article inspired Wozniak and Jobs’s first business venture
• Nolan Bushnell, whose Atari provided Jobs with most of his pre-Apple work experience
• Lee Felsenstein, moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club, the user group that prompted Wozniak to build Apple’s first machine
• Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, the creators of VisiCalc, the spreadsheet that gave the Apple II its killer app
• And many others

This oral history is incredible.