Apple did not exist in 1967
Apple Computer was founded in 1976, and its first product, the Apple I, went on sale that year. Nothing called an Apple computer existed in 1967, and no personal computer in the modern sense existed either. In 1967 Steve Wozniak was a teenager of about 17 and Steve Jobs was around 12. The story of those two and their first machine is a mid-1970s story.
What is worth explaining is the world they were born into: what computing looked like in 1967, who had access to it, and what was missing that the personal computer later supplied.
Why personal computers did not exist yet
A personal computer needs a few things to be possible at all: a processor small and cheap enough to sit on a single board, memory that is affordable, and a way to interact directly with the machine. In 1967 none of these was available at a price an individual could pay.
Processors were built from many separate components. The single-chip microprocessor did not appear until about 1971. Memory was commonly magnetic core, made of tiny ferrite rings woven by hand or machine, which was reliable but expensive. And the ordinary way of using a large computer was to give it a job and wait for the result, not to sit at it and type.
Mainframes
The big machines of 1967 were mainframes, and the best-known family was the IBM System/360, announced in 1964. These were installed in dedicated rooms, often with their own air conditioning and staff, and they were bought or leased by corporations, universities, banks, insurers and government departments. Such machines often cost far more than a house.
Typical work included payroll, billing, inventory, insurance records, airline reservations and scientific calculation. Programs and data were commonly entered on punched cards, a programmer handed over a deck and later collected printed output, and programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL were widely used.
Some universities and companies also offered time-sharing, in which many users connected to one computer from separate terminals. This was the nearest thing to personal access, but the terminal was simply a keyboard and printer or screen, and the computer itself belonged to someone else.
Minicomputers
Between the mainframe and the later personal computer sat the minicomputer. Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-8, introduced in 1965, is the usual example. It was far smaller and cheaper than a mainframe, with a price commonly cited in the tens of thousands of dollars, which was still beyond any household but within reach of a laboratory, a university department or a factory.
Minicomputers were used to control experiments, run machinery, collect data and handle specialised tasks. They helped establish the idea that a computer could be dedicated to one job rather than shared across a whole organisation, which is part of the background to what came later. Still, nobody would have called one a home appliance.
Hobbyists and electronics in 1967
Electronics was a popular hobby in 1967, but it meant building radios, amplifiers and transistor projects. Home computing was not an established idea. A few people in universities and laboratories were already imagining machines for individuals, but this was a speculative minority view. Meanwhile integrated circuit chips were reaching ordinary products, and they gradually made small computers practical.
The change came in the following decade. The first widely noticed hobbyist kit computer, the Altair 8800, appeared in January 1975, and the Apple I followed in 1976. Neither would have been feasible with the technology of 1967.
Where the confusion may come from
Titles that attach a “first Apple computer” to 1967 probably reflect a general sense that the late 1960s were a time of technological change. That is true: the decade saw rapid advances in electronics, spaceflight and communications, and 1967 sits in the middle of it. But the personal computing story belongs to the 1970s, and the American counterculture of the 1960s, sometimes credited with shaping later computer enthusiasts’ attitudes, is a background influence rather than a source of any specific machine.
A careful summary, then, is this: in 1967 computers were large, expensive and institutional. Apple’s founders were still in school, the company was nine years away, and the personal computer was a decade or so from the market.