Last month, Apple became the first company valued at a trillion dollars. With its new ring-shaped campus, all glass and curvy lines, it looks the part of a company bestriding an industry. But its dominance wasn’t always assured.

Twenty-five years ago, the computer revolution’s marquee company was in decline. Back then, it was just settling into shiny new headquarters, a campus of six buildings that formed a different kind of ring. Called Infinite Loop, the name is a reference to a well-known programming error—code that gets stuck in an endless repetition—though no one seems to know who applied it. Infinite Loop was the place where Apple’s leaders and engineers pulled off a historic turnaround, and it will always be the source of stories and legends—many of them untold. Until now.

Michelle Groskopf

About the Author Editor at large Steven Levy has covered Apple for more than 30 years.

Though Apple is keeping the complex, the move this year to the grounded UFO known as Apple Park seems to mark an end to the era when Steve Jobs, every inch the hero in a Joseph Campbell narrative, rescued a company that no one wanted to die. In 1997, a young WIRED magazine, founded in the same year that Infinite Loop opened, ran a cover with the Apple logo and a one-word caption: Pray. Our prayers were answered—and it happened at Infinite Loop.

For more than a year I’ve been interviewing Apple employees, past and present, about their recollections of Infinite Loop. In their own words, edited for clarity and concision, here is the story of a plot of land in Cupertino, California, that brought us the Mac revival, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, and the Steve Jobs legacy.

In the early 1990s, Apple decided to expand its Cupertino headquarters by building a new, grander campus. Steve Jobs, who was forced out of the company in the mid-’80s, had come up with the idea.

John Sculley (Apple CEO, 1983–93):* When I first started working with Steve Jobs, he had this idea of building an Apple campus. Steve called it SuperSite. He wanted something like the experience of going to Disney World, with monorails going around, where everyone was in different-colored uniforms. When Steve told the Mac group that he wanted to have uniforms, they all looked at him like he was crazy.

John Sculley poses with employees at Apple's headquarters in 1993. Acey Harper/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Chris Espinosa (Apple employee #8, 1977–present): Then Steve left, but he’d planted in Sculley the idea that we needed a central campus on property we owned.

Sculley: We had taken a contract on a former Motorola site, Four-Phase.

Shaan Pruden (senior director, partnership management, 1989–present): I visited there in 1993. I think the windows might have been in, but the insides weren’t done. I’m struck by the image of those giant windows and seeing the Caterpillars pushing around those mounds of dirt.

Espinosa: It opened very late ’92, early ’93. We occupied the buildings mostly in numerical order. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Greg “Joz” Joswiak (VP of product marketing, 1986–present): They built this campus fast, and it was obviously a bright shiny object. Everybody wanted to move in. It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office.

Espinosa: Building 1 was occupied first by the exec staff and software group. Building 2 was all the Mac web. Three then was the development tools, technical support, and product marketing. Building four was the cafeteria and the Apple library, a great, great resource. Buildings 5 and 6 were hardware. The notion was that all of R&D would fit in it, but by the time we finished it we’d grown too much. And then, of course, after we occupied it, the company collapsed so that we all fit in again. By ’96 we all fit into the Loop.