As one of the world’s largest companies, Apple obviously attracts a fair amount of attention nowadays, but it wasn’t always that way.
In the video below, a much younger Steve Jobs explains how, when starting out, the company had to file “a fictitious business name statement” for official purposes. Suggestions included things like Matrix Electronics, but Apple Computer was finally settled on, with the proviso that it would become the company name if no one else had any better suggestions before the filing deadline.
So, why Apple? In Jobs’ own words: “Partially because I like Apples a lot and partially because Apple is ahead of Atari in the phonebook and I used to work at Atari”. In 2007,it dropped ‘Computer’ from the name to become just Apple.
Clearly, that plan worked pretty well – Apple is now a global powerhouse, while Atari bowed out of the hardware game long ago. As a bonus nugget, the name Atari comes from a Japanese verb meaning to hit the target, which is pretty apt for a gaming company.
