It is easy to forget that, when he was a student, the man who brought us the Macintosh, iPhone and iPad (and, with his little finger, Pixar) collected bottle caps to make ends meet. The need to stretch every nickel informed the way Apple was run during the early days. It is on that spell, rather than the enormous public profile commanded by Steve Jobs in his later years, that would-be emulators should dwell.

Lost in the millions of words devoted to Jobs since his sad and untimely death is what established Apple in the first place — an approach to business far removed from the techniques employed by the managers of the three- or four-year-old subprime “unicorns” that command billion-dollar valuations today.

Peruse Apple’s initial public offering prospectus, and the numbers are startling. In the year preceding its flotation in 1980 Apple recorded sales of $117m, and pre-tax income of $24m. It did this in a market cluttered with dozens of companies making personal computers and with a payroll of about 1,000 — almost half of whom, believe it or not, were engaged in manufacturing. Apple’s initial public offering, which raised $90m, valued the company at about $1.2bn. (Multiply these numbers by three if you are comparing them with current dollars). Apple’s two founders and their chosen chief executive owned about 40 per cent of their creation, largely because they had been so efficient (and parsimonious) with the small amount of outside capital they had raised. Apple became a public company in a month when the prime rate stood at 21.5 per cent (yes, the decimal point is in the correct position) and the capital markets were bruising.