> (a) Under this plan, officers and key employees have been granted options to purchase shares [of qualified stock] ... (c) [the same for non-qualified stock]
See also http://www.npr.org/2012/04/04/149870751/a-rare-mix-created-s... : When Fairchild's investors back east took the option to buy the company, its executives didn't understand things like giving stock options to employees. "Their attitude was much like everyone else on the East Coast," Rock says. "Companies could give out a few options, but only to top executives. They were all very staid and white-shoe." ... Rock says one executive called the idea of stock options creeping socialism. "They did things the way their fathers did them," Rock says.
Quoting from http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive... : "With Rock's backing, they decided to form a company called Intel that wouldn't be stingy about granting options to employees. "We didn't include everybody, but almost everybody," says Moore, who retired in May as Intel's chairman. (Noyce died in 1989.) Other startups followed Intel's example; by 1977 it hardly raised eyebrows when Apple Computer--another startup backed by Arthur Rock--granted options to all its employees."
Followed by "Ironically, outside of Silicon Valley the stock option was becoming an endangered species. Congress, at the urging of Senator Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee, had begun in the 1960s to whittle away at options' tax-advantaged status, which some denounced as an unfair boon for the rich."
I think that establishes that in Silicon Valley by the time that Apple was founded, employee stock options of the type that Apple did were a popular thing.
I think you don't get the point of danmaz74's comment. Job hired his childhood friend as first employee, making him quit his job to work in the garage, and when the company goes well and they start talking about IPO, he doesn't bother to give him stock options as a reward for being instrumental to Apple's success.
That's pretty much ungrateful, and doesn't have anything to do with modern startups.
