As Apple turns 40, a look at the notes Regis McKenna took as he formulated an advertising and PR plan for Apple II
Regis McKenna's 1976 Notebook And The Invention Of Apple Computer, Inc. — On Apple's 40th birthday, an exclusive look at the notes its original media strategist took as he formulated an advertising and PR plan.
Context & Ripple Effects
Fast Company marked Apple's 40th birthday by publishing Regis McKenna's 1976 notebook — the working notes behind the advertising and PR plan that introduced the Apple II. The piece sits inside a running anniversary franchise: Wired had already revisited the machine's lineage with its Mac-at-40 interviews with Alan Dye, and the pattern continued toward Apple's 50th with an oral history from Wozniak, Markkula, and other early participants.
What makes the notebook newsworthy rather than nostalgic is that it documents the marketing strategy at the moment Apple Computer, Inc. was being invented as a brand — primary-source evidence of how the company's public identity was deliberately constructed, not stumbled into.
First-order effects
- Readers and Apple historians gain direct access to McKenna's original planning notes, shifting the Apple II launch story from secondhand retelling to documented primary source.
Second-order effects
- The publication feeds the anniversary-coverage cycle itself: each milestone (the Mac's 40th, Apple's 50th) gives outlets like Fast Company, Wired, and the Financial Times a hook to mine archives and participant memories for new angles.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's founding narrative becomes a recurring editorial and brand asset — the company's origin story periodically re-published, re-interviewed, and re-argued (as in the Fortune piece arguing success since 1998 came from iteration, not initial design), keeping early-history figures like McKenna and Wozniak in circulation decades after their roles ended.
The trend: Corporate milestones keep converting founders' private archives into public brand narratives, with Apple's anniversary retrospectives now spanning its 40th and 50th birthdays.