Blue Sky Dream (22 page)

Interstate 280, with its signs declaring itself to be “The World’s Most Beautiful Freeway,” had been our freeway full of station wagons. But now 280 was crowded with Mercedeses and BMWs, the drivers spelling out their arrogance on personalized license plates, one WIZKID after another wanting us to know IMRICH. Now we read in the newspaper that families like ours had gone out of style: The Valley was a national leader in the rate
of abortion, numbers of hours women worked outside the home, and the failure rate of marriage (well over half). We read of big deals sealed over cocaine and of assembly workers cranked on amphetamines (sometimes given to them by their supervisors). We learned that
work hard, play hard
, the code of the tribe of Woz, was driving people nuts. When one estimate suggested that two thirds of its workers were seeking some form of therapy, Apple Computer considered a money-saving move: Bring the psychotherapists into the workplace, under the company’s own roof.

My family certainly did not see itself in the microchip millionaires, the start-up upstarts, the coke-bingeing burnouts, the way Silicon Valley was rewriting the career objective on its résumé. My family clung to the code of the military contractor, the Valley’s pioneer code: sober reliability. Loosen up too much, and it might show up on the Lockheed polygraph. But pass every polygraph, and the badge you kept might insure you a job forever, might enable you to accumulate a comfortable pension as you lived snug in the folds of a corporation the United States government was determined to keep in business. Here is what we thought as we watched the tribe of Woz take over our Valley:

Why be ungrateful for a perfectly good enough life in the sun? Why risk wanting more?

When the front page said that the CEO of the Eagle computer company had died smashing his Italian sports car into a ravine on the day he’d taken his firm public, it seemed to us as fantastic—and cautionary—as an Old Testament story.

I
f Jerry Wozniak had been an accountant in Des Moines, Woz would not have invented a personal computer. Father and son agree on that.

“I probably wouldn’t have got the little electronics kit for Christmas in the third grade, you know?” Woz said.

“An accountant wouldn’t have talked about the things we
talked about,” mused Jerry. “An accountant wouldn’t even have known what Boolean algebra was.”

In this lesson of father begetting son resides truth on another level, for the Pentagon commanded the computer into being. The Pentagon, as well, commanded into being the microchip that made a personal computer possible. This not a story the tribe of Woz likes to tell itself, for we are now in the realm of blue sky mythology, legends of government mobilizing great minds to create great machines in the name of national security, national survival even. These stories have been told by Dirk Hanson in his book
The New Alchemists.
They include:

The story of Vannevar Bush, dean of engineering at MIT and eventual head of federal defense research during World War II, who believed that “in a scientific war, the scientists should aid in making the plans.” In 1930 he had seen the need for a machine that would calculate the path of an artillery shell. The computer of gears and cogs and rods that he and his team created they called a Differential Analyzer.

The story of British mathematician Alan Turing and ULTRA, the secret project he joined to decipher Nazi transmissions during the Second World War. Turing had theorized a machine that could think in Boolean logic. ULTRA’s engineers and scientists, giving flesh to Turing’s theories with vacuum tubes and photoelectric paper tape readers, cracked the Nazi codes and maybe won the war. They called their computer COLOSSUS.

The story of ENIAC, the computer begun in secret in 1943 by contract to the Army Ordnance Corps. Thirty tons, one hundred feet long, ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes to create memory and solve equations in record time. The problems ENIAC crunched were those of shooting down the enemy and tracing rocket trajectories, problems of warplane flight simulation, problems having to do with another secret project of national security: the making of the atomic bomb.

The stories of ENIAC’s postwar successor UNIVAC, whose development was funded by contracts from the Army, the Air
Force, and a company getting heavily into the intercontinental ballistic missile business, Northrop. The government bought the first three UNIVACs in 1948; not until 1954, when General Electric purchased one for data processing, was a UNIVAC owned by a private company. By then the bomb makers in Los Alamos had long owned their own version of the UNIVAC, which (fact and legend record) was named MANIAC.

The story of William Shockley and his transistor, technology that grew out of wartime radar research. The Pentagon was quick to see the benefits of solid state electronics as replacements for bulky, failure-prone vacuum tubes. In 1952 the Department of Defense bought nearly every one of 90,000 transistors manufactured by Western Electric and gave five million dollars for transistor research to General Electric, Raytheon, Sylvania, and RCA.

The story of the IC. The first integrated circuits on a chip, invented by Shockley disciples, were bought in the early 1960s almost entirely by the only customers who could afford them: the Pentagon and NASA and their contractors. Fairchild Semiconductor, which according to one of its executives achieved “liftoff” thanks to the Minuteman missile program, spun off many of the big chip makers in today’s Valley, including Signetics, American Micro Devices and Intel.

The story of IBM. Since the 1930s, Thomas Watson’s company had been supplying, as the name said, machines to business. But the company truly took off during World War II, growing four-fold, and at the dawn of the Cold War, Pentagon brass urged IBM to try to build a computer faster than the UNIVAC. The market for IBM’s first mass-produced computer was the military’s massive new radar network. That was the mid-1950s. By the end of the decade, IBM so dominated the government and corporate market for mainframe computers that an industry saying went: “IBM is not the competition. IBM is the environment.”

T
o a Lockheed family, IBM, a maker of machines of the future, seemed to confirm our sense of how that future would be organized, groomed, and dressed. IBM was bureaucracy honed to ultimate profitability. From the command post in the green countryside, the perfectly landscaped headquarters in Armonk, New York, the orders came down the line. The uniformed army marched forward in polished black shoes and dark blue suits and white shirts and drab ties, a force with close-shorn hair and clean shaves, overwhelmingly Protestant and white and male. Within headquarters, where memos ran thick with secret code words and flip-chart presentations were locked up every night, security was an obsession. In the labs and in the branch offices, employees were given to understand they had jobs for life, even though that meant Armonk, in its paternal wisdom, might move them to any part of the country at any time.

IBM seemed to prove the strength inherent in monolith, the rewards for discipline and loyalty. In fact, IBM ran its own schools of acculturation; within those classrooms, as recently as the early 1970s, employees were taught to sing hymns descended from this “IBM School Song.”

I found these lyrics reproduced in a 1975 book called
And Tomorrow … the World? Inside IBM.
The author, a British business reporter named Rex Malik, sifted stacks of internal IBM documents and interviewed hundreds of IBMers at almost the exact
moment that Woz was inventing the Apple computer in his garage. The conclusions Malik drew twenty years ago, he rendered with the funny, fierce sarcasm of a heretic thoroughly unimpressed with IBM’s then spectacular bottom line and the many books then celebrating IBM’s genius for modern organization. Foreshadowing what would become the accepted wisdom among today’s corporate strategists, Malik disparaged the IBM middle manager, the quintessential Organization Man, as no prototype productive American. Enemy to his own creative potential and, ultimately, to efficient enterprise, he was little more than a well-kept soldier in servitude to an empire conquered by monopolistic methods. Malik damned corporate IBM as decidedly “militaristic, in that there are sharply delineated boundaries to the duties and responsibilities that an executive will carry, the whole is carefully ranked in rigid hierarchy, and any action undertaken likely to change the strategic picture one iota has first to be cleared upwards: it is not an atmosphere to encourage independent decision-making.”

Malik furthered his case with this quote from a former Big Blue executive who had left to be president of a small company. “I know of no major decision I made in thirteen years at IBM that did not require six months of staff work. In my own business, no decision takes more than two days.

“I had a bizarre vision one night when I was thinking about my tombstone. It read ‘When he joined IBM it was a struggling $500 million company. When he got his gold watch, it was a $40 billion corporation. We think he helped, but we’re not sure.’ ”

This described the nightmare, of course, of a man who was presumptuous enough to want to be at the top, and so that man had left IBM for an uncertain life atop a small firm. IBM, at the time he did this, was a multinational juggernaut with well over 100,000 employees in America alone, 17,000 of whom were middle managers—17,000 gold watches to be given out someday, 17,000 eventual tombstones to be carved. What a believer in IBM might have said about that fellow’s “bizarre” vision, what a
Lockheed engineer who was thankful to have survived the layoffs after Vietnam might have pointed out, is that a man could have far worse written on his tombstone.

“T
otally, totally fun. New families had moved in and all the families had kids and we were the same age. There were kids all over, so many kids on our block, and we would just go up and down the block and run into each other and start riding bikes and agree to do something, go over to the school or something, and we had little clubs …”

Woz was remembering for me the feel of the neighborhood where he grew up. “Hardly anything existed and now every single thing has been taken for houses and shops and I miss that. That’s why I kept moving further and further into the mountains. I’ve had three homes. But it’s not the same. Because back then it was so great to be around kids. We were all great and sharp and bright and young. And lots of fathers worked in the same place, a company with the same sort of class orientation. It felt very
cohesive
, the neighborhood. The neighborhood was like a little island in the middle of orchards and I’ll never see that again probably. Just like the start of Apple. It was an incredible time and I’ll never see it again.”

Since that incredible time, Woz had seen much. Ten years after the start of Apple, he had quit, saying, “I’m at a point where I want to work on anything but computers. I would be amazed if I ever make another computer in my life.” He had married twice, both ending in messy divorces. He had learned to fly and had crashed his airplane, narrowly surviving. He had lost twenty million dollars on two rock extravaganzas, the US Festivals. He had traveled the world meeting leaders including Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev. He had decided to become a schoolteacher.

By that time, the tribe of Woz needed only the myth of Woz, not the person. In 1980, six years after the start of Apple, a
top strategist at IBM had concluded that Big Blue must get into the personal computer business, but that “we can’t do this within the culture of IBM.” Designers and marketers were plucked from the company’s ranks and told to go off alone and try to emulate the culture of the tribe of Woz. They had come back with the IBM PC.

In the autumn of 1994, Woz was complaining to me that a father found it difficult anymore to buy his son an electronics kit. Heathkit had folded, and Woz was constantly looking for what Jerry had given him, kits with switches and relays and buzzers that could be hooked together a thousand ways. Woz said that bright children like his son, Jesse, who was twelve, spent their time in front of the computer screen manipulating software, not delving into the circuitry within the machine as Woz had. I asked him if he felt nostalgic for his youth, if he considered his own son in some way deprived.

“I just wish I had his life!” Woz answered. “I wish I were he because then I could grow up with computers and with video games and I know these things are so great that I would have just loved them, being the person I was. And I didn’t have them.” Already at twelve, Jesse knew more about programming the personal computer than did its inventor. The son, in fact, was teaching the father the latest tricks of software, how to design pages and troll the Net and download software updates and play new games. “Anything I can do on a computer, he does it faster. That’s why,” Woz told me, “I wish I were ten years old.”