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Apple at 50: Michael Scott, the company's first CEO, made bold and bad choices
As Apple hits 50 years old, AppleInsider recounts the pivotal role of each of its CEOs, starting with the very first one, Michael Scott. He made bold choices, but he made them badly.
Michael Scott, age unknown — image credit: Business Insider
Steve Jobs was not Apple's first Chief Executive Officer. While he founded the company on April 1, 1976, with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, Jobs had no experience running what was aiming to become a large company.
So a CEO was needed, but actually Apple's first two chief executives are tightly interlinked. Mike Markkula would become the second one, but he hired the first — and then later persuaded that first to leave.
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Apple at 50: Michael Scott, the company's first CEO, made bold and bad choices
[William Gallagher's profile picture]
Fri Feb 27 2026, 06:39 AM EST
8 minute read
Michael Scott, age unknown -- image credit: Business Insider
As Apple hits 50 years old, AppleInsider recounts the pivotal role of each of its CEOs, starting with the very first one, Michael Scott. He made bold choices, but he made them badly.
Steve Jobs was not Apple's first Chief Executive Officer. While he founded the company on April 1, 1976, with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, Jobs had no experience running what was aiming to become a large company.
So a CEO was needed, but actually Apple's first two chief executives are tightly interlinked. Mike Markkula would become the second one, but he hired the first — and then later persuaded that first to leave.
Michael Scott was that first CEO, leading Apple from February 1977 to March 1981. He had previously worked with Markkula at Fairchild Semiconductor, and presumably that shared experience brought Scott to mind.
But then it was presumably also a shared friendship that got Scott to agree to take on the role for a third of what he was then earning at National Semiconductor. Scott signed on to Apple for $26,000 (about $140,000 in 2026), and immediately began organizing what must have seemed like a messy company.
Organization and control
Scott pretty much immediately started making Apple more corporate. He issued numbered ID badges, and like every corporate boss since time began, expected everyone to like this idea.
Probably Steve Wozniak was fine with it, if he even thought about the idea at all. Scott gave him badge number 1.
Scott gave himself badge number 7, apparently as a nod to James Bond.
As it would be so often again, though, it was Steve Jobs who objected. Jobs wanted to be number 1 and Scott felt he'd "be unbearable" if he were.
Again, as he might often do later, Jobs argued his way — eventually getting Scott to agree to his having ID badge number zero. It was a pointless victory, though, as for places such as the Bank of America, zero was not recognized and Jobs had to be listed as employee number 2.
L-R: Michael Scott, Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, Chris Espinosa and Woz in 1978 — image credit: AllAboutSteveJobs.com
Having an adult running Apple didn't hurt, but neither did the immediate success of the Apple II that was launched in April 1977, while Scott was still settling in. The Apple II sold for $1,298, or $6,966.62 in 2026's money, around the same as a M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 256GB RAM and 1TB storage today.
That revenue stream plus Scott being more business-minded than Jobs or absolutely more than Woz, meant that within six months, Apple was out of the red. Apple even had enough in the bank to spend $21,000 ($112,000 in 2026) to license BASIC from Microsoft.
Today it's hard to imagine any programming language being a selling point for a computer, but back then, this was.
So was its documentation — in a time when it was as rare to find a manual as it is, well, today. Now apps and devices are expected to be so easy that there's no need for a manual, but back then it was because no one bothered to write them.
Scott didn't bother to write one either, but he did put together photocopied sheets to form a rough manual of about 30 pages. But if he was right on the money about the need for a manual, he was also far too tight about the money to do it properly.
Cover and sample page from the "Red Book" Apple II manual, initially made from anything Michael Scott could sneak out from programmers' desks — image credit: Internet Archive
Instead of hiring a writer, apple2history says that Scott hunted for scraps of written notes by raiding people's desks overnight. If you think it's right, Scott, you don't do it at night.
In January 1978, those pages were smartened up, given a red cover, and mailed out to customers as the Apple II Reference Manual. Then later in 1978, after Steve Jobs called for professional documentation, Chris Espinosa wrote a manual based on this earlier Red Book.
Eating the dog food
In what now also seems impossibly quaint, Scott also imposed one other absolute rule on Apple. In a memo written on February 1, 1980, Scott announced that Apple would no longer buy, rent, or preferably even use typewriters.
"If word processing is so neat, then let's all use it!" he wrote to the Executive Staff and All Typewriter Users. "We believe the typewriter is obsolete. Let's prove it inside before we try and convince our customers."
Michael Scott's memo banning typewriters at Apple
Scott saw the future — and then he got to see more of it. While it was Steve Jobs who negotiated the famous deal with Xerox to be shown around its PARC facility, he brought Scott with him on his second visit.
The Palo Alto Research Center had computers with graphical displays. It really had the Lisa and the Mac before anyone else — and did not know what to do with it.
Steve Jobs did, and the Apple Lisa was born. Scott saw the future too, but also knew Jobs was a problem.
In late 1980, Scott reorganized Apple, setting it up under different teams for different projects. The Apple Lisa was one, and Scott may have considered it the most important.
Certainly Jobs did, and he wanted to run the Lisa project, but Scott refused. Scott did not believe that Jobs was capable of running the project.
Scott (not pictured) allowed Steve Jobs to be a spokesperson for the Apple Lisa, but not be involved in making it.
"After setting up the framework for the concepts and finding the key people and sort of setting the technical directions, Scotty decided I didn't have the experience to run the thing," Jobs said later. "It hurt a lot. There's no getting around it."
Keeping Jobs away from the Lisa project was probably wise. But it's also part of the sequence of events that saw Jobs muscle in on the Macintosh.
But for now, was getting Apple to use its own computers, he was imposing a certain discipline, and financially the company was doing better. Plus, surely more than anyone knew at the time, they were setting up the future of Apple and the then still-unknown Macintosh.
You can be too kind
Unfortunately, by this time, Apple was doing well, but Scott was not paying sufficient attention to co-founder Steve Wozniak. Later Scott would tend to regard Woz as a lazy programmer, but what he missed in December 1980 was that Woz was also far too generous.
For Woz had enough shares in Apple that he need never go short of money again. He had enough stocks that he felt he could and should give it away to friends and family.
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📄 AppleMemo-No%20Typewriters.pdf