Success Quote by Bill Budge

Half his annual income isn’t a quirky origin story detail; it’s the point. Budge’s numbers do the persuasion for him. By naming the Apple II, pegging the year (1978), and dropping a stark salary figure, he turns “I was interested in computers” into “I staked my life on one.” The specificity reads like a receipt, and that matters: it frames early personal computing not as a hobbyist’s playground but as an expensive, deliberate wager made before the culture could reassure you it was smart.

The subtext is about access and risk. In today’s startup mythology, we’re trained to hear sacrifice as virtue. Budge’s version is less performative, more material: the Apple II wasn’t a symbolic gesture, it was a household budget crisis. That tension reveals the era’s peculiar barrier to entry. The people who got there early weren’t necessarily the most visionary; they were the ones willing (or able) to absorb real financial pain for a machine most friends would have dismissed as a toy.

There’s also a quiet re-centering of “businessman” away from boardrooms and toward personal tooling. He’s describing a kind of pre-internet capital expenditure: buying capability. The Apple II becomes both an instrument and a credential, a way of literally purchasing proximity to the future. In two sentences, Budge captures why the early computer revolution felt intimate and precarious: progress didn’t arrive as an app update, it arrived as a box you had to bet your rent on.