Bite me: The myth about Apple

IT TURNS out that what you think you know about the tech giant could actually be wrong. Especially when it comes to how it all began.

Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs speaks during an Apple Special Event at Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts in San Francisco, California, 27/01/2010 before an image of himself and Steve Wozniak who met in high school, who founded Apple in 1976. Apple introduced its latest creation, the iPad, a mobile tablet browsing device that is a cross between the iPhone and a MacBook laptop.

GARAGE start-ups are legendary in Silicon Valley.

Xerox, Hewlett Packard and Dell all had their roots in the car park.

Apple founder Steve Jobs often referenced his parents garage in Los Altos, California, as the birthplace of Apple in the spring of 1976 — and Silicon Valley lore still does.

Well, along comes Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to put a damper on the legend about the birthplace of the Apple I and Apple II computers.

“The garage is a bit of a myth,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brandon Lisy.

“We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products,” the computer pioneer known as “Woz” said.

“We did no manufacturing there. The garage didn’t serve much purpose, except it was something for us to feel was our home,” he added.

“We had no money. You have to work out of your home when you have no money.”

So ingrained is the mystique of the Los Altos garage as the birthplace of Apple that the town last year designated it a historic landmark.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Wozniak also told Businessweek, “The work was being done — soldering things together, putting the chips together, designing them, drawing them on drafting tables — at my cubicle at Hewlett-Packard in Cupertino [Calif.].

“That was an incredible time. It let me do a lot of side projects, and it was five years to the summer of ’75, when I built the Apple computer, the first one.

“The next summer I built the Apple II computer [there],” Woz added.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.