Welcome (seriously)

Two years ago, Apple was officially valued at $1 trillion. Last month, it doubled that: $2 trillion.

With that milestone, I’d like to look back quite some time ago, at a small piece of history, when Apple was a much smaller company.

It’s about what Steve Jobs did when Apple’s first small lead in the marketplace for personal computers was threatened.

This really is ancient history—not long after Apple went public in 1980, and its IPO made 300 millionaires overnight. Less than a year later, it faced an existential crisis.

The personal computer market was growing, but it was still utterly dwarfed by the market for mainframe business computers, which was dominated by IBM.

And in August 1981, IBM announced it was getting into that market, too.

It's funny to think now, but IBM coming into Apple's market then was kind of like Apple or Google or Amazon coming into your market today. Potentially terrifying, maybe even worse.

Only, Jobs wasn't really worried. As Walter Isaacson wrote in his 2011 biog…