steveh

Before Apple took the site over (and made their various changes) it was built for, and was the headquarters for Four-Phase Systems (makers of the first all-LSI minicomputer systems) back in the late '70s. One of the things that happened during the company's move from its previous headquarters involved moving their fab; when the move was done, the fab was spun up, and it worked (not something you could count on back then).

The basic layout of the campus was much like its current format, if quite a bit simpler. Four-Phase is long gone, having been swallowed up, or parceled out to various other companies, including Motorola and Canon, but it was a pretty interesting place to work for a guy new to the Valley, and ended up being a stepping stone from there to Apple a little later for me.

Microsoft's "saving" Apple was hardly done out of altruism, nor did it cost Microsoft anything in the long term.

In 1997, Microsoft bought 150,000 shares of Apple preferred stock, convertable to common shares of Apple stock at a price of $8.25, redeemable after a three year period, for $150 million. Apple was worth ~ $3B at the time.

By 2001, they'd converted all of the shares into common stock, netting the company approximately 18.1 million shares. 

By 2003, they'd sold all of it.

It was mostly optics.