Return to the Little Kingdom (12 page)

Wozniak had proved himself a master of the hardware terminal, the blue box. It was built from an original design and was capable of competing with the smartest around. He gave further evidence of his prowess by concealing a blue box inside the case of a Hewlett-Packard calculator. His command of software was more questionable. He didn’t devote the time needed to master the telephone system as thoroughly as some of the other phreaks, and though he eluded capture, many of his customers weren’t so lucky. In the informal hierarchy of phreaks, Wozniak fell more into the realm of hacker than phreak.

He didn’t even experiment with placing calls on AUTOVON, a telephone system used for military communications that was a playground for the hardened phreaks. One AUTOVON habitué, Burrell Smith, felt Wozniak “didn’t understand the network which takes devotion and a full-time passion.” There was another penalty: his college work. Though Wozniak had arranged a dream timetable of two courses that were taught one after another in the same lecture room on four afternoons a week, he found telephones more entertaining. By the summer of 1972, he had again fallen foul of a college dean and was receiving letters scolding him for his poor academic performance.

Bottles of apple juice, packets of potato chips, and plates of turkey, chicken, and salami sandwiches lay at one end of a long conference table. At the other end Steve Jobs, rigged out in shirt, tie, and corduroys, was tapping his feet on the rug and drumming his fingers against the tabletop. He was waiting to start a weekly lunch meeting with the managers of different departments in the Mac division. Bob Belleville, the head of engineering, Matt Carter, the head of manufacturing, Mike Murray, the marketing manager, Debi Coleman, the financial controller, Pat Sharp, Jobs’s personal assistant, and Vicki Milledge from the human resources department strolled into the room.

“C’mon! We’ve got a lot of shit to get through today,” Jobs said to the six managers as they chatted and sauntered around the table. He began to quiz Bob Belleville, the bespectacled engineer, about a dispute between two of his staff.

“What are you going to do about George eventually?” Jobs asked.

“Eventually,” Belleville replied in a mild tone, “I’ll be dead.”

“The only way we’ll keep George,” said Jobs ignoring the quip, “is to give him all the analog electronics. Unless he feels responsible for all analog electronics he’ll go somewhere else. He’ll get a great job offer to run engineering in some start-up.”

Belleville predicted that any such promotion would upset Hap Horn, another engineer who was working on a troublesome disk drive.

“If Hap blackmails you and says he’ll quit,” Jobs said, “you go by him. Once Hap gets off the critical path you ought to do it.”

“We need to finish this discussion off line,” Belleville said demurely.

Turning his attention to the long agenda, Jobs fretted about the production of instruction manuals. Activity in the publications department served as a rough barometer of progress since it monitored conditions between two fronts. One was formed by the gusty tinkering of the lab bench while the other loomed in the shape of the implacable introduction date.

“I see this stuff slipping and slipping out of pubs,” Jobs said turning to Michael Murray, the marketing manager. “They’re doing a great job but they’re not getting anything done. Get on top of it.” Murray nodded.

Jobs worked his way farther around the table and addressed Matt Carter, who was responsible for manufacturing the computer and monitoring progress at Apple’s factory near Dallas. “Can I suggest something?” Jobs said. He didn’t wait for a reply and his supplicatory tone evaporated. “Your group doesn’t interact with marketing or engineering. They’re not back in the lab. They’ve got to get into the spirit of Mac. Introduce them to everyone. You’ve got to push ’em into interaction.”

“I’m taking a party to Dallas,” Carter grinned. “So that they can interact the shit out of each other.”

Jobs abruptly changed the discussion to the growth of the division. Recruiting new people was a perennial feature of life at Mac and gobbled up much of the time of its senior managers. Jobs glanced at a sheet of paper and said: “We had forty-six people last month.”

“We’ve got sixty today,” corrected Vicki Milledge, the woman from human resources.

“God! Wow! We’re really cracking,” said Jobs.

“There’s been a whole trail of people through here,” Michael Murray observed and mentioned a candidate from Xerox. “She’s in the process of resigning from Xerox which takes much longer than interviewing at Apple.”

“When’s Rizzo going to let you know?” asked Jobs, referring to a candidate for the same position.

“He’s procrastinating,” said Murray.

“I’d pick Rizzo,” said Jobs. “He’ll get into the trenches faster. Get clear in your mind who you want.”

Murray dropped the name of a woman who was working for a venture-capital firm but had indicated she would take a $40,000 drop in salary to work at Apple.

“Is she beautiful and single?” Jobs inquired.

“She’s not single,” Murray chuckled.

“Are we interviewing for the Barbizon School of modeling?” Debi Coleman asked.

Jobs latched onto another name.

“He’s doing planning,” said Murray.

“He’s a venture capitalist,” retorted Jobs. “Sounds like a bullshit job to me.”

“What about Steve Capps?” asked Jobs.

“He works at Lisa,” Belleville remarked as though he wasn’t about to embark on a raiding mission at another division of the company.

“I heard through the grapevine he wants to work over here,” Jobs replied.

Matt Carter asked what his colleagues thought about a possible recruit for the manufacturing team, provoking Debi Coleman to venture, “He talked a good line. He asked the right questions.”

“His batteries are too low. I didn’t trust the guy,” Jobs said and immediately suggested an alternative. “They’ll like Duke a lot more. He’s awake. He’s more conservative, drives a two-eighty-Z and wears glasses.”

Vicki Milledge chipped in that she wasn’t allowed to have a secretary, or what at Apple was known as an “area associate.”

“Why not?” Jobs demanded.

“Because of the budget,” Milledge said.

“Screw ‘em,” Jobs retorted.

 

Pat Sharp, a woman with curly hair and spectacles, broached the subject of moving the division lock, stock, and barrel to a larger building. The Mac group was squeezed into one half of a single-story, red-tiled building, and some of its members worked in an annex. It was poised to move into another building on the opposite side of Cupertino’s Bandley Drive, a road Apple had turned into a corporate alley. Apple’s presence along the road was so pronounced that the buildings were known by the order in which the company had occupied them rather than by street numbers. “I was wondering about the layout,” Sharp ventured.

“I’m willing to spend a million bucks to fix up Bandley Three,” Jobs announced. “We’ll fix it up real nice and that’s it. That’s our final resting place. Put your energy into it. It’s going to be laid out for one hundred people. I don’t have any interest in running a division of more than a hundred and you’re not interested in working with more than a hundred. There will be no trailers, no outhouses, no nothing. If Bob wants a new software guy, someone else will have to go.”

“Can we put a weight room in or an exercise clinic?” asked Murray.

“No,” Jobs said. “We’ll have a few showers and that’ll be it. Think about what you want,” Jobs urged. “If the software or pubs people want private offices, now’s the time to think about it.”

He turned to a more immediate concern, a pilot build of two hundred Mac printed circuit boards that would be used for testing. Matt Carter reported the progress. “The kits are almost in. We’re going to stuff ’em next week.”

“Why don’t we order another twenty-five boards?” Jobs asked.

Debi Coleman agreed. “Is there any logic behind the two hundred? Last time we built fifty and then we wanted seventy-five.”

That reminder prompted Jobs to worry aloud that some of the existing printed circuit boards would fall into the hands of a competitor or one of the offshore firms that specialized in churning out low-priced, copycat computers. “I want to pull the first fifty and I want to trash them and have them compressed into a giant garbage compactor.

“When do we start building?”

He heard the date for the pilot-build start and was struck by another thought.

“What about beer busts?” he asked, referring to a recent party. “Do you want any more like that?” He paused briefly: “When’s our next party?”

“Christmas,” said Murray.

“That’s in January because everybody’s so busy,” said Jobs. “What about early November? What about a rock ‘n’ roll party? We’ve just had a square dance. Rock ‘n’ roll. Square dance. That’s the universe. We’ll have a Halloween rock ‘n’ roll dance.”

 

Carter told his colleagues that he was about to depart on a trip to the Far East to inspect possible parts suppliers and had already begun to place orders. Jobs exhaled at the news.

“This is like a train starting up that takes a quarter of a mile to stop and we haven’t even got the track laid.” He paused and turned to Carter and Belleville. “We’ve got to really test the main logic board. We’ve got to test hot and cold.” He slapped the table. “Details. Details. Details. There’s a lot more money in the digital board than the analog board. If we’re going to have a fuck-up let’s have it in the digital board.”

“We’re really in trouble with the analog board,” Carter countered. “Right now we’re being told it’ll be ready in forty-five days but we’ve yet to see diddly squat. We kicked ’em in the butt and they said they want ninety days. They’re going to have to bust ass even more than they think.” Carter returned to the need to place orders for parts and Jobs mentioned two suppliers: “I like Samsung better than Aztec. Can we negotiate with them?”

“We cannot take the risk,” said Carter. “We’ve got to give them both big incentives.”

The group moved on to consider the possible pricing of the computer. For some months the general aim had been to sell the computer for $1,995. Jobs wanted to be assured by the financial controller, that it would still meet Apple’s profit targets if it was priced at $1,495. Coleman, who had been considering what effect changes in price might have on sales volume, started to draw a graph and curves on a blackboard. Jobs watched for a moment, listened to Coleman as she explained her diagram, and said, “We could pull numbers out of our ass and do anything. Any curve is total crap. If you believe it you’re being fooled.”

“We could print it out on a blotter in color and it doesn’t mean a thing,” Murray echoed.

Jobs had a mischievous idea about how to test the effect of a $500 difference in price. “We should do some test marketing. We should drop the price in L.A. and raise the price in Seattle and hope the dealers don’t talk to each other.” He started to explain the conclusions of a task force Apple had established to set guidelines for building prices from profit targets: “There were eighteen million marketing and finance people who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing. We’re always going to make judgments and a lot of it is unknowable. So we just ended up with a rule of thumb for the rate of return we want.” He turned to Coleman and his voice rose half an octave. “Don’t drive us into the land of assholes with graphs. The last thing we want is people trying to out-Visicalc one another.”

Murray began to complain that whatever the price, Apple was not allocating anywhere near enough money to launch Mac. “If we were Kodak or Polaroid we’d have a giant pot of money to launch products.” Jobs played devil’s advocate and pretended he was in charge of the division selling Apple IIs and IIIs. “Let me put on another hat and play PCS manager. The only way I’m going to sell more Apple IIs is to merchandise the hell out of it. I don’t have a hot product. I don’t get free editorial. I don’t get the cover of
Byte
.”

“I’m trading futures,” Murray said.

“I’m paying the light bills,” Jobs said.

There was some talk of a sales meeting in Acapulco for Apple’s dealers and of a quarterly gathering of four hundred Apple managers at which Jobs was to give a report on progress with Mac. They sorted out which members of the Mac division should attend the two-day meeting. Then Vicki Milledge laughed nervously. She surveyed her boss and reported that all the managers, apart from Jobs, had given her performance reviews on their staffs.

“I hate doing reviews. I like salary increases,” Jobs explained.

“Into every good life some rain must fall,” Matt Carter said consolingly.

W
hen Steven Jobs started to sift through university brochures he showed that he was capable of both originality and obstinacy. He approached the task with all the stubbornness he had previously used to persuade his parents to move to Los Altos. Jobs had spent enough time hanging around the colleges that his older friends attended to conclude they were unsuitable. He thought that Berkeley, with its enormous lecture theaters, was a degree mill and he considered Stanford too staid. Eventually, after visiting a friend who was attending Reed College, a small, liberal, and expensive university in Portland, Oregon, Jobs decided he wanted to try life in the Pacific Northwest.

He returned from a tour of inspection and broke the news at home. Paul Jobs, horrified by the prospect of enormous tuition bills, remembered the gist of the discussion: “We tried to talk him out of it.” Clara Jobs had a blunter recollection: “Steve said that was the only college he wanted to go to and if he couldn’t go there he didn’t want to go anywhere.” So the senior Jobses buckled to some emotional blackmail, tucked their son into the back of their car, drove him to Reed, and said their farewells on a deserted campus a few days before the start of the 1972 school year. The parting was etched on Steven Jobs’s memory. “It wasn’t real cordial. I sort of said ‘Well, thanks, ’bye.’ I didn’t even want the buildings to see that my parents were there. I didn’t even want parents at that time. I just wanted to be like an orphan from Kentucky who had bummed around the country hopping freight trains for years. I just wanted to find out what life was all about.”