Apple's longest-serving employee joined the company when he was 14. Meet Chris Espinosa

Chris Espinosa had joined Apple as a part-time worker in 1976 when he was only 14. (Image credit: @howeverythingworks/Instagram)

Chris Espinosa joined Apple when he was 14, and still in high school. He joined the company in 1977 and became Apple's longest-serving employee.

Espinosa had initially started working there part-time when Apple was founded in a garage on April Fool's Day in 1976. When it was incorporated in 1977 by Steve Jobs and Steve 'Woz' Wozniak, he became an official employee -- identified as employee no.8 -- of the company, CNET reported.

The first official work Espinosa did for the company was to test the Apple II BASIC operating system during his Christmas holidays and when Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 to launch the education computer company NeXT, Espinosa was the senior employee at Apple. He held the position even after Jobs returned to Apple once the company bought NeXT in 1997.

In a previous interview, Espinosa spoke about the tech giant's marketing principles outlined in 1978. "There were three words. Empathy: know your customer, know what they want. Focus: do fewer things better. And impute: always carry value in everything you do. Those are things that we do today," he said.

'Steve Jobs was a maniacal genius'

In another one of his older interviews, Espinosa also commented on how Jobs was notorious for micromanagement. "He's a maniac... a maniacal genius. His job is to stir up everything... He will not leave anything alone. He will not allow inadequacy or compromise to exist," Inc. quoted Espinosa as saying.

Flagging fake Apple badge on eBay

Espinosa made waves on social media earlier this year when he flagged a fake vintage Apple employee badge on eBay which was eventually sold for more than $1,000 (about Rs 84,000). badge was described to have belonged to Sherry Livingston, employee no. 10.

But Espinosa pointed out that it wasn't Sherry Livingston and offered a point-by-point rebuttal down to the typewritten font and the paper the map was drawn on. "That wasn’t taken with a Polaroid with a flash. The laminate dimensions are all wrong. That’s a computer font, not an IBM Selectric Orator-type ball. That's not my original sketch which was on a national engineering pad," he wrote.

But none of the proof of this came in time to prevent the item from being sold.