Return to the Little Kingdom (31 page)

Jobs had his own troubles. In the summer of 1977 he, Dan Kottke, and his high-school flame, Nancy Rogers, toured Cupertino, inspecting houses and giggling at the types they called Rancho Suburbio. Eventually they found a four-bedroom house belonging to a Lockheed engineer, which was scarcely a fifteen-minute walk from Apple. It was a Rancho Suburbio Special with wall-to-wall beige shag carpeting, aluminum windows, and an all-electric kitchen. Jobs moved his belongings, which consisted of a mattress and meditation cushion, into the master bedroom while Kottke slept in the living room on a foam pad next to an old piano. It wasn’t an entirely conventional existence. Kottke filled a small bedroom thigh-deep in fist-size chunks of foam packing material and let the neighborhood children romp in the stuff.

Nancy Rogers was unsettled. “I was really insecure and young men in their early twenties are not very good with women. They need to prove themselves. I was afraid to go out. I didn’t have enough money. I didn’t paint.” Rogers took to calling Jobs at the office, asking him to return and help fix broken light sockets. She hurled plates at Kottke and Jobs, toppled books off shelves, scrawled obscenities with a charcoal briquette on Jobs’s bedroom walls, and slammed a door so hard it punctured a hole in a wall. She became pregnant, took a job at Apple helping with assembly, spurned an offer from Holt to learn drafting, and finally left Apple and moved out of the house. “Steve didn’t care that I was pregnant. I had to get away from Steve, Apple, and people’s opinions.”

For Jobs it was a difficult time and Holt reacted to the emotional whirlgig. “Sometimes I felt like his father; sometimes I felt like his brother.” Jobs, who had always tried to mimic a surrogate elder brother, was also starting to understand that he didn’t have to pattern his behavior on another person. “I saw Mike Scott and I saw Mike Markkula and I didn’t want to be like either one and yet there were parts of them that I admired a lot.” He was coming to grips with the difference in pace that exists between a garage operation and even a small business. The discomfiting fact was that the output of a dozen people (let alone one hundred) wasn’t predictable and such imperfection, for somebody who always demanded the best, was enormously difficult to tolerate.

Jobs was also adjusting to the idea that computers and software could not be completed in a few weeks and that progress was not something that could be easily measured. Like managers in other companies whose future revolved around taming technology, he found that progress was invisible until it could be made to work on a tabletop. When Wozniak started writing a floating-point version of BASIC, he felt the tension. “Steve had no idea what it takes to write that sort of code. If something seemed wrong, he’d quickly go and make a change. He would always want to have an influence and change whatever came up.”

Yet Jobs contributed much. He was always the company dynamo and the house personality. He started adding zeroes to Apple’s gross sales before some of the others were even thinking in hundreds, and started to talk about millions before his colleagues had contemplated thousands. When Markkula thought that color logos on the cassettes were too expensive, Jobs won the day. When Scott threw up his hands in horror at the notion of offering a one-year warranty on the computer when the industry standard was ninety days, Jobs burst into tears, had to be cooled off with what became a standard ritual (a walk around the parking lot), but eventually won his way. When Gary Martin discovered a $27,000 check that had been forgotten, Scott wanted to use it to buy a new mold, Markkula wanted to spend it on an advertisement in
Scientific American,
and Jobs wanted to do both. Apple bought a mold and an advertisement.

Jobs’s and Scott’s squabbles and arguments were such a constant in Apple’s life that they became known as The Scotty Wars. But the quarrels also took whimsical turns. On Jobs’s twenty-third birthday he was startled to find a funeral wreath decorated with white roses propped up in his office. It carried an unsigned card with the message R.I.P. THINKING OF YOU. Jobs didn’t discover for some time that the perpetrator was Scott who took to using a white rose as his personal seal.

Markkula stood between the twin volcanos. He dealt with Jobs much as an uncle would nurture a favorite nephew but he allowed Scott to handle him. Scott and Jobs found it far easier to make tough decisions than did the milder-mannered Markkula. Perhaps helped by the quiet of a family life Markkula was more cordial, punctual, and polite. He avoided tying his fate as closely to the company as Scott and Jobs did. As Apple grew he was prepared to delegate. “If it doesn’t work,” he kept repeating, “fix it.” he was also ready to let people fail. Jean Richardson, who joined Apple in 1978, said, “He didn’t want to come down and beat the heavy hand. He wanted people to work it out among themselves. He would always say, ‘You two go and work it out.’” A programmer said, “He seemed to have a strong desire for people to like him. He was so subtle in the way he worked that it was impossible to pin any bad deed on him.” Others found him imperturbable and a perennial optimist, important qualities in a position where managers usually spent most of their time coping with problems. Trip Hawkins, an Apple marketing manager, recalled, “Markkula absorbed stuff like a sponge. He could also make you see a unicorn in a field.”

 

As individual characteristics started to become clear, work proceeded on a project that melded all the strains in the business. It was a mini-reprise of the development of the Apple II computer and blended developments in technology with an inventive bent and uncompromising pressure: It was an interface that connected the computer to a disk drive rather than to a cassette recorder.

Disk drives were not new. Mainframe computers had used them since 1956. But as the evolution of electronics led to the microprocessor, so disk drives also got progressively smaller. When they were first used on mainframes the disk had a diameter of about two feet and were stacked inside cabinets the size of dressers. The disk drives were linked to the computer by a device enclosed in a large box known as the controller. Even so, disk drives offered enormous advantages over the reels of magnetic tape that had previously stored information. Instead of waiting for hundreds of yards of tape to pass by a fixed point, information could now be plucked by a little “head” that floated above a rapidly spinning disk. In 1972 IBM announced a further advance in disk-drive technology when it displayed a pliable disk that was no larger than a birthday card and which quickly became known as a floppy disk. The disk drives were boiled down into boxes no larger than a concise dictionary and the controller from a cabinet onto a single-printed circuit board. The floppy disk was an advance that IBM publicists didn’t hesitate to compare to a jumbo jet flying one tenth of an inch above the ground for several miles without scorching its tires.

Cassette tapes hooked to microcomputers had the same sort of deficiencies as the magnetic tapes connected to mainframe machines. They were so slow that loading a language like BASIC could take ten minutes and finding data was a hit-or-miss proposition. By comparison, a disk drive could find data in seconds. Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research, a software company, had written to Jobs and complained about Wozniak’s cassette interface. “The cassette subsystem is particularly frustrating. I used two different recorders and found them both equally unreliable. . . . I must consider the backup storage subsystem as low-end hobbyist grade.”

At Apple there was a united push to hook a disk drive to the computer. Jobs paid weekly visits to Shugart, a Silicon Valley company that was one of the first to make disk drives, and implored its executives to supply Apple. Meanwhile, Wozniak studied the circuitry used by IBM engineers who had developed a disk controller and also the approach employed by a Berkeley start-up, Northstar. But Wozniak only started work in earnest shortly before Christmas, 1977. His tendency to procrastinate made life uncomfortable for Scott who, anxious to ship, said, “Woz would take a product right up to the crisis point and do it. It was almost as if he needed the adrenaline spike of almost being late in order to really create.” But once Wozniak started working on the disk controller he didn’t stop until it was complete. Holt, who again played taskmaster, thought, “It was close to insanity for him to get his mind so close to the machine.” Jean Richardson also kept a maternal eye on him. “He was a ghost that came and went at odd hours. He worked through the night. I would meet him going out as I came in in the morning. Eating and sleeping didn’t seem to matter.” Wozniak worked furiously for a couple of weeks, accompanied by Wigginton who wrote programs to test the drive and Holt who badgered him until he was convinced that the device would really work.

When the drive was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 1978 and subjected to more careful scrutiny some weeks later at the Second West Coast Computer Faire, the reaction was uniform. The disk-controller card used far fewer chips than any competing device and Wozniak considered it “the favorite design of my life.” Fellow engineers also applauded. Lee Felsenstein, who a year before had been so skeptical about Jobs and Wozniak and the computer in a cigar box, took a look at the controller and recalled, “I nearly dropped my pants. It was so clever. I thought, ‘We better keep out of the way of these guys.’” At Commodore Chuck Peddle was guiding a design team that was also working on a disk drive but was beaten to the finish line. He thought about Wozniak’s design in geopolitical terms and said, “It absolutely changed the industry.” Until the drive was announced, Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack had all been working out teething problems with their manufacturing and nothing much separated the companies. Apple also always had computers in stock and when suppliers visited Cupertino they weren’t taken into the part of the building where the inventory was piled up. Once the drive was announced matters changed.

After the design was completed and Apple coaxed the disk drives to life, Scott brought his remorseless pressure to bear. The drives that arrived from Apple’s only supplier, Shugart, which was a Xerox Corporation subsidiary, were unreliable. So the engineers and technicians in the laboratory cannibalized parts to produce working drives and buckled to Scott’s implacable demands. He insisted that Apple start shipping the disk drives even though there hadn’t been enough time to complete a comprehensive manual. The results of Scott’s pressure and the quality of the flimsy leaflet that accompanied the early disk drives were revealed in a complaint that a Southern California customer mailed to Markkula. “You fucking bastards. I bought an Apple with floppy and nobody, I mean nobody, in L.A. or San Diego knows how to use the sonuvabitch for random access files. I really feel ‘ripped off.’ Everybody talks about this great manual in the sky that is coming out soon??? Shit! Shit! Shit! I need this computer now in my business not next year. Fuck you. I hope your dog dies.”

An oblique comment on the way of life at a large company was pinned to a notice board in the Mac engineering laboratory. It was one wag’s jaundiced view of the development of a computer and the bureaucracy at Apple. To the rhetorical question “How many Apple employees does it take to change a light bulb?” the anonymous skeptic answered:

A few of the Mac group were hovering around a Lisa prototype. Programmer Andy Hertzfeld provided a commentary as Michael Boich fiddled with features of the machine. “I couldn’t work at Lisa,” Hertzfeld said to no one in particular. “The only thing that gets done there is by committee and politics. Lisa equals competent engineering.”

Boich and Hertzfeld eyed the performance of the Lisa with the critical air that men once used to inspect tappets and pistons. Boich pressed a button on the mouse and Hertzfeld said as he watched a list appear on the screen, “They’ve got a really ugly font for their menu. I’ve seen it take five minutes to make a menu.”

Boich chuckled. “It thrashes pretty badly.”

“It’s a total misuse of the menu,” Hertzfeld insisted with the air of an offended monk.

“It’s in one of those thrash modes,” Boich said as he waited for a file to appear on the screen. “They’ve got a lot of things to do.”

“We’re never going to have these performance problems,” Hertzfeld said, “but our programs are never going to be this big.”

Engineering manager Bob Belleville, who was watching the scene from the entrance to the cubicle, cautioned quietly, “‘Never’ is not a word I feel real comfortable with.” He said that the comments reminded him of a time when some former colleagues at Xerox, who were developing a laser printer, had greeted the appearance of a machine from a competitor with the comment, “Our specs are much better than that.”