Revolution in The Valley [Paperback]

by Hertzfeld, Andy

  The only new upcoming product was the LaserWriter printer, based on Canon’s 300 dots-per-inch (DPI) laser-printing engine, with a digital board designed by Burrell Smith and software written by Adobe (a new company founded by Xerox alumni John Warnock and Chuck Geschke). Like the Macintosh itself, Adobe’s PostScript software that was at the heart of the LaserWriter was years ahead of its time and was capable of producing exquisitely beautiful pages. Unfortunately, the LaserWriter had one major flaw: its retail price was over $7,000, which was almost triple the cost of a Macintosh.

  Joanna Hoffman, the Mac team’s original marketing person, transferred from international marketing back to the main product marketing group in early 1985 to help deal with the growing crisis. At the first sales meeting she attended, she was surprised to see that the sales forecasts for the upcoming quarter were unchanged from six months ago—when things were still looking good—and were almost four times what they were currently selling. Everybody was informally assuming more realistic numbers, but no one had the heart to cut the official forecast because they were afraid to tell Steve about it. To the relief of the sales and manufacturing team, Joanna immediately slashed the forecasts.

  The weak sales were beginning to put pressure on the relationship between Steve Jobs and John Sculley for the very first time. They had gotten along fine when everything was going well, but hitherto they never had to deal with much adversity. Unfortunately, in early 1985 the personal computer market was descending into one of its periodic downturns, and even Apple II sales were starting to falter. Steve did not take criticism very well, and sometimes reacted to suggestions for improving Macintosh sales as if they were personal attacks. Steve and John’s relationship began to sour as John put pressure on Steve to address the Macintosh’s problems.

  Steve Jobs had never suffered fools gladly, and as the pressure mounted, he became even more difficult to work with. Employees from every part of the company began to approach John with complaints about Steve’s behavior, including some of Steve’s direct reports in the Macintosh division. John felt especially strong about building more compatibility bridges with the IBM PC, an approach Steve disdained. John began to view Steve as an impediment toward fixing Apple’s problems, and the board of directors was urging him to do something about it.

  Steve had often professed he preferred working with small teams on new products, and that he didn’t really want to run a large organization with hundreds of employees. Apple’s board felt he should hand the reins of the Macintosh division over to a professional management team, and return to his core strength as a new product visionary.

  Steve had recently met an interesting character named Steve Kitchen, who was introduced to him by Steve Capps. Steve Kitchen was a fast-talking, enthusiastic entrepreneur who had developed a couple of successful Atari video games. He claimed to have recently invented a revolutionary flat screen display technology that could facilitate portable computers. Steve Jobs was intrigued by the prospect of developing a lightweight portable computer years ahead of its time, and he considered having Apple buy the technology and start a research organization called “Apple Labs” to develop it. But he seemed ambivalent. Sometimes he was enthusiastic about starting Apple Labs, but other times he seemed determined to prove he could manage the large division.

  The conflict came to a head at the April 10th board meeting. The board thought it could convince Steve to transition back to a product visionary role, but instead he went on the attack and lobbied for Sculley’s removal. After long, wrenching discussions with both of them, and extending the meeting to the following day, the board decided in favor of John, instructing him to reorganize the Macintosh division, stripping Steve of all authority. Steve would remain the chairman of Apple, but for the time being no operating role was defined for him.

  John didn’t want to implement the reorganization immediately because he still thought he could reconcile with Steve and get him to buy into the changes, thereby achieving a smooth transition with his blessing. But after a brief period of depressed cooperation, Steve resumed attacking John behind the scenes in a variety of ways. I won’t go into the details here, but eventually John had to remove Steve from his management role in the Macintosh division involuntarily. Apple announced Steve’s removal, along with the first quarterly loss in their history and significant layoffs, on Friday, May 31, 1985—Fridays being the traditional time for companies to announce bad news. It was surely one of the lowest points of Apple history.

  I was shocked when I heard the news that morning from a friend at Apple, and immediately drove down to Cupertino to see what was going on and commiserate with my friends. I was aware of the problem with Macintosh sales, but it was still inconceivable to me that the board could oust Steve Jobs, difficult as he could sometimes be, because he was clearly the heart and soul of the company. It was almost impossible to imagine the Macintosh team without him at the helm. I thought that perhaps I wasn’t hearing the whole story, and that something would emerge to help it make more sense.

  I arrived at the Apple campus soon after Sculley’s communication meeting finished, during which he explained the nature of the reorganization and the accompanying layoffs. The way people were milling around listlessly reminded me of Black Wednesday four years earlier (see “Black Wednesday” on page 16), when Mike Scott unexpectedly purged the Apple II group. A few folks from the Apple II division—who resented Steve’s superior attitude—seemed elated, and a few others saw the shakeup as an opportunity for personal advancement, but most of Apple’s employees were somber, depressed, and uncertain about the future.

  Many people had varying stories about what had actually happened. I thought that maybe it meant Steve had decided to pursue Apple Labs, and that maybe I could come back to Apple to work on a small team again. I was anxious to talk to Steve himself and find out his take on it. I wasn’t the only one, so Bill Atkinson, Bud Tribble, Steve Capps, and I arranged to visit Steve at his house in Woodside for dinner on Sunday evening, two days after the reorganization was announced.

  I had never been to Steve’s house in Woodside before. It was a 14-bedroom, 17,250-square-foot Spanish colonial–style mansion built in 1926 that Steve had purchased a year before, in 1984. We knocked on the door and waited a few minutes before Steve appeared and led us inside. The massive house was almost completely unfurnished, and our footsteps echoed eerily as he led us to a large room near the kitchen with a long table, one of the few rooms that had any furniture.

  We stood around the kitchen chatting as Steve prepared some food. His girlfriend Tina was there; I’d met her a few times before and was impressed by her mix of kindness and intelligence. Bill started chatting with Tina as I finally got a chance to ask Steve about the reorganization.

  “So what really happened at Apple?” I asked him, even though I was scared to bring it up so directly. “Is it really as bad as it looks?”

  “No, it’s worse,” Steve replied with a pained expression. “It’s much worse than you can imagine.”

  Steve was adamant about blaming John Sculley for everything that had happened. He felt that John had betrayed him and he had little faith that Sculley or anyone else could manage Apple without him. He said his role as chairman was completely ceremonial, and it left him with no actual responsibilities. In fact, Apple had already moved his office from Bandley 3 to Bandley 6, a small building across the street that was almost empty. The new office was so remote from day-to-day operations that it was later nicknamed “Siberia.”

  We had a pleasant dinner, huddled around one end of the long table, mainly reminiscing about the good old days developing the Mac but occasionally engaging in grim speculation about Apple’s future. Steve had arranged for some gourmet vegetarian food to be delivered, and we drank some excellent wine. Dessert consisted of handfuls of locally grown Olson’s cherries, grabbed from a large wooden crate that Steve kept in the kitchen.

  After dinner, we retired to another room that had an expensive stereo system and
an elaborate model of the mostly underground house Steve planned to build to replace the one we were standing in. I had brought along a copy of Bob Dylan’s new album, “Empire Burlesque,” which was just released earlier that week, because I knew that Steve, like myself, was a big Bob Dylan fan, even though Steve thought Dylan hadn’t done anything worthwhile since “Blood on the Tracks” a decade before. I placed the album on a hi-tech turntable that seemed to be mounted on aluminum cones and played the last song, “Dark Eyes,” which was slow and mournful, with a fragile melody and lyrics that seemed relevant to the situation at Apple. But Steve didn’t like the song, and wasn’t interested in hearing the rest of the album, reiterating his negative opinion of recent Dylan.

  Later, when it was time to leave, we lingered outside under the beautiful summer night sky. We were all pretty emotional by then, especially Steve. I tried to convince him the change wasn’t necessarily so bad, and that I would be excited about returning to Apple to work with him on a small team again. But Steve was inconsolable, and more depressed than I had ever seen him before. As we left, I thought it was lucky he had Tina there to keep him company in the cavernous mansion.

  It took a while for me to understand the consequences of the reorganization. The best news for me was that my nemesis Bob Belleville had resigned from Apple because he had sided with Steve during the recent infighting and burned too many bridges to continue. Most of the rest of Steve’s staff stayed on to work for Jean-Louis Gassee, who replaced Steve in the reorganized division, although Mike Murray resigned soon thereafter. Steve Jobs spent most of the summer traveling, trying to figure out what to do next. He was still the chairman of Apple Computer, but he was so at odds with the rest of its leadership that it was hard to see how he could remain there much longer.

  The Father of the Macintosh

  Who is the father of the Macintosh?

  In the early days of the personal computer industry, breakthrough products could still be created single-handedly, or by very small teams. Steve Wozniak, for example, is indisputably the father of the Apple II. He designed the entire digital board himself and wrote all of the system software, including a BASIC interpreter, most of it before Apple was even incorporated. But even Woz required help from Rod Holt for the analog electronics (the Apple II’s switching power supply was almost as innovative as the digital board), and from Steve Jobs and Jerry Manock for the industrial design (ditto for the plastic case).

  By the 1980s, things had become more complicated. The development of the Macintosh was more of a team effort. At least a half-dozen people made significant, invaluable contributions. Steve Jobs anointed 7 of us (not counting himself) as the official “design team,” but it could just as easily have been 5 or 15. Some people felt bad they weren’t included. It was obvious there was no good way to draw the line.

  But if you look up the phrase “Father of the Macintosh” on Google, you get lots of links mentioning the name Jef Raskin. Jef was a former computer science and music professor at UCSD who started at Apple in January 1978 as Apple employee #31. Jef, along with his friend Brian Howard, had contracted to write Apple’s manual for Basic at their consulting firm (which was named Bannister and Crun in a playful appropriation from the legendary Goon Show). Apple liked the Basic manual so much they hired Jef and Brian to be founders of their internal publications group.

  In early 1979, after successfully building an outstanding pubs department, Jef turned the reins over to Phyllis Cole and started thinking about what it would take for personal computers to expand beyond the current hobbyist market. He wrote up his ideas in a series of short papers. In March, he presented his idea for an ultra low-cost, easy-to-use appliance computer to Mike Markkula, and in September got the go-ahead to hire a few people and form an official research project. Jef named it Macintosh, after his favorite apple. Most of his ideas for the new machine were collected in a set of papers he called The Book of Macintosh.

  There’s no doubt Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple. It was his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy-to-use, low-cost, high-volume appliance computer that got the ball rolling. And his vision remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then hiring amazing individuals like Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, Joanna Hoffman, and Brian Howard for the Macintosh team. But there is also no escaping the fact that the Macintosh we know and love is very different from the computer Jef wanted to build, so much so that he is perhaps much more like an eccentric great uncle than the Macintosh’s father.

  Steve Jobs in 1989

  Specifically, Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology: the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which had only 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two because it couldn’t address more than 64K bytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started. The final product utilized very few of the ideas in Jef’s Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, as it almost did (see “Bicycle” on page 36), there wouldn’t be much reason to correlate it with Raskin’s ideas at all.

  So, if not Jef, does anyone else qualify as a parent of the Macintosh? Bill Atkinson is a strong candidate, since he was almost single-handedly responsible for the breakthrough user interface, graphics software, and killer application (MacPaint) that distinguished the Mac. A case could also be made for Burrell Smith, whose wildly creative digital board was the seed crystal of brilliance everything else coalesced around. But ultimately, if any single individual deserves the honor, I would have to cast my vote for the obvious choice: Steve Jobs. The Macintosh never would have happened without him, in anything like the form it did. Other individuals are responsible for the actual creative work, but Steve’s vision, passion for excellence, and sheer strength of will, not to mention his awesome powers of persuasion, drove the team to meet or exceed the impossible standards we set for ourselves. Steve already gets a lot of credit for being the driving force behind the Macintosh. In my opinion, it’s very well deserved.

  Apple’s Fremont Macintosh factory warehouse

  Epilogue: The Macintosh Spirit

  The attitudes and values of the team forged the spirit of the Macintosh

  The original Macintosh was designed by a small team that worked long hours with a passionate, almost messianic fervor inculcated by our leader, Steve Jobs. The excitement that we felt during its creation shines through in the finished product. The attitudes, values, and personalities of the designers are reflected in the thousands of subtle choices they made in the course of their design, coalescing into a spirit or feeling imparted to its users.

  We were excited because we thought we had a chance to do something extraordinary. Most technology development is incremental, but every once in a while there’s an opportunity to make a quantum leap to a whole new level. A few years earlier, the Apple II and other pioneering systems made computing affordable to individuals, but they were still much too hard for most people to use. We felt that the Mac’s graphical user interface had the potential to make computing enjoyable to nontechnical users for the very first time, potentially improving the lives of millions of users.

  As soon as he seized the reins from Jef Raskin in January 1981, Steve Jobs galvanized the Macintosh team with an extreme sense of urgency. One of his first acts as head of the project was to bet John Couch, the executive in charge of the Lisa Division, $5000 that the Macintosh would beat the Lisa to market, despite the fact that Lisa had more than a two-year head start, and we had barely begun. The Mac team always had incredibly optimisti
c schedules because Steve was never satisfied with more realistic estimates (see “Reality Distortion Field” on page 24), as if he could make things happen faster through sheer force of will.

  But the desire to ship quickly was counterbalanced by a demanding, comprehensive perfectionism. Most commercial projects are driven by commercial values, where the goal is to maximize profits by outperforming your competition. In contrast, the Macintosh was driven more by artistic values, oblivious to competition, where the goal was to be transcendently brilliant and insanely great. We wanted the Macintosh to be a technical and artistic tour-de-force that pushed the state of the art in every conceivable dimension. No detail was too small to matter (see “PC Board Esthetics” on page 41), and good enough wasn’t good enough. If Steve could perceive it, it had to be great.

  Steve encouraged the Mac designers to think of ourselves as artists. In the spring of 1982, he took the entire Mac team on a field trip to a Louis Comfort Tiffany exhibition in San Francisco because Tiffany was an artist who was able to mass-produce his work, as we aspired to do. Steve even had us individually sign the interior of the Macintosh case, like artists signing their work (see “Signing Party” on page 68), encouraging each one of us to feel personally responsible for the quality of the product.

  Other groups at Apple had an elaborate formal product development process that mandated lengthy product requirement documents and engineering specifications before implementation commenced. In contrast, the Mac team favored a more creative, flexible, incremental approach of successively refining prototypes. Burrell Smith developed a unique hardware design style based on programmable array logic chips (PAL chips), which enabled him to make changes much faster than traditional techniques allowed, almost with the fluidity of software. Instead of arguing about new software ideas, we actually tried them out by writing quick prototypes, keeping the ideas that worked best and discarding the others (see “Busy Being Born” on page 89). We always had something running that represented our best thinking at the time.