Return to the Little Kingdom (20 page)

Yet Jobs exercised many paternal touches. He had presented Hertzfeld and Smith and other members of the Mac group with medals and helped make a ritual out of outings to sushi bars. When a programmer fell ill, he called the hospital frequently. He dropped by the Mac lab over the weekends and took evident pleasure in personally delivering envelopes containing stock options. He had contemplated inviting actress Brooke Shields to attend a Christmas party and chuckled at how her appearance would make Hertzfeld and Smith blush. Jobs was shrewd enough to know that he could tantalize both Hertzfeld and Smith. “Andy,” Jobs concluded, “is struggling with himself. He wants to make some money and he wants to be famous.”

Fame and the notoriety that had come to surround Jobs and Wozniak and the programmers featured in Tracy Kidder’s best-selling book
The Soul of a New Machine
worked as powerful stimulants. Smith’s business card read HARDWARE WIZARD and Hertzfeld’s SOFTWARE ARTIST and the two speckled their speech with the engineer’s equivalent of fighter pilots’ muscle talk such as kludge, glitch, and hairy edge. Hertzfeld, like Wozniak, talked about his audience and said, “The energy of all the people who will use Mac reverberates into the programming.” To help ensure his prize duo and forty-five other members of the Mac group an encounter with posterity, Jobs had their signatures embossed on the inside of the mold for the case.

One result of this emotional fandango, the grueling work and the daliance with fame, was that Hertzfeld and Smith had become close friends. They enjoyed what Smith, with his tendency to reduce everything to initials, called a BFR: a Best Friend Relationship. Sometimes they daydreamed about leaving Apple and starting their own company. Yet every time Jobs asked for something, they worked day and night until it was completed. Smith had embarked on a six-month diversion to squeeze a lot of circuits onto one custom-designed chip. When the effort failed, he had to re-design Mac all over again. On one Friday evening Jobs had threatened to remove some chips that controlled the computer’s sound unless they worked by the following Monday. Hertzfeld and Smith had straightened with alarm and worked through the weekend, and by the Monday morning the sound worked. These were the sort of management tactics (coupled with the difficulty of finding rewards to top riches and fame) that were calculated to burn out engineers.

Hertzfeld and Smith had suspended the rest of their lives until they completed Macintosh. They had no girlfriends, and they spent their Sundays hunched over a printed circuit board or behind a computer terminal. And on this one Sunday, Smith, as he had on dozens of previous occasions, had decided to abandon sleep until he had solved the problem. “Having friends,” he said, “is orthogonal to designing computers. When they call, I find myself hanging up on them.”

W
hile Wozniak completed the design of his computer, Jobs fluttered in the background, flitting in and out of Call Computer and continuing to work at Atari where he was asked to produce a device that would generate horoscopes from tidbits of information about dates and places of birth. The computing power needed to chart the progress of an individual with the course of the planets proved too much and the project fizzled. Jobs was uncertain about what he wanted to do and was unhappy about one obvious path. “I didn’t see myself growing up to be an engineer.” Though he nursed secret dreams of buying a BMW 320i he was uneasy about the prospect of being pulled into an orbit of cars and houses. Instead he fell back on his natural inquisitiveness and spent two semesters auditing a physics course offered by Stanford for gifted freshmen. Jobs left his mark on Mel Schwartz, the professor who taught the class. “Very few people turn up who say they want to learn something. I was impressed by Steve’s enthusiasm. He was really interested and curious.”

Unlike Wozniak, Jobs found the nitpicking technical debates of the Homebrew Club unappealing. He attended a few meetings but was bored by the chitchat about timing cycles, direct memory access, and synchronous clocks. Yet he kept close tabs on Wozniak’s battles with his computer. When the two talked on the telephone, they almost always chatted about developments or problems with the machine. When they met, or when Jobs visited Wozniak’s home, it was always the computer that formed the central topic of conversation. Jobs analyzed the reason why he and Wozniak, the proverbial odd couple who were separated by age, temperament, and inclination, could stay friends, and observed, “I was a little bit more mature for my age and he was a little less mature for his.”

During January and February 1976 Jobs started to badger Wozniak about the possibility of making and selling some printed circuit boards so that others could build their own versions of the computer. Wozniak had not contemplated doing anything apart from handing out schematics of the machine to any Homebrew members who were interested. “It was Steve’s idea to hold them in the air and sell a few.” Jobs entertained the notion of a fleeting, informal venture that would be more of a partnership between friends than a proper company. There was no talk of Wozniak leaving Hewlett-Packard or of Jobs severing his casual arrangement with Atari. Jobs’s thoughts about the possible market were limited to a few friends, members of the Homebrew Club, and one or two stores. The pair didn’t consider permits, licenses, insurance contracts, and other legal demands because their idea of a company extended as far as the bylaw that required new partnerships to place a small formal advertisement in a local newspaper.

The two tossed around names for their company. One afternoon, driving along Highway 85, between Palo Alto and Los Altos, Jobs, summoning the shades of his dietary regime and his rural life in Oregon, suggested they call the company Apple Computer. Try as he might Wozniak couldn’t improve on the suggestion. “We kept trying to think of a better name but every name we came up with wasn’t any better.” They played with the sound of names like Executek and Matrix Electronics but the simplicity of Apple always seemed more appealing. For a few days the two wondered whether their choice would land them in a legal wrangle with Apple Records, the Beatles’ recording company, and Jobs worried that Apple Computer was altogether too whimsical for anything that even pretended to be a company. Eventually, anxious to place the partnership advertisement in the
San Jose Mercury
Jobs issued an ultimatum. “I said, ‘Unless we come up with something better by five P.M. tomorrow, we’ll go with Apple.’”

Jobs reckoned that it would cost about $25 to make each printed circuit board and that if all went well they might be able to sell a hundred for $50 apiece. They agreed that each would contribute half toward the $1,300 or so that Jobs reckoned the printed circuit board would cost. Neither had much money. Wozniak was earning $24,000 a year at Hewlett-Packard but was spending most of it on his stereo system, records, and the computer that had a way of gobbling up parts. His checking account at a Cupertino bank oscillated between black and red and his landlord, fed up with receiving checks that bounced, was insisting the rent be paid in cash. Jobs, meanwhile, was carefully guarding the $5,000 he had saved from his work at Atari.

To provide most of his share, Wozniak decided to sell his HP 65 calculator for $500. He knew that Hewlett-Packard was about to announce an enhanced version, the HP 67, that would be available to employees for $370. “I figured I had a profit and a better calculator.” The buyer, however, paid Wozniak only half the agreed price. Jobs had a similar problem when he decided to use some of the $1,500 he made from selling a red and white Volkswagen bus. This particular piece of foreign machinery had never been given the parental seal of approval. Paul Jobs had accompanied his son on the original purchase mission, taken one look at the Volkswagen, and concluded, “It was a tired, gutless thing that wouldn’t go anywhere.” He told his son that Volkswagen vans tended to have problems with wheel bearings and the reduction-gear mechanism but his advice wasn’t heeded. The younger Jobs planned to fix any problems and bought a book called
How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive! A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot
. Eventually, when the van proved too troublesome he buckled to his father’s advice and sold the van after it passed some checks at an automotive diagnostic center. Paul Jobs chuckled quietly when “two weeks later the guy came back with the engine in a bucket.” Steve Jobs promptly offered to share the cost of repairs and his $1,500 nest egg dwindled.

Jobs, never coy about offering his opinion, watched Wozniak make some modifications to the computer. Rather than rely on somebody else’s board of memory chips, Wozniak decided to build his own. For the hobbyists the design of a reliable memory board was a persistent bugbear and the memory frequently came to mean the difference between a reliable and erratic machine. The memory chips were just as complicated to manage as the microprocessor and marrying the two—the most important parts of the machine—brought no end of trouble. A defective memory chip could blow out the computer and the quirks lurking in the rows of memory chips were notoriously tough to pinpoint. Wozniak was choosing his memory chips at a time when all the leading semiconductor companies were fighting to establish an industry standard for them. There were pronounced differences in technology, performance, and price among the chips, so picking the right chip was a bit like betting on a poker game. Wozniak plumped for a chip that he had spotted at the Homebrew Club, one that was made by American Microsystems Inc., a Santa Clara company. Jobs was appalled by the choice, thought Wozniak could do better, and embarked on a search for a brand-new Intel chip that hadn’t filtered through to the electronics-supply stores.

Both the chips were dynamic RAMs and far superior to the static RAMs that were the standby of most hobbyists. Dynamic RAMs consumed less power than static RAMs and, in the long run, were also cheaper. However, they were far more complicated and most computer hobbyists clung to the adage, “Static memory works; dynamic memory doesn’t.” The crucial difference between the two parts was that information stored on dynamic chips would disappear unless it was refreshed with bursts of electricity every two thousandths of a second while the static RAMs didn’t require regular shock therapy. The Intel chip was also compatible with the logic used by microprocessors, had fewer pins than the AMI chip, eventually became the industry standard—and Jobs’s instinctive choice turned into a considerable triumph. Wozniak recalled long debates about the proper memory chip—“Steve was pushing to use the right part. We were lucky to be on the right track. It was one of the luckiest technology steps on the whole development. All the other hobby computers were using 2102 1K static RAMs.”

 

While Jobs was pushing from one direction, Wozniak found that Alex Kamradt was tugging from another. In the spring of 1976 Kamradt and his small team were still trying to convert the terminal Wozniak had designed during the summer of 1975 into a reliable product for Computer Conversor. Kamradt telephoned Wozniak at work and at home and buttonholed him at the Homebrew meetings. But he found that Wozniak was more interested in adding features to his new computer than in completing an old design. Kamradt also had to contend with the full persuasive power of Jobs who was imploring Wozniak to place his faith in Apple rather than in the uncertain prospects of Call Computer. To add conviction to his argument, Jobs introduced Wozniak to Ron Wayne, a field sales engineer at Atari responsible for making sure that prospective video-game distributors were up to snuff. Wayne had casually agreed to help Jobs come up with a motif for Apple and to draw schematics to accompany the printed circuit board. Jobs argued that Wozniak’s computer was doomed if he placed it in Kamradt’s hands. He insisted that the prospects for the machine were far brighter if it was produced by an alliance of Wozniak, Jobs, and Wayne.

Wayne was in his early forties, a portly man with boyish curly hair that was turning gray. At the end of the sixties he had started a company in Nevada to design and build slot machines, but it had failed during the business recession in the early seventies. Strapped for money, Wayne had borrowed $600 to finance a trip to California and eventually earned enough to pay off his debts. By the time that Jobs approached him for advice about Apple, Wayne believed he’d “had enough failures to be a very smart fellow.” He was also a strong believer in the permanent mark that engineers could leave on the world and liked to talk about “multifaceted, holistic engineering.” A bachelor, Wayne lived alone in Mountain View where he was reading books about economic disasters and debasement of currencies. He had become convinced that the global economic system was on the brink of collapse and had started to protect himself from imminent doom by collecting rare stamps, old coins, and gold. He was also building an eight-foot-long replica of a Jules Verne nautical clock from carefully carved slices of cardboard. Though he found semiconductors and integrated circuits objects of complete mystery, Wayne was lassoed into helping Jobs muster arguments to prevent Wozniak from falling into Kamradt’s grasp. Wayne consoled Wozniak and explained that the skilled engineer would always be remembered if he teamed up with the right marketer. He pointed to the way Eiffel had left his name on a tower, and Colt his name on a gun.

Wozniak was not easily swayed. The trio sat up late into the night arguing about the form of the proposed partnership. Wayne suggested they should balance the equity of their investments with the merit of invention. It was an idea that appealed to Jobs, but Wozniak had problems coming to grips with twentieth-century notions of property. He wanted complete freedom to use his design tricks and was worried that Hewlett-Packard would assign him to a project where he would need to rely on some of the ploys he had used in the Apple. Wayne thought, “It was almost as if Wozniak would condescend to allow Apple to use these principles but he wanted to reserve the right to sell them to other people.”