On April 1st, 1976, literally April Fools’ Day, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak shook hands on a two-page document and created Apple Computer Co. in Jobs’ parents’ Los Altos home. What started as a joke of a startup turned into one of the most valuable companies in human history. And honestly? It almost never happened.

Jobs was a 21-year-old college dropout with shaggy hair and big dreams. Wozniak was a 25-year-old engineer who actually knew how to build computers. Together, they split 90% of the company, with the remaining 10% going to their adviser, Ron Wayne, who walked away with just $2,300 before the company exploded. That decision haunts him to this day. His stake would be worth roughly $370 billion now.

The Apple II launched in 1977 and actually worked. By 1980, Apple went public at $22 per share. If you’d thrown $2,200 at 100 shares back then, you’d be sitting on over $5.5 million today. Not bad for a garage startup.

But things got messy. The Macintosh in 1984 was revolutionary, it introduced the computer mouse to regular people and had a graphical interface nobody had seen before. The Super Bowl commercial was so iconic it literally invented the concept of Super Bowl ads as cultural events. Still, at $2,500, it didn’t sell like they hoped. Jobs and CEO John Sculley had a massive falling out, and Jobs got pushed out in 1985. He sold almost all his Apple stock out of spite.

Apple limped along through the '90s while Microsoft basically copied everything and crushed them on price. The company burned through CEOs like they were going out of style. By 1997, Apple was actually dying.

Then Jobs came back as an “adviser”. He lasted about five minutes before taking over completely. He made peace with Bill Gates, got Microsoft to invest $150 million, and unleashed the translucent, colorful iMac. It was weird and beautiful and exactly what people didn’t know they wanted.

The iPod killed the CD. The iPhone in 2007 changed literally everything. Over 3 billion iPhones sold since then. It still makes up more than half of Apple’s $416 billion in annual revenue.

Jobs died in 2011, leaving the company to Tim Cook. Apple’s now worth $3.7 trillion, 10 times what it was worth when Jobs passed. Cook has done an impressive job keeping the machine running, even if he hasn’t created another “iPhone moment”.

Fifty years later, two guys who started as pranks on April Fools’ Day created the blueprint for how tech companies should think about design, simplicity, and user experience. That’s not a bad legacy.