Last week, on April 1 to be exact, Apple reached the grand old age of 50 (almost exactly a year younger than Microsoft), one of a tiny proportion of S&P-listed companies that have stayed the course for half a century. It is a company with which I have had a special connection and a love-hate relationship for most of my adult life.

Not that I have ever owned an Apple product (I have always been a loyal Android man) nor any Apple shares; heavens, I wish I had. No. My special connection is more quirky and personal. Almost every day of my teenage life, I walked into my school’s morning assembly under a shadow that influenced us both: the signature of Isaac Newton, mischievously carved into a granite windowsill at the eastern end of our old school hall.

While my connection to Newton’s apple was a simple accident of geography, Steve Jobs’ connection was not. Apparently, Apple’s original logo, designed by co-founder Ronald Wayne, comprised a detailed drawing of Newton lying underneath the apple tree.

It was not until a year later that the now-iconic Apple logo, designed by Rob Janoff, was created. Minimalist and memorable, with the “bite” apparently added to make clear it’s an apple rather than as a “punny” allusion to a byte. The rainbow colours were apparently a reference to Apple computers being the only ones at the time to show images in colour.

I sometimes also wonder whether Apple’s famous (some would say infamous in the face of mounting regulatory anti-competition concerns) “walled garden” of interconnected and proprietary products and services was inspired by Newton’s life in the Woolsthorpe Manor garden – safe, private, secure, a self-contained world meeting all needs.

Both Jobs and Newton appear to have had much in common: obsessive, perfectionist, cantankerous, abrasive to the point of rudeness, intimidating – visionaries famously difficult to work with, but who fundamentally disrupted their fields; complex men living in complicated ages.