Return to the Little Kingdom (19 page)

He used some of the techniques he had used in designing the Computer Conversor terminal to make significant advances over earlier designs like the Cream Soda Computer. The most significant difference was, of course, the inclusion of the microprocessor. But there were other advances that also helped to make the computer easier to use. Instead of using switches to toggle instructions to the computer, Wozniak attached a typewriter keyboard. He also used some chips called PROMS (programmable read only memories), which stored instructions that previously had to be entered into the computer every time it was switched on.

He was precise about the way in which the chips for his computer should be laid out on the bread board. He spent hours working out where the chips should be placed before plugging the sockets, the cradles for the semiconductors, into the board. Wozniak was more meticulous than most engineers when it came to making the wire connections between the semiconductor pins. He disliked the popular “wire-wrapping,” which tended to wreath boards in a spaghetti jungle of wires, and favored “point-to-point” wiring, which required laboriously snipping and soldering lengths of wire between pins. The fastidious approach paid off when it came to troubleshooting and made it far easier to find troublesome pins and spot faulty connections.

Wozniak’s private interests consumed more and more of his time. He carted his prototype to work and spent much of his time at the lab bench making further refinements. Especially after Hewlett-Packard announced that the calculator division would be moved to Oregon, Tuttle said, “We spent half our time working on our pet projects.” Tuttle had also bought a 6502 and was also burning the midnight oil, taking his prototype home and trying another approach. With their prototypes built, Tuttle, Wozniak, and another colleague approached their lab manager to suggest that Hewlett-Packard consider making microcomputers. Tuttle recalled, “It was one of those informal meetings. It wasn’t a big deal. We just sort of asked for five minutes and showed Woz’s board. We were told, ‘HP doesn’t want to be in that kind of a market.’”

When Wozniak took his unnamed computer to the Homebrew Club it received another cool reception. That wasn’t surprising since a poll at one of the club’s meetings in October 1975 showed that of the thirty-eight computers belonging to members, twenty-five were either Altairs or used an 8080 while only one used a 6502. Wozniak hooked his computer to a black-and-white television, connected a board of 4K bytes of memory chips that Myron Tuttle had lent him, and patiently typed in the BASIC. There was a certain amount of surprise that BASIC would run on a machine with so few chips, but most of the club members didn’t even bother to inspect the computer. Wozniak passed out schematics to the few who were interested and later put his new machine in perspective. “It wasn’t as difficult as some of the other computers I had designed.”

The warm Sunday afternoon gloom pushed against the glass doors at the rear of the Mac laboratory. The air conditioning, which vibrated through the speckled ceiling tiles on weekdays, was turned off. The stuffy darkness was sliced in two places. A gentle light ballooned out of Andy Hertzfeld’s programming cubicle and a cube of cold neon lit an engineer’s bench where Burrell Smith was gnawing the skin of his knuckles. Hertzfeld slipped out of his cubicle and walked to the bench where Smith slid off his lab stool. Both stood lower than the head-light partitions that separated all the offices. They stared at a printed circuit board which, festooned with probes and wires, looked like a stomach pried apart with sutures, retractors, and hemostats. The probes were hooked to a logic analyzer and the rows of lines on its green screen monitored the signals emerging from the microprocessor.

Smith hadn’t gone home the previous day until 11:30 P.M. and then had stayed up until 3 A.M. thinking about why the Mac’s memory chips were not being recharged properly. Neither he nor Hertzfeld had worked on one project for quite as long before. The fatigue of designing a computer was printed on the pair and both were working harder than they had ever worked. Smith was twenty-six and Hertzfeld twenty-nine though both looked older. Behind his spectacles, Hertzfeld’s eyelids looked like swollen leeches while his cheeks were unshaven and pale. The pallid circles around Smith’s eyes bore the marks of late evenings. The same slack belts of fast food were strapped to their waists. Hertzfeld had found that developing a computer distorted time. “I used to think six months was a long time. But it’s not. It seems like an instant.”

Smith, his auburn hair tucked tight behind one ear and hanging in a thin curl beneath the other, tripped over his words in a frothy rush: “It’s so weird,” he complained to Hertzfeld. In a languid tone Hertzfeld asked, “How do you know that you’ve fixed it when you don’t know how it occurs?” Smith replied, “It’s so frustrating because I haven’t proved that I cannot solve the problem and I haven’t proved that I can solve it either.” Hertzfeld sighed. “We’re going to be getting into superstitions. We’re going to see that it works but we won’t be sure that it works.”

Smith had been trying to solve the puzzle for a couple of days. He had first noticed the computer wasn’t behaving properly while the rest of the engineers were celebrating what they thought was the completion of the first Mac prototype. Smith had ignored the champagne, which at Apple (and at the Mac group in particular) had a habit of appearing from behind even the thinnest milestone, and sat by himself looking at the computer. He had used a heat gun, which looked like a hairdryer, and a spray to heat and cool particular chips to temperatures where quirks were liable to appear more frequently. Smith had decided that the problem lay with the largest chip on the board, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor.

The 68000 and the other chips on the board were a tribute to the continuing advances in semiconductor technology. The 68000 was a sixteen-bit microprocessor, and consequently the Mac had about ten times as much computing power as the Apple II, though it used half as many chips. Smith compared the difference in complexity to watching an ordinary baseball game and then trying to follow the action in a game where eight batters hit simultaneously to fifty-four outfielders. He was perspiring and kept flicking frames onto the logic analyzer to inspect another frame showing the electronic signals from the clocks. He said, “You thrash around the design space long enough and you learn the idiosyncrasies.”

Some at Apple thought the entire Mac project reflected a parade of personal idiosyncrasies rather than any grand design. There was no plan of Napoleonic proportions. False starts, diversions, mistakes, experiments, rebellion, and competition formed the stuff of the machine. The Mac, like other products that rely on technological advances, the uncertain swings of a fast-growing company, and the proclivities of different managers, was something that Apple had been groping toward for several years. For almost two years it was one of those projects that could have foundered with the departure of a programmer or the appearance of a faulty prototype. Hertzfeld, who had watched the ups and downs, the delays in announcement, had formed his own conclusion about how to measure progress: “The time to completion,” he had decided, “is a constant.”

 

The starting point turned into the only sure point of reference. In the middle of 1979 the manager of Apple’s publications department, Jef Raskin, was asked to take charge of a small group that would build a computer to sell for $500, work through a television set, contain a built-in modem, and be able to run both the Pascal and BASIC languages. Raskin, misspelling the name of his favorite apple, code-named the project Macintosh and dreamed up his own idea for a computer. “I thought it was more important to give people a choice of case color than a choice between the number of bytes of memory. I wanted it to become an indispensable part of a house. I wanted something that people would become addicted to.” Raskin suggested that Apple produce a battery-powered portable home computer that would sell for under $1,000. He built a cardboard mock-up and decided that the computer should have a built-in screen, should not contain any expansion slots, and should be accompanied by a thin manual. A year or so after starting work on the project he noted, “Apple II is a system. Macintosh is an appliance.”

Raskin, a chunky, bearded man with a soft spot for model airplanes and music, set up shop in late 1979 and shuffled among several buildings, including Apple’s original office suite near the Good Earth Restaurant. In early 1981 Raskin, as Hertzfeld re-called, ran afoul of Apple politics. “The Lisa team in general told Steve to fuck off. Steve said, ‘I’ll get this team that’ll make a cheap computer and that will blow them off the face of the earth.’ Then Steve saw that Raskin had critical mass: He had a hardware engineer and a software engineer. Since Steve was a bigger kid than Raskin, he said, ‘I like that toy!’ and took it.”

Raskin quickly fell victim to Jobs, who wanted to impose his own imprimatur on the project. Jobs added veterans from the early days of Apple to Raskin’s team. He tried to change the code-name of the project from Mac to Bicycle after reading a
Scientific American
article that described the personal computer as the bicycle of the twenty-first century. But he backed off when his group protested. After taking control of Mac, Jobs made his intentions clear. He bet John Couch, the head of the Lisa division, $5,000 that Mac would ship first.

At first, Smith and Hertzfeld eyed Jobs with suspicion. The former had been raised in upstate New York where he had studied literature at junior college and become interested in a UNIVAC computer and phone phreaking. The first electronic device he had ever built was a blue box, which he constructed on his mother’s kitchen table. “I reckoned it was impossible to find it on the street and I wanted the satisfaction of building my own.” For phone phreaking he adopted the name Marty, and when he first visited California he stayed with John Draper. He attended some Homebrew meetings and, on moving permanently to California, built an office control system for doctors and dentists and bought a Commodore Pet because he couldn’t afford an Apple. Out of work, he helped a friend build a wall and was touring companies in a borrowed truck when he was offered a job as a technician in Apple’s service department. He repaired Apple IIs by day and studied the schematics at night. “I wanted to find out how the board worked by myself. I had almost subconscious dreams that I’d be dealing with logical elements in some way. I was always driven down to the lowest level of the system. I don’t like working on things if I don’t know how they work.”

Smith was fished from the service department by a programmer who recognized his talent and recommended him to Raskin. By the spring of 1980 Smith had designed a prototype based on an eight-bit microprocessor. For about six months, the computer languished with no software. A programmer hired to write some of the software placed unshakable faith in the computer languages used in artificial intelligence work and had little sympathy for the demands of microcomputers. Then Smith started working with the Motorola 68000 and by Christmas of 1980 had developed a second Mac. Hertzfeld, who was working on software for the Apple II, watched these changes with mounting envy. One night he stayed late and wrote a small program that produced a picture of Mr. Scrooge and the greeting: HI BURRELL.

 

Hertzfeld had grown up in Philadelphia and started programming when he was fifteen. “I was amazed you could get this typewriter to do such-neat things.” He studied science and mathematics at Rhode Island’s Brown University and moved to Berkeley because he wanted to live in California and preferred the prospect of graduate studies to corporate life. He bought an Apple II six months after it appeared and nursed an impatience with some of his fellow students. “They were people who didn’t like programming. They liked talking about programming.” He wrote an I Ching game and took it to a local computer club, designed a peripheral for the Apple II and was startled when he found out how much some of the computer companies were paying. “I didn’t think it was the sort of thing you did for money. Now I’ve been corrupted by money and by thinking how much I can make.”

Smith and Hertzfeld had gradually learned to live with Jobs and he with them. It was a delicate set of relationships glued together by the fact that they all needed each other. Hertzfeld and Smith worked around Jobs’s unpredictable nature. Hertzfeld explained, “He’d stop by and say, ‘This is a pile of shit’ or ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ The scary thing was that he’d say it about the same thing.” The pair floated in the uncertainty of whether Jobs liked them or whether he just liked them for the jobs they were performing. And Hertzfeld, three years after the start of the project, admitted, “I like working for Steve because of Mac but I don’t know if I like him.”

 

Yet Jobs had instilled an urgency into the Mac project and his influence within the company had given it increasing prominence. One of the programmers who worked on the early stages of Mac had nicknamed Jobs “the reality distortion field” and the sci-fi moniker had stuck. Jobs had many of his group believing they were building another Apple II and his faith was almost strong enough to persuade them that they were working in a garage when all the tangible evidence suggested otherwise.

Like all employees, Smith and Hertzfeld had grumbled about their boss. They complained that Jobs forbade them to show Mac to their friends while he paraded visitors, including his one-time flame, folk singer Joan Baez, through the lab. Their irritation mounted when it took Jobs months to concede that the Mac screen and 64K bytes of memory were too small before he ordered a redesign. They mumbled some more when Jobs refused to give them permission to sell a mouse interface for the Apple II. When Jobs arranged for the programmer developing the word processor for the Mac to receive a royalty of $1 for every copy sold, tempers rose. It had not taken Hertzfeld and Smith long to figure that, given Apple’s ambitions for the computer, the word processor would leave its author with larger tax problems than they were contemplating. Smith worried that Jobs wasn’t thinking boldly enough about future computers and, on hearing that the Mac group would move into a building occupied by personal computer systems division, muttered, “It says, ‘Thanks guys,’ but now you’re just like all the rest. You’re just ordinary guys. Mac will become another PCS and we’ll be just another big company.” On several occasions Hertzfeld had threatened to quit but each time Jobs had persuaded him to stay.