“I recognized you from your pictures,” she told us.
“Can I have your autograph?”
I was flustered, because no one had ever asked me for an autograph before. I demurred, but eventually Burrell and I both signed our names near our pictures, feeling slightly embarrassed.
The cover of January 30, 1984 edition of Newsweek was supposed to feature the Macintosh.
I turned on my Walkman, pushed back my seat and tried to relax, hoping to fall asleep, but about 20 minutes later we were approached by a different flight attendant, also holding a copy of the Newsweek issue. “Are you the guys who designed the Macintosh?” she asked. “I’d love to get your autographs.”
Wait a second, I thought, Woz is on this flight, too. Woz was a notorious prankster. Maybe all this attention was his doing. Sure enough, when I stood up and turned around, Woz was also standing, pointing at us and cracking up. He had convinced the flight attendants to cooperate in pulling one of his typical pranks on us. I started laughing too, because it was a pretty good one.
Leave of Absence
March 1984
I didn’t know how to deal with my bad review
I didn’t know how to deal with the bad performance review I received from Bob Belleville in February 1983 (see “Too Big for My Britches” on page 140). I had always loved my job at Apple, and had been devoting myself to working on the Macintosh, which I passionately believed would change the world significantly for the better. But it was clear that Bob was out to get me for reasons that I only partially understood.
Jerome Coonen had recently started as the new software manager, so I at least didn’t have to interact with Bob directly very often. In fact, Bob seemed to want to avoid me even more than I wanted to avoid him. My initial instinct was to quit, but I believed in the Macintosh too much to leave until it shipped. This was at least six months away, so I resolved to keep working hard while I thought about what I should do.
It seemed as though the main problem was that Bob and I had very different views concerning the organization. I worshiped at the altar of the Apple II and romanticized my work, seeing it more as a calling than a job. I was much more enthusiastic about the computer we were creating than the engineering organization that was creating it, and I was difficult to manage because I was self-righteous and immature (although I didn’t see it that way at the time) and thoroughly disrespected organizational authority.
Bob Belleville, by contrast, saw his job as rescuing the Mac team from the chaotic development process I thrived in. He was determined to instill a modicum of order and predictability, which was necessary to scale the organization. He saw my lack of respect for lines of authority as undermining the organization, which was unacceptable to him. I think Bob intended the negative review as a wake-up call, a way to compel me to change my style to fit his vision of the organization. I know he was surprised that I took it as hard as I did.
Since he disavowed having said the critical things he did on that late afternoon walk, and since I never received a written review, there didn’t seem to be any way for me to reconcile with Bob. Furthermore, I didn’t think I wanted to work in the type of organization he was trying to establish anyway. And so I decided that while I still wanted to work for Apple, I didn’t want to—even indirectly—work for Bob. Perhaps it was inevitable that the Macintosh team would eventually mature into a more cumbersome and top-heavy organization, but I figured Apple would always need small teams and people like me to get the ball rolling on something new.
When Bud Tribble left the Mac team to return to medical school at the end of 1981 (see “Gobble, Gobble, Gobble” on page 76), I considered leaving, too. Steve Jobs persuaded me to stay, partially by promising to protect me from authoritarian managers. But over the next few months, whenever I tried to discuss the situation with him, he tended to be dismissive, belittling the problem and telling me that I didn’t have to love Bob to work for him. Sometimes, he would cryptically hint he had some solution in mind, but nothing ever materialized.
As 1983 drew to a close, I was swept up in the monumental effort to finish the software (see “Real Artists Ship” on page 208), and then the blissful joyride of the product introduction (see “The Times They Are A-Changin’” on page 217). But by the middle of February, things had calmed down and I knew it was time to make a decision about my future at Apple.
By this time my relationship with Bob Belleville had worsened, if that was possible, after he went on a tirade in his staff meeting in December 1983 when he found out I had assisted Burrell Smith and Brian Howard by writing diagnostics for the LaserWriter prototype they were working on. Everyone on the software team was exhausted from the high-pressure marathon effort to finally complete the software, and tension with Bob made it hard for me to be enthusiastic about the future.
Then in February, after laying off a quarter of the Lisa people, Apple decided to merge the Macintosh and Lisa groups together, putting the Mac people in all of the top positions. Steve had always promised us that the group would never exceed 100 people. But now, when combined with more than 200 Lisa folk, it would be over 300 employees strong.
I watched as Steve stood up in front of the assembled Lisa team and announced the merger and layoffs, telling the laid-off folks they had screwed up and were B or C players. “So, today we are releasing some of your fellow employees to give them the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley,” he declared in classic Steve Jobs style.
Around this time someone suggested that I consider taking a leave of absence, instead of quitting entirely. That sounded good to me. I would retain my badge and the prerogatives of an employee, plus I could more easily return if things seemed better after they settled down. I decided to take a six-month leave, starting on March 1st, 1984.
Brian Howard, Andy Hertzfeld, and Burrell Smith promoting Radius in 1987
When I told Steve Jobs about my leave of absence plans, he said he regretted them, but he didn’t offer me any alternative that was acceptable to me. Now that the division had over 300 people, I proposed we spin off another small team that could work directly for him, but he wasn’t interested. With the Macintosh finally shipping and the divisions combined, Steve felt he needed managers like Bob Belleville to manage the huge battalion of employees more than he needed creative types like myself. Also, he told me he was sure I’d be so bored in a month or two that I’d come back early from my leave.
A couple of days before my leave was to start, Steve came into the software area escorting a surprise guest. They came over to my cubicle and Steve introduced me to Apple’s newest employee, Alan Kay (see “Creative Think” on page 114). Alan had recently departed from Atari and had just signed on as an Apple Fellow. He was one of my heroes, and it made me even more depressed than I already was to know that leaving would mean I wouldn’t get to work with him.
At the end of my last day of work, the software team held a farewell dinner for me at a small, fancy, continental restaurant called Maddalena’s, which was around five blocks from my house in Palo Alto. Now that my last day had actually arrived, I was really sad about leaving all my friends at Apple. I walked over to the restaurant with Burrell Smith, who lived in the house next door to me, wondering if I would be able to survive the dinner without bursting into tears.
Most of the software team came to the dinner, as did Steve Jobs. I was in a sort of daze as the elaborate dinner was served, followed by some toasts where people said how much they liked working with me. I only had sporadic success at holding back tears. Bill Atkinson said he had no idea what I would work on next, but he knew he would be amazed by it. Steve Jobs said he would miss me and that he hoped I would hurry back from my leave. But then he made a strange comment that I didn’t quite know how to read: “The thing I like best about Andy is that it’s so easy to make him cry.”
Finally, the dinner was over and I walked back home with Burrell, still feeling numb, as if I didn’t want to think about my conflicted feelings j
ust yet. When I awoke at my usual time the next morning, I had to fight the urge to drive down to Apple as usual. It took a week or two before it stopped feeling strange not to go into work.
Spoiled?
April 1984
The Mac team’s “spoiled” reputation
The Macintosh team had a reputation for being spoiled, which was certainly true by the middle of 1984, but it wasn’t always the case. Steve Jobs was fond of bragging that the Mac designers were Apple’s best engineers. That may have been true, but it certainly wasn’t reflected in our pay.
Two weeks before I transferred to the Mac team after a shake-up in the Apple II group in February 1981 (see “Black Wednesday” on page 16), I received my regular six-month review and was slated for a nominal raise in salary, from $22,000 per year to $24,000. I thought I should still get my raise, even though I had switched groups, so after working on the Mac for a few weeks I approached Bud Tribble, my new manager, about it.
“Well, that sounds reasonable to me,” Bud told me when I explained the situation to him, “but there’s a problem. I’m only getting paid $20,000 a year.”
I was shocked. The average manager in the Apple II group was making at least twice that much. I then asked Burrell Smith about his compensation and found out that he was getting paid even less than Bud, since he started at Apple as a lowly service technician (see “It’s The Moustache That Matters” on page 13) and had hardly gotten any raises as his responsibility grew. Less than two months earlier, the Mac was an iffy research project under Jef Raskin. I guess Steve hadn’t seen to it to adjust anyone’s salary when he took over.
The next day, I went and talked with Steve about the pay issue. I told him about my incipient raise, and asked him why, if the work we were doing was so important, Burrell and Bud had such low salaries. Steve was uncharacteristically nonchalant, professing that he didn’t know what their salaries were and that he hadn’t given anyone raises because no one had asked for one. Then he quipped that we had much more important things to worry about than our salaries, but agreed to give all three of us modest raises right away. Even after the raises came through, the Mac team was still relatively underpaid compared to the rest of Apple.
Rod Holt, the designer of the Apple II power supply and the first Macintosh engineering manager, was an extraordinary, opinionated individual who could expound brilliantly on a startling range of topics. He was the unlikely combination of a committed socialist and a multimillionaire, by virtue of his being one of Apple’s earliest employees. On one occasion, the Mac team hired an older analog engineer to work on the disk controller and paid him almost twice what Burrell was making, even though he was only doing a small fraction of the work. When we complained, Rod invoked his economic theories about how people should be paid according to their needs instead of their talents. We didn’t necessarily buy that, but it was true that we weren’t working mainly for the money, and Rod was so charmingly philosophical that we let it slide.
Our offices at Texaco Towers were also kind of quaint by Apple standards. Most of Apple’s offices were outfitted with high-tech, partitioned, Herman Miller cubicles, but Texaco Towers was more old-fashioned, with funky, older desks and secondhand furniture. Steve was generally tight with money and usually turned down any extravagant requests. For example, he allowed us to buy an IBM PC to dissect for $2,000 in August 1981 (see “Donkey” on page 55), but nixed our similar request for a $20,000 Xerox Star.
Most afternoons around 4 P.M., Burrell and I used to walk down to the nearby Texaco station to get soft drinks from their vending machine. One afternoon, in the summer of 1981, Steve brought a visiting dignitary by for a demo while we were out, and, frustrated by our absence, decided to bring in a refrigerator stocked with soft drinks so we wouldn’t have to miss work time to get beverages. Free sodas were the first unusual perquisite for the Mac team.
The team’s lifestyle began to change as it grew throughout 1982. In mid-1982, we moved from Texaco Towers to Bandley 4. Bandley 4 was a typical, ordinary Apple building, but it was only intended to be temporary quarters for the Mac team, until the building across the street, the much larger Bandley 3, could be renovated to accommodate us. The salaries of the early team also rose, as we had to pay competitive salaries to newcomers.
The design for our new quarters in Bandley 3, which we moved into in the summer of 1983, showed the first signs of extravagance. The software team was ensconced in a large area with glass doors that we dubbed “the fishbowl,” because a passerby could observe us without opening the door. The showpiece of the building was a large atrium in the lobby, with fancy skylights and some interesting furnishings.
To one side of the lobby were two video games we had the opportunity to purchase cheaply a month or so after moving in; I paid for Burrell’s favorite, Defender (see “Make a Mess, Clean it Up!” on page 168), while Randy Wigginton contributed Joust. On the other side of the lobby was an expensive stereo system bought by Steve, which featured a then-very-novel compact disc player and almost 100 CDs (which was just about every one released at the time).
Bandley 3 also had a nice little kitchen, near the software area, with a much bigger refrigerator than we had in Texaco Towers. Steve decided sodas weren’t very healthy and had the refrigerator stocked with expensive Odwalla fruit juices, delivered fresh every day, as well as an assortment of other beverages.
In the spring of 1984, right about the time I left Apple, the lobby began to fill up with more interesting artifacts, purchased by Steve Jobs on his various travels. There was an outrageously expensive Bosendorfer piano that was soon accompanied by a BMW motorcycle, both on display as examples of exquisite craftsmanship. It was rumored that Steve had actually purchased them to impress Hartmut Esslinger, the industrial designer he was enamored with at the time. Hartmut’s firm, Frog Design, designed the case of the Apple IIc.
That was right around the time that the 100-person Macintosh Division merged with the 250-person Lisa Division, with the Mac people occupying most of the management roles. The Mac had completed its journey from a funky research project to the center of the company, but I continue to think it was a lot more fun when we had a lot fewer resources.
the Macintosh software team in the spring of 1985
THUNDERSCAN
June 1984
A clever device transforms a printer into a scanner
The first project I worked on for Apple after starting in August 1979 was writing low-level software for the Silentype printer—a cute, inexpensive, thermal printer for the Apple II—that was based on technology licensed from a local company named Trendcom. In typical Apple fashion, we improved on Trendcom’s design by replacing their relatively expensive controller board with a much simpler one that relied on the microprocessor in the Apple II to do most of the dirty work.
The only other engineer working on the project was Victor Bull, who was the hardware designer and also the project leader. Vic was smart, taciturn, and easy to work with. I learned a lot from him about how thermal printers work, as well as how things worked at Apple. We finished the project quickly, and the Silentype shipped in November 1979, less than four months after I began working on it.
In May 1984, during my leave of absence from Apple (see “Leave of Absence” on page 229), I received a phone call from Victor Bull, who I hadn’t heard from in a couple of years. He had left Apple more than a year before to work with his friend Tom Petrie at a tiny company named Thunderware that sold a single product called Thunderclock, an inexpensive calendar/clock card for the Apple II. Victor thought I might be interested in writing software for an exciting, clever, new product Thunderware was developing for the Macintosh, which he refused to describe over the phone. He invited me to come visit them and check it out.
In early June, I drove up to Thunderware’s office in Orinda, which was about an hour’s drive from my house in Palo Alto. After I arrived at their modest headquarters, Vic introduced me to his partner, Tom Petrie, and I signed a nondisclosure a
greement before they ushered me into a back room to see their demo.
The most popular printer for both the Apple II and the Macintosh was the ImageWriter, a $500 dot-matrix printer capable of rendering bitmapped graphics. It was designed and manufactured by a Japanese company named C.Itoh Electronics and was marketed by Apple. Virtually every Macintosh owner purchased an ImageWriter because it was the only printer Apple supported. Tom’s demo consisted of an ImageWriter printer hooked up to an Apple II that at first glance appeared to be busily printing away. But when I looked closer, I noticed that instead of blank paper there was a glossy photograph of a cat threaded through the printer’s platen, and the printer’s black plastic ribbon cartridge was missing, replaced by a makeshift contraption containing an optical-sensing device that trailed an umbilical cord back to the Apple II.
Their potential new product, Thunderscan, was a low-cost way of turning an ImageWriter printer into a high-resolution scanner by replacing the ribbon cartridge with an optical sensor and providing some clever software. Since the resolution was determined by the precision of the printer’s stepper motors, Thunderscan, priced at under $200, had better resolution than flatbed scanners costing more than 10 times as much. I loved the ingenious concept and the Woz-like elegance of saving money and adding flexibility by doing everything in software, but there were also a few problems.
The biggest issue was that Thunderscan could only capture one scan line’s worth of data on each pass of the print head. This made it nine times slower than regular printing because the print head could deposit nine dots at a time. This made for frustratingly slow scanning, often taking over an hour to scan a full page at the highest resolution. Thunderscan was never going to win any races.
Another apparent problem was the disappointingly low quality of the image being captured and displayed by Tom Petrie’s Apple II application. Tom and Vic said their scanner was capable of capturing up to 32 different levels of light intensity, but both the Apple II (in hi-res mode) and the Macintosh only had one bit per pixel to display, so the software had to simulate grayscales using patterns of black and white dots. It looked as though Tom was using a simple threshold algorithm to do the rendering, which threw away most of the grayscale information and made the resulting image look unacceptably blotchy. It was hard to tell if the quality promised by Tom and Vic was there or not.
Revolution in The Valley [Paperback] Page 22
