Return to the Little Kingdom (29 page)

The advert left no misunderstanding about the ideal micro-computer:

Wozniak described the computer’s software BAZIC: “Without software a computer is no more than a racing car without wheels, a turntable without records, or a banjo without strings. The best thing of all about BAZIC is the ability to define your own language. . . a feature we call perZonality. TM.” And there was a glowing portrait of the hardware: “We really thought this baby out before we built it. Two years of dedicated research and development at the number ONE microcomputer company had to pay off, and it did. A computer engineer’s dream, all electronics are on a single PC card, even the 18-slot motherboard. And what a motherboard.”

With its corporate logo on the spoof and a coupon offering prospective customers trade-in allowances on their Altairs, the MITS management was not amused. It frantically stamped FRAUD and NOT REAL on all the brochures it could find. Finally, despite the $400 he had sunk into the prank, Wozniak began to get nervous, and worried that thousands of computers would be returned to MITS, he and his accomplices dumped cartons of dummy ads down stairwells.

Jobs picked up one of the advertisements and started to examine the details of the surprising new competitor—which Wozniak had plotted in a chart against machines like the Sol, IMSAI, and Apple beneath the line: “The mark of a microcomputer champ is performance.” Wozniak and Wigginton, who couldn’t smother their giggles, slid out through a side door, leaving Jobs inside gasping, “Oh, my God! This thing sounds great.” Jobs looked at the detailed rankings given in a performance chart on the back, discovered that the Apple II ranked third behind the Zaltair and the Altair 8800-b, and with an air of intense relief, sighed, “Hey, look! We didn’t come out too bad.”

T
he spray of a public splash is made of facades, gestures, and illusions. At the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977 Apple Computer, Inc., appeared a lot larger than the actual little business that moved out of the Jobses’ garage into a shingled office building at 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino. The office, Suite E-3, was smaller than a tract home and was barely a mile from the homes of Jobs’s and Wozniak’s parents. It was separated from Homestead High School by Interstate 280 and was a stone’s throw from the crossroads where the Cali Brothers’ muddy-colored silos were corralled by stores and subdivisións. Apple’s neighbors were a Sony sales office, an employment agency, a weight-loss clinic and a teachers’ organization. A plasterboard wall was run down the center of Apple’s rented quarters to separate half a dozen desks from the lab and assembly area. It was in these cramped surroundings, two hundred feet from the Good Earth Restaurant, that Apple’s founders and their hired hands turned their attention from the cosmic to the parochial.

For almost a year the men in Cupertino concentrated on controlling Apple’s bodily functions. They were building everything from scratch and had to settle on details and procedures which they had either never encountered or had always taken for granted. To provide some sort of framework, Markkula, for the first three months of 1977, concentrated on Apple’s business plan.

He turned for guidance to John Hall, a group controller at Syntex, a Palo Alto pharmaceutical company. Markkula and Hall were casual acquaintances. They had met at a couple of parties, shared some common friends, and bumped into each other on ski slopes in the California Sierras. Markkula knew that Hall had helped other young companies with their business plans and he asked him to do the same for Apple. Hall took a two-week vacation from Syntex and holed up with Apple’s principals for hours of meetings at the local eateries: the Good Earth Restaurant and Mike’s Hero Sandwiches. Scott helped Hall cost out a bill of materials and project manufacturing costs. Jobs provided details of contracts with parts suppliers and Wozniak and Holt were consulted for advice on engineering matters.

For grander marketing strategy Hall and Markkula rubbed a hazy crystal ball and decided that the Apple II would launch a three-pronged assault. They thought the machine would be sold to home-computer hobbyists and to professionals like dentists and doctors who had previously shown a weakness for gadgets like programmable calculators. They also planned to develop the Apple as a control center for the home, linked to comforts like automatic garage doors and lawn sprinklers. Hall recalled, “We felt that we needed three tenets for a business plan. But I didn’t believe the business plan and Mike Markkula didn’t believe it. I felt it was a weak plan strategically.” Hall’s skepticism was so great that when Markkula asked him to become Apple’s vice-president of finance, he declined. “I couldn’t afford the risk of joining a screwy company like Apple.” However, he did ask Markkula whether Apple would pay in stock for his consulting work. When Markkula demurred, Hall accepted a check for $4,000.

 

As the business plan took shape, Scott turned to familiar faces for help. Apple’s first receptionist, secretary, and general factotum was Sherry Livingston, a perky, bright woman who had worked for him at National Semiconductor. Uncertain about Apple’s prospects, Livingston was only convinced of its staying power after Markkula tugged open a drawer stuffed with orders. Gene Carter, who had been Scott’s boss for a while at Fairchild, was looking for a job and became head of Apple’s sales and distribution. When Scott wanted somebody to mind the books he turned to Gary Martin, a cheerful, gossipy accountant who had also worked for him at National. Martin took a look at the Apple II and thought, “Who the hell is going to want this thing? I felt so sorry for Scott I tried to buy him lunch.” Eventually, Martin decided to try Apple for a month, knowing that his boss at National had promised not to turn in his security badge.

Others came of their own accord. Wendell Sander, a shy engineer-cum-sleuth at Fairchild, had become intrigued by Apple after adding some memory chips of his own design to the Apple I. He wrote a
Star Trek
program to amuse his children, demonstrated it to Jobs while Apple was still in the garage, and eventually, after thirteen years with Fairchild, decided to let his passion guide his star. “If they had folded I could have got a job the next day. There wasn’t much personal risk apart from the chance of getting a bruised ego. My career would not have vanished.” Jim Martindale, a colleague of Jobs’s at Atari, was hired to look after production while Don Bruener, a high-school pal of Randy Wigginton’s, became a part-time technician. Jobs’s college friend Dan Kottke graduated from college and became Apple’s twelfth employee, and Elmer Baum started working in the final assembly area. Scarcely anybody considered that the decision to join Apple was risky. Instead they all seemed to feel that the greatest risk was to stay put and do nothing.

As the newcomers arrived, through the late spring and summer of 1977, they found themselves in a small business that had bound itself to some visible public promises. An advertisement in the February 16, 1977, issue of the Homebrew newsletter promised delivery of the Apple II no later than April 30, 1977. Markkula had also decided that Apple could save itself a lot of bother by offering Apple I owners a choice between a full refund or replacement with an Apple II. The arrival of age, or at least what passed for age in Silicon Valley, brought a sense of rigor to Apple. Blending experience with exuberance proved to be a troublesome task, but it was also a fortunate combination. Experience helped temper impulse and instill a sense of discipline while innocence inevitably questioned convention and authority.

Wozniak, Jobs, Holt, Markkula, and Scott were all alert to technical matters and tended to understand the size and implications of electrical problems that cropped up. But they also had serious differences and had to work through the clashes that occurred between men whom a Hollywood screenwriter might have labeled The Hobbyist, The Rejector, The Fixer, The Pacifier, and The Enforcer. At the outset, they shared none of the experience that comes from surviving mistakes and weathering trouble. Holt felt, “There wasn’t much trust at all. The question was not of trusting each other’s honesty but each other’s judgment. You might score seventy percent all round. It was a business not a family affair.”

Almost from the start Scott and Jobs irritated each other. Scott, in his curious position as corporate caretaker and the guardian of Apple’s internal affairs, became Jobs’s first encounter with an unbending authority. Before Scott’s arrival Jobs had done anything he wanted. After Scott became president, Jobs found his boundaries were prescribed. The pair approached life from different angles. Scott thought experience was more valuable than native wit while Jobs was convinced that most problems could be solved with a proper application of intelligence. Scott admired Jobs’s optimism, his exuberance and energy and gradually learned to appreciate his sense of style. But he also decided, “Jobs cannot run anything. He doesn’t know how to manage people. After you get something started he causes lots of waves. He likes to fly around like a hummingbird at ninety miles per hour. He needs to be sat on.” Scott squelched Jobs at every turn and one of the earliest mechanical chores provoked a clash. Scott handed out official employee numbers to go along with some laminated-plastic security badges. Since, in Scott’s mind, the computer gave birth to the business he assigned Wozniak number one, Jobs number two, Markkula number three, Fernandez number four, Holt number five, and Wigginton number six, reserved number seven for himself, and gave Espinosa number eight. Everybody, apart from Jobs, was satisfied with the order.

“Am I number one?” he asked Scott.

“No. Woz is number one. You’re number two.”

“I want to be number one,” Jobs insisted. “Can I be number zero? Woz can be number one. I want to be number zero.”

Number Zero and Number Seven also found much to differ about in the diurnal flow. Wigginton watched from the sidelines. “Jobs had strong ideas about the way things should be done, and Scotty had the right way, which didn’t happen to be Jobs’s and there was the inevitable fight.” They differed over the way materials should be moved from one section to another, how the desks should be positioned, and what color laboratory benches should be ordered. Jobs wanted white because he felt it would be better for the technicians and engineers. Scott wanted gray because he knew those benches would be cheaper and easier to get. Gary Martin, the accountant, watched another spat shortly after he joined Apple. “They got into a roaring argument over who should sign some purchase orders. Jobs said, I got here quicker than you. I’ll sign them.’ Then Scotty said, I’ve got to sign them,’ and then he threatened to quit.”

In the quieter moments following Scott’s arrival Jobs looked after purchasing and some of the fixtures and continued to press for quality. When an IBM salesman delivered a blue Selectric typewriter instead of the neutral color he had specified, Jobs erupted. When the phone company failed to install the ivory-colored telephones Jobs had ordered, he complained until they were changed. As he arranged delivery schedules and payment terms, Jobs humiliated a lot of suppliers. Gary Martin watched. “He was very obnoxious to them. He had to get the lowest price they had. He’d call them on the phone and say, That’s not good enough. You better sharpen your pencil.’ We were all asking. ‘How can you treat another human being like that?’”

 

Elsewhere a natural division occurred between the older engineers with experience of some of the headaches of manufacturing and the younger ones who were eager to get a prototype running and content to leave the duller polishing and finishing to others. One programmer recalled, “There wasn’t any sense of fear. Anybody could call anybody an asshole. It wasn’t assumed we were doing the right thing. We had to prove we were doing the right thing.” Wozniak never had much of a reputation for finishing the last part of anything. For him and some of his younger accomplices the difference between a prototype dangling cords and trailing wires and a completed machine verged on the academic. Anyone worth his salt, they argued, would obviously be capable of fixing a computer that was a little bit flaky.

Holt, on the other hand, was like a mother hen, pecking and scratching until he was convinced everything worked and he knew what it would cost to build. It was Holt who insisted everything be “up to spec.” It was Holt who accompanied Jobs to Atari to find some modulators, little devices that connected a computer to a television set. It was Holt who clipped an oscilloscope to the computer to check the signals running from the microprocessor to the memory chips and the cassette recorder. It was Holt who insisted, after Wozniak had dreamed up some new approach, that he explain, demonstrate, and draw diagrams of the design. Holt said, “I hardly ever trusted Woz’s judgment.” Holt also discovered the way to Wozniak’s heart. “The only real trick to get Woz working on something was to become his audience or get him an audience.”

Meanwhile, Markkula and Scott had exerted his own pressure on the engineers and programmers. When the young programmers were more interested in cobbling together short demonstration programs to illustrate the power of the computer, Markkula insisted that they start work on programs people could use. To show the depth of his concern, Markkula did much of the tedious work on a program that would let people balance their checkbooks. He also brought a quieter style. When Wozniak was compiling a scoring system for Breakout and wanted to include BULLSHIT as a comment for low scores, Markkula persuaded him that there was a call for something more refined. When the first computers were ready to ship, Scott forced the youngsters to tack together an abbreviated version of BASIC so that Apple could start to ship machines accompanied by a computer language.