One of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs’s most audacious marketing triumphs is rarely mentioned in the paeans to his genius that remain a staple of business content farms. In 1982, Jobs offered to donate a computer to every K–12 school in America, provided Congress pass a bill giving Apple substantial tax write-offs for the donations. When he arrived in Washington, DC, to lobby for what became known as the Apple Bill, the 28-year-old CEO looked “more like a summer intern than the head of a $600-million-a-year corporation,” according to The Washington Post, but he already showed signs of his famous arrogance. He barraged the legislators with white papers and proclaimed that they “would be crazy not to take us up on this.” Jobs knew the strength of his hand: A mania for computer literacy was sweeping the nation as an answer to the competitive threats of globalization and the reescalation of the Cold War’s technology and space races. Yet even as preparing students for the Information Age became a national priority, the Reagan era’s budget cuts meant that few schools could afford a brand-new $2,400 Apple II computer.
