Hyderabad, April 1 -- On April 1, 1976, three men signed a piece of paper in a California garage and called their new venture Apple Computer Company. One of them, Ronald Wayne, sold his 10 per cent stake back within two weeks for USD 800. The other two, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, went on to build one of the most valuable companies in history.

Fifty years later, Apple is worth more than USD 3.6 trillion. However, not many know how close it was to shutting down.

The rise, the fall

Wozniak had originally designed the circuit board at the heart of Apple's first product, the Apple I, simply to share with fellow hobbyists. Jobs saw a business. That tension between the engineer's instinct to build and the entrepreneur's instinct to sell wo...