Return to the Little Kingdom (24 page)

While Wozniak busied himself developing some programs for the Apple, the issue of software spurred a vigorous debate at the club. Most computer hobbyists considered software, if not a birthright, certainly something that should be provided free of charge to anyone who displayed the derring-do and moxie to build his own computer. The programmers who wrote software disagreed. In an open letter to hobbyists, published in the Homebrew newsletter, Bill Gates, one of the developers of the original BASIC for the Altair, complained that though most of MITS customers possessed a copy of BASIC, only about one tenth had actually bought the program. “Without good software,” Gates wrote, “and an owner who understands programming a hobby computer is wasted. . . . As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.” Gates’s spirited defense of programmers’ rights fell on deaf ears though one club member did respond: “Calling all your potential future customers thieves is perhaps ‘uncool’ marketing strategy.”

Marketing was another thing that Wozniak couldn’t be bothered with. Most of the features he gradually added to the Apple conformed to his personal wishes. He added circuits for game paddles and sound so that Breakout could be presented in its full glory. Letters appeared on the screen in upper case because most of the keyboards used by Homebrew members could only cope with capital letters. Wozniak even wrote a routine to convert lower case to upper case. “We weren’t thinking very far ahead. We were going to put on a lower-case keyboard but we didn’t have time to get to it.” Similarly, the computer was designed to display only forty characters in a line because television screens couldn’t cope with any more.

Wozniak was not even certain that he wanted Jobs to sell his color computer. At the time Apple was formed, Wozniak had reached a verbal arrangement with Jobs and Ron Wayne that he would own all the rights to improvements in the Apple. For a time he entertained the idea of selling his enhanced version to the manufacturer of the Sol Terminal, Processor Technology. “I wasn’t sure that it was an Apple product.” The entire Wozniak household was skeptical about Jobs. Leslie Wozniak heard about him as “this schlunky looking guy with bare feet and dirty hair,” while her parents harbored more serious doubts about their older son’s business partner. Jerry Wozniak encouraged his son to think about other allies and offered to put him in contact with some of his own acquaintances. “We wondered about Steve Jobs,” Jerry Wozniak recalled. “We thought he was the type of person who felt he should always start right at the top and didn’t care to work his way up.”

 

These domestic clashes came to a head when, in the fall of 1976, two representatives from Commodore Business Machines arrived at Jobs’s garage and offered to buy Apple lock, stock, and prototype. The prospective purchasers were familiar faces. Both Chuck Peddle and Andre Sousan had previously dealt with Apple, and the former had led the team that designed the MOS Technology 6502. (Wozniak had bought his first 6502 from Peddle’s wife at the San Francisco trade fair.) While Wozniak made modifications to the Apple, Peddle had called at Jobs’s garage and had demonstrated the KIM-1, a single-board microcomputer developed by MOS Technology to help train engineers who would use the 6502 in elevators and household appliances. In the interim MOS Technology had been acquired by Commodore Business Machines, where Andre Sousan was vice-president of engineering. Both Sousan and Peddle were convinced that a computer like a modified Apple would allow their new employer to jump into the microcomputer field. Jobs also had his price. He wanted $100,000 for Apple, some Commodore stock, and salaries of $36,000 a year for himself and Wozniak.

In fact, a sale would have brought more money than either had ever contemplated and also relief from a year of fourteen-hour workdays. But the more inquiries Jobs made about Commodore, the more suspicious he became. He asked about Jack Tramiel, Commodore’s founder, who in the early seventies had been roundly cursed by the electronic-calculator industry for leading a savage price war and operating a chain of stores called Mr. Calculator. Jobs soon learned that when Tramiel started to bargain, he often fell back on a favorite saying: “There’s one thing closer to me than my shirt and that’s my skin.” Jobs was unimpressed. “The more I looked into Commodore the sleazier they were. I couldn’t find one person who had made a deal with them and was happy. Everyone felt they had been cheated.” For their part, Tramiel and Commodore Chairman Irving Gould decided they did not want to acquire Apple. Sousan recalled: “They thought it was ridiculous to acquire two guys working out of a garage.”

Yet Commodore’s approaches were the subject of long discussions between Jobs and Wozniak and there were bitter disagreements about how any proceeds should be divided. Jerry Wozniak entered the arguments and made his feelings quite clear. Mark Wozniak recalled the strength of his father’s opinions. “Dad got Jobs to cry a couple of times. He said he was going to make the little sonuvabitch cry and that’d be the end. He told him, ‘You don’t deserve shit. You haven’t produced anything. You haven’t done anything.’ It came close to the end.” Jobs felt miserable, was convinced that Jerry Wozniak sorely underestimated his contributions and told the younger Wozniak, “Woz, if we’re not fifty-fifty you can have the whole thing.” Eventually Jobs’s instincts prevailed and Commodore and Apple went their separate ways.

 

While the founders of Apple were fending off suitors, they were also busying themselves with further modifications to the computer. Jobs thought a quiet machine without a fan would sell better than some of the noisier computers that used fans to cool power supplies that were as hot as toasters. Wozniak had never been that interested in power supplies: When he and Fernandez developed the Cream Soda Computer it was the power supply that failed. When he and Baum designed the Data General Nova, they hadn’t even bothered to design a power supply. The power supplies for the Apple were afterthoughts. Power supplies were something to be plugged in at the last moment, something that could always be fished off a shelf at Haltek. The only time it was necessary to worry about a power supply was when it threatened to send a bolt of volts streaking through the computer—and blow out every sweetly tuned piece of digital electronics.

Power supplies belonged to an older, stodgier branch of electronics whose basic rules hadn’t changed that much since the early days of radio. Power supplies, like regulators and transformers, were analog devices, and there was an emotional and intellectual division between analog and digital electronics. Youngsters like Wozniak were much more interested in digital electronics, where change was more rapid. Their conceptual world was framed in terms of highs and lows and 1s and 0s and their lives circulated around handling solutions that were presented to them by the semiconductor manufacturers.

General-purpose engineers tended to be more adept at analog electronics, which drew from a wide range of scientific disciplines and required a more thorough grounding in mathematics and physics. Analog designers worried more about completeness, aware that the addition of a screw or the placing of a wire might affect the performance of their design. They fretted about current losses and were altogether a more circumspect, patient breed. Unlike digital designers who would exclaim “It works,” the analog designers would be more cautious, explaining, “It works within the bounds of the specs.”

So Jobs drove to Atari and asked Al Alcorn to recommend somebody who could help design a power supply that wouldn’t need a fan. He returned to the garage exploding with optimism, telling Wozniak and Wigginton that he had met the greatest analog designer in the history of the universe, an engineer who could design a power supply that would light up New York but still run off a six-volt battery. The subject of the excitement, Frederick Rodney Holt, was less confident about Apple. He met Jobs, surveyed all that was visible between hair and toe, and wondered whether Apple could afford to pay his consultancy fee. “I told him I was expensive. He said, That’s no problem.’ He just conned me into working.”

Holt started spending evenings and weekends at Apple, and Jobs and Wozniak discovered, once again, that appearances were deceptive. Holt looked as if he might have been the chief designer of a sci-fi machine that fired bolts of swizzle sticks. His face was creased with pleats; he had jade-colored eyes, a thatch of hair, and a bony frame that was usually decked in a turtleneck shirt, slacks, and waffle-stomper shoes. Thin fingers almost always held a Camel cigarette and were stained with the nicotine that gave him a raspy cough. But he was no dried-out, middle-aged engineer. Though old enough to be the father of both Wozniak and Jobs, Holt had first become a parent at the age of eighteen, a year after he had left home to marry the first of several wives.

As a youth he had inherited the complete works of Lenin from his grandfather, a Revolutionary Socialist who ran for governor of the State of Maine on the Eugene Debs ticket. And though Lenin came to share his teenage bookshelf with the works of Darwin, Holt decided that the triumph of the proletariat was infinitely preferable to the survival of the fittest. He found graduate work in mathematics at Ohio State lonely—“It was like playing chess with yourself”—edited a free-speech newspaper, and explored the private jealousies of radical-left splinter groups. He became national treasurer for the student portion of the National Coalition Against the War in Vietnam and was invited by a small New York publisher to write a book about the Logic of Marxism. But he was diverted by the call of politics and in 1965, when John Lindsay ran for mayor of New York City, Holt managed the rival campaign of a black taxi driver who stood as a Revolutionary Socialist. The duo succeeded in drawing far more attention from the FBI than from the New York electorate.

Alongside his political forays Holt developed an interest in both electronics and motorcycles. He developed, built, and installed some low-distortion hi-fi sets “with a lot of poop” and for almost ten years worked at an electronics company in the Midwest where he helped to design a low-cost oscilloscope. During evenings and weekends Holt graduated from riding motor scooters to Harley Davidsons and Triumphs, and from flat-track to illegal road racing. As the years passed and racers bought the latest motorcycles, Holt’s edge, which depended on his mechanical ability to modify stock machinery, began to evaporate. Nevertheless, when he moved to the West Coast from Ohio in the early seventies he installed his three motorcycles on a trailer and towed them across the country. In the spring of 1976 he abandoned racing because muscle-nerve damage in his thumbs prevented him from keeping a tight grip on the handlebars. The language of the motorcycle circuit still speckled his speech but his forced retirement and a bitter quarrel with a longtime friend at Atari nudged him toward Apple. “If I had still been racing motorcycles when Jobs came along, I probably would have told him to get lost.”

Holt found that Jobs and the unruly Apple computer presented intriguing problems: “It was a challenge to do something on a commercial scale that had never been done before. It was the kind of problem that has a certain intrinsic appeal to me.” However, Holt was not about to let any part-time consulting, no matter how interesting, interfere with his weekly game of pool. And Jobs and Wozniak soon discovered it was impossible to talk to Holt about any subject without finding that he was armed with something more than rudimentary knowledge. An off-the-cuff remark about the glaze on a piece of pottery was liable to provoke a discourse on chemical treatments. An admiring comment about a snapshot would prompt a discourse on photogravure techniques. Grumbles about the price of memory chips would spark a lecture on the evils of the capitalist system while a casual mention of poker was almost certain to produce a spirited card game. Holt, the youngsters at Apple soon noticed, was the sort of person who would want to be on speaking terms with an electron and was quite likely to sit down in a restaurant and, on the back of a napkin, prove that he didn’t exist.

Beyond the windows a long maroon steel beam hung carelessly from a crane. From the ground some laborers flashed earthy semaphore signals at the crane driver. The white crowns of their construction hats made bouncing mirrors of the sun. For the two dozen people seated around a U-shaped table in an anemic ground-floor office the noise of the work on Apple’s new corporate headquarters was sealed off by tinted windows. The drooping beam and the white hats were like a scene torn from a silent film on construction safety.

A few of the people at the meeting doodled and stared through the windows. About half were marketing managers from different divisions at Apple while the others came from the Chiat-Day advertising agency. John Couch, the head of the division making Lisa, sat anxiously on the edge of his seat. Fred Hoar, Apple’s vice-president of communications, smoothed his carefully combed auburn hair and Henry Whitfield stood beside an overhead projector. Others concentrated on Fred Goldberg as he made some remarks about the campaign that he and his colleagues at the advertising agency had prepared for Apple. Goldberg described some of the preparations for advertisements that would appear simultaneously with the company shareholders’ meeting where Lisa and the Apple IIes were to be formally introduced. He then started to outline a plan for advertising all of Apple’s computers.

“We’ve got a job to cut through the confusion and make a brand a brand,” Goldberg said. “We’ve got to build confidence among new users about which computers to use and when. Most people don’t just buy the computer. They buy the company, its size and the confidence it inspires.” He expressed some faith in the effect of the advertisements. “The running of around an announcement offers much less chance of backfiring than PR. When you run advertising you know what you’re going to get. Spending corporate money demonstrates corporate confidence in the product. It makes a statement when you spend your own money.”