Apple made less than $100 million by selling stock — 4.6 million shares priced at $22 — to the public on this date in 1980 in an ugly environment for IPOs.

Massachusetts regulators wouldn’t let individual investors touch it.

Of course, a few weeks ago, Apple briefly became the U.S.’s first $900 billion company by market cap and sparked speculation that $1 trillion was within reach even by the end of the year, boosted by news of strong sales for its now ubiquitous iPhone, specifically an update called the iPhone X at a $999 base price.

Shares traded to a record above $176 in early November around that rollout and were just above $172 on Monday on news of a music-download acquisition — yet more testament to the product, and even content — evolution of the personal computing upstart founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Read:Apple stock rises after company confirms Shazam acquisition

The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the IPO was on Page 12 of the Dec. 12, 1980, edition, behind President-elect Ronald Reagan’s picks for Cabinet posts and Chrysler’s struggles with its debt load.

Perhaps the best detail in the Journal’s story was that Massachusetts regulators prohibited individual investors in the commonwealth from buying Apple IPO shares. They deemed Apple’s IPO “too risky” under rules “aimed at weeding out highfliers that don’t have solid earnings foundations.”

The Wall Street Journal

The caution prescribed then was echoed not only in the warnings during the dot-com boom against sinking money into companies with no history of profit or even revenue generation but by those more recently accompanying the explosion into popular consciousness of the cryptocurrency bitcoin.

Read:Bitcoin futures soar past $18,000 in debut, with the leap setting off trading halts

As Josh “Reformed Broker” Brown, the CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, tweeted, Apple has grown quite a bit since Massachusetts advised investors to give it a miss.

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