[BRadmin]

Serious question:

What's their rationale for forming a partnership and not incorporating right away as a means of protecting personal assets? Was the official / lawyering process radically different (i.e. terribly expensive) back then?

[mechanical_fish]

I'm sure that the startup legal process was a lot less popularly understood than it is now. And even today people ask a lot of questions about legal foundations for startups.

But I think you can't abstract away the particulars. I'm sure it didn't occur to the Steves to spend money to protect their assets, because they didn't have any. Assets or money, that is. And this fellow Ron could have done so, but perhaps it didn't occur to him because he was too busy burying gold nuggets in his backyard and cleaning his weapons collection.

The early history of Apple is such a fun story. I now have this awesome vision of the Apple cofounders as the bowling team from The Big Lebowski.

[Vivtek]

My guess is that incorporation would have included a fee of several hundred to a thousand dollars - money they totally didn't have. Note they incorporated with the Apple II, after they'd had some revenue come in.

[varjag]

Could've been there was no LLC option back in the 1970s, so they'd have to go for full-blown (expensive) corporation.