Return to the Little Kingdom (5 page)

Wozniak found ham radios more entertaining when they were modified and connected to friends’ houses. He rigged up wires attached to speakers to send Morse code from one house to another and discovered with his friends that if they talked into the speakers they could hear each other: “We didn’t know why but from that day we were into house-to-house intercoms.”

At about the same time, Stephen entered a tic-tac-toe game in Cupertino Junior High School’s science fair. He and his father calculated an electronic simulation of the paper game and worked out combinations in which man battled machine. Stephen figured out designs for the electric circuits that would duplicate the moves while his father secured a supply of resistors, capacitors, transistors, and diodes from a friend. To his mother’s irritation Stephen assembled the game on the kitchen table. He hammered nails into a sheet of plywood to form electrical connections and laid out all the smaller parts. On the flip side of the board he installed a collection of red and white light bulbs and at the bottom he arranged a row of switches that would allow a player to select a move.

 

A couple of years after completing the tic-tac-toe game Wozniak spotted an intriguing diagram in a book about computers. This was a machine called a One Bit Adder-Subtracter which would do what its name suggested: add or subtract numbers. Wozniak could follow some of the technical discussion from the lessons he had learned while messing around with kits and designing the tic-tac-toe board. But there were other aspects that he found entirely foreign. For the first time he came up against the idea that electronic calculating machines could provide solutions to problems of logic. He began to explore the algebra of logic and learned that switches—which could be only on or off—could be used to represent statements—which could be only true or false. He became familiar with the binary numbering system—a series of 1s and 0s—that had been developed to represent electronically two voltage levels in a circuit.

The diagram for a One Bit Adder-Subtracter was very limited. It could cope with only one bit, one binary digit, at a time. Wozniak wanted something more powerful that would be able to add and subtract far larger numbers so he expanded the idea to a more complicated device that he called The Ten Bit Parallel Adder-Subtracter. This was capable of simultaneously dealing with ten bits at a time. He designed the necessary circuits by himself and laid out dozens of transistors and diodes and capacitors on a “bread board”—a laminated sheet drilled with a regular pattern of holes. The board was about the size of a picture book and was attached to a wooden frame. Two rows of switches lined the bottom of the board. One entered numbers into the adder, the other into the subtracter, and the result was displayed—again in binary form—in a row of small lights. Wozniak had, to all intents and purposes, built a simple version of what engineers called an arithmetic logic unit, a machine that was capable of coping with arithmetic problems. The machine could operate on the instructions, or program, that were entered by hand through the switches. It could add or subtract numbers but couldn’t do anything else.

When the machine was complete, he carted it off to the Cupertino School District Science Fair where it took the first prize. Later it took third place in the Bay Area Science Fair even though Wozniak was competing against older challengers. To compensate for the disappointment of finishing third, he was rewarded with his first trip in an airplane—a whirl over California’s Alameda Naval Air Station.

Half a dozen managers from the Crocker Bank sat around a large L-shaped table, sipped coffee from bone-china cups, and watched a white screen unroll from the ceiling. They might have been in an interior designer’s idea of a Hollywood dressing room for a movie star who happened to be a computer. The table rested on aluminum cylinders, and potted ferns dappled the purple rug with triangular shadows. Framed sketches hung on the wall and mirrors ran like a modern brocade around the top of the walls. Dan’l Lewin, an Apple marketing manager with a smooth, square jaw, neatly knotted tie, and freshly pressed blue suit, let the screen unroll. He pressed a concealed button and a pair of maroon slats, which ran along two walls of the hexagonal room, hummed sideways. Spotlights shone over the backs of some chairs onto two smooth counters that held six Lisa computers.

Lewin had been playing corporate guide for several months and had shepherded similar groups from dozens of large companies into the same room and through the same script and tour. Though Apple mimicked the movie industry and called these daylong sessions “sneak previews,” they were plotted as carefully as story-boards. They were aimed at persuading visitors from
Fortune
500 companies to order scores of Lisa computers and at quelling suspicions that Apple was a flimsy company unable to support what it hoped to sell. Most of the visiting groups had been a mixture of longtime computer-operations managers with a professional distrust of desk-top computers, and amateurs whose passion for computers had been kindled by the smaller machines. All the visitors to the sneak room signed forms binding them to secrecy, but Lewin readily admitted, “By the time we announce Lisa, everybody who is important will already have seen it.”

Lewin crisply spat out a ream of numbers that sounded like the authoritative opening paragraphs of an annual report. He told the group that Apple produced an Apple II every thirty seconds and a disk drive every eighteen seconds. He steered them through a management chart and observed, “We are growing into a more traditional organization.” He acknowledged that some details about Lisa had seeped into the press but said this was part of a corporate strategy. “Apple,” Lewin noted, “is controlling the press very well. But until you see what we’ve done I doubt whether you can understand it. No other company would be prepared to take the risk. Most companies are interested in making big computers.” Lewin explained that the conceptual foundation for the Lisa had been laid, not at Apple, but at Xerox Corporation during the mid-to late seventies. “We took those ideas,” Lewin said, with the pride of a muffler-franchise holder, “and we internalized them. We Apple-ized them.”

After he finished with the opening remarks, Lewin introduced Burt Cummings, a round-faced, curly-haired engineer. Cummings sat beside one Lisa whose screen was enlarged on two television monitors fitted to the wall. He immediately plunged into technical details. “Why do you call it Lisa?” interrupted one of the men from Crocker Bank.

“I don’t know,” Cummings shrugged. “There really isn’t much of a reason for anything.” He continued with the demonstration and suddenly the screen became a distorted jumble of letters. Cummings wriggled uncomfortably, surveyed the mess, and added hastily, “It tends to bomb. It’s six-month-old software.”

Cummings typed some commands into the computer, which proved to be the right medicine, and proceeded with his demonstration, flashing a string of different pictures onto the screen. “Is this all canned?” asked Kurt Schweer, another of the Crocker visitors.

“You’ve seen the Xerox Star,” Lewin said. “That’s what makes you think this is canned. This is incredibly fast. That’s what our engineers are proud of.”

 

Every fifteen or thirty minutes Lewin introduced another manager from the Lisa group. John Couch, the head of the Lisa division, who looked worn and weary, gave an antiseptic history of the computer’s development and of the importance Apple placed on the control of software. Lisa, he explained, was part of a concerted effort to shield the user from the crust of the machine with snowfalls of software. He explained that the Apple III had been introduced with about ten times as much software as the Apple II, while Lisa was going to come with about ten times as much software as the Apple III. He stressed that Apple had moved from supplying programming languages like BASIC with the Apple II to programs for things like financial analysis with the Apple III, while on Lisa the user could do a variety of tasks with a minimum of fuss. “Lisa,” Couch emphasized, “originally stood for ‘large integrated software architecture.’ Now it stands for ‘local integrated software architecture. ’” He took a quiet jab at the competition: “Quite a bit of the problem with Xerox was that they weren’t building a personal computer. They weren’t giving it to the individual.”

 

The bankers were ushered, with much flashing of security badges, into an adjoining building which served as the center of assembly for Lisa. Wasu Chaudhari, a genial manufacturing man, gave them a tour of the test production racks where dozens of computers were running through proving cycles. Chaudhari demonstrated that Lisa was easy to take apart. He removed the back panel and slipped out different parts. “One person builds one product,” he smiled. “It’s a modified Volvo concept.”

“Rolls-Royce would be better. Aston Martin better still,” countered Tor Folkedal, a burly Crocker manager.

After lunch in a cluttered conference room which had been hurriedly converted into dining quarters, the bankers were steered back to the computers. They were allowed to play with the machines, nudged and prompted by Lisaguide, the computer’s private Baedeker, which appeared on the screen. After spending a couple of minutes working his way through the pictures and explanations, Tor Folkedal exhaled: “We’ll have managers at the bank playing with this all day. It’s a video game.”

“You’ve got to get some games on this,” Schweer agreed. “Goddamn! It’ll make the greatest flight simulator in the world.”

Ellen Nold, a thin woman from Apple’s training department, tried to assuage any fears about Apple’s commitment to its customers. “We assume when Crocker buys hundreds of Lisas you’ll want a training program.” She told them that training sessions would be specially tailored for the bank and that drill exercises would be based on the workaday subjects familiar to bankers. Wayne Rosing, Lisa’s chief engineer, fielded questions. The bankers wondered when Apple would be able to connect several Lisas together and swap information between machines. They worried about the difficulty of connecting a Lisa to IBM computers, to “the terminal world,” “the Bell world,” and “the DEC world.” One of the technical types wanted to know the speed at which data would travel between computers and whether software written for other computers would run on Lisa. Rosing leaned back in his chair and answered all the questions in a leisurely way. He explained, in answer to one question, why Lisa had no calendar. “We’re so far along that I had to say, ‘Darn it! We’re going to stop here even if this feature only takes a week because otherwise we’ll never get it out the door.’” As the afternoon wore down the bankers were asked for their impressions.

“I’m not sure you’re clear about who would actually use this,” said Betty Risk, a dark-haired woman who had listened and watched for most of the day. “Is it for the executive, or the professional, or the manager?”

“Your security’s tight,” Schweer remarked. “It could have been an abacus sitting there.” The flinty edge that hardened his early remarks had softened: “You guys have come a long way. This is the first time I’ve heard any company ask the right questions. Most companies say ‘We can do anything for you if you stand on your head and punch the keyboard with your toes.’”

Despite the compliments the group from Crocker was reluctant to make any promises about ordering large quantities of the Lisa. Apple was just one of several computer companies they would visit before deciding which machines to order. Nobody mentioned numbers and nobody mentioned dollars.

“Trying to speak for a bank the size of Crocker is difficult.” Schweer sighed. “You always bet your job when you propose a standard. It’s easier to pick several different makes.” He paused: “Of course, you could just put your hands over your eyes and pick, or get several and spread the blame.”

“And then get half your butt fired,” Lewin chuckled.

W
hen Steven Jobs was five months old his parents moved from the dank fringes of San Francisco to the iron cuddle of South San Francisco. There, Paul Jobs continued to work for a finance company as a jack-of-all trades. He collected bad debts, checked the terms of automobile dealers’ loans, and used a knack for picking locks to help repossess cars that were scattered about Northern California.

Paul Jobs looked like a responsible James Dean. He was lean, had closely cropped brown hair and tightly drawn skin. He was a practical, sensible man with a Calvinist streak who was self-conscious about his lack of formal education and would conceal his shyness behind chuckles and a tough sense of humor. Jobs had been raised on a small farm in Germantown, Wisconsin, but when it failed to provide enough for the two families it was supposed to support, he and his parents moved to West Bend, Indiana. He left high school in his early teens, roamed around the Midwest looking for work, and at the end of the thirties, wound up enlisting in “The Hooligan Navy,” the U.S. Coast Guard.

At the end of World War II, while his ship was being decommissioned in San Francisco, Jobs bet a shipmate that he would find a bride in the shadow of the Golden Gate. Nipping ashore, when port and starboard liberty allowed, Paul Jobs won the wager. He met Clara, the woman who became his wife, on a blind date. She had spent her childhood and high-school years in San Francisco’s Mission District.

After several years in the Midwest where Jobs worked as a machinist at International Harvester and a used-car salesman, he and his wife returned to San Francisco in 1952. It was there that they started to raise their family and experience the perils of parenthood. They began to endure all the perils that children could find. When their young son Steven jammed a bobby pin into an electric outlet and burned his hand, they rushed him to the hospital. Some months later they had his stomach pumped after he and a young accomplice built a miniature chemical lab from bottles of ant poison. In the Jobses’ South San Francisco home there was enough room for another child and Steven was joined by a sister, Patty. Confronted with the responsibility of filling four mouths, Paul Jobs characteristically took out two thousand-dollar-insurance policies to cover his funeral expenses.