On February 16, Apple Computer retired $300 million of outstanding debt to become a debt-free company.

According to this site, Apple CEO Steve Jobs sent the following memo to Apple employees:

Today is a historic day of sorts for our company. When I arrived back at Apple in mid-1997, the company was burdened with $1 billion of debt. Through everyone's hard work we turned Apple around, paid off the majority of our debt and began to amass a war chest of cash in the bank which has grown to about $4.8 billion! But there was still $300 million of remaining debt, which we decided to hold to maturity.

Today we used $300 million of our cash to pay off this remaining debt.

Apple is now a debt-free company – for the first time in over a decade!

It sure feels good.
Steve