Return to the Little Kingdom

by Michael Moritz

  “The time to completion is a constant,” Andy Hertzfeld said.

  The warm Sunday afternoon gloom pushed against the glass doors at the rear of the Mac laboratory. The air conditioning, which vibrated through the speckled ceiling tiles on weekdays, was turned off. The stuffy darkness was sliced in two places. A gentle light ballooned out of Andy Hertzfeld’s programming cubicle and a cube of cold neon lit an engineer’s bench where Burrell Smith was gnawing the skin of his knuckles. Hertzfeld slipped out of his cubicle and walked to the bench where Smith slid off his lab stool. Both stood lower than the head-light partitions that separated all the offices. They stared at a printed circuit board which, festooned with probes and wires, looked like a stomach pried apart with sutures, retractors, and hemostats. The probes were hooked to a logic analyzer and the rows of lines on its green screen monitored the signals emerging from the microprocessor.

  Smith hadn’t gone home the previous day until 11:30 P.M. and then had stayed up until 3 A.M. thinking about why the Mac’s memory chips were not being recharged properly. Neither he nor Hertzfeld had worked on one project for quite as long before. The fatigue of designing a computer was printed on the pair and both were working harder than they had ever worked. Smith was twenty-six and Hertzfeld twenty-nine though both looked older. Behind his spectacles, Hertzfeld’s eyelids looked like swollen leeches while his cheeks were unshaven and pale. The pallid circles around Smith’s eyes bore the marks of late evenings. The same slack belts of fast food were strapped to their waists. Hertzfeld had found that developing a computer distorted time. “I used to think six months was a long time. But it’s not. It seems like an instant.”

  Smith, his auburn hair tucked tight behind one ear and hanging in a thin curl beneath the other, tripped over his words in a frothy rush: “It’s so weird,” he complained to Hertzfeld. In a languid tone Hertzfeld asked, “How do you know that you’ve fixed it when you don’t know how it occurs?” Smith replied, “It’s so frustrating because I haven’t proved that I cannot solve the problem and I haven’t proved that I can solve it either.” Hertzfeld sighed. “We’re going to be getting into superstitions. We’re going to see that it works but we won’t be sure that it works.”

  Smith had been trying to solve the puzzle for a couple of days. He had first noticed the computer wasn’t behaving properly while the rest of the engineers were celebrating what they thought was the completion of the first Mac prototype. Smith had ignored the champagne, which at Apple (and at the Mac group in particular) had a habit of appearing from behind even the thinnest milestone, and sat by himself looking at the computer. He had used a heat gun, which looked like a hairdryer, and a spray to heat and cool particular chips to temperatures where quirks were liable to appear more frequently. Smith had decided that the problem lay with the largest chip on the board, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor.

  The 68000 and the other chips on the board were a tribute to the continuing advances in semiconductor technology. The 68000 was a sixteen-bit microprocessor, and consequently the Mac had about ten times as much computing power as the Apple II, though it used half as many chips. Smith compared the difference in complexity to watching an ordinary baseball game and then trying to follow the action in a game where eight batters hit simultaneously to fifty-four outfielders. He was perspiring and kept flicking frames onto the logic analyzer to inspect another frame showing the electronic signals from the clocks. He said, “You thrash around the design space long enough and you learn the idiosyncrasies.”

  Some at Apple thought the entire Mac project reflected a parade of personal idiosyncrasies rather than any grand design. There was no plan of Napoleonic proportions. False starts, diversions, mistakes, experiments, rebellion, and competition formed the stuff of the machine. The Mac, like other products that rely on technological advances, the uncertain swings of a fast-growing company, and the proclivities of different managers, was something that Apple had been groping toward for several years. For almost two years it was one of those projects that could have foundered with the departure of a programmer or the appearance of a faulty prototype. Hertzfeld, who had watched the ups and downs, the delays in announcement, had formed his own conclusion about how to measure progress: “The time to completion,” he had decided, “is a constant.”

  The starting point turned into the only sure point of reference. In the middle of 1979 the manager of Apple’s publications department, Jef Raskin, was asked to take charge of a small group that would build a computer to sell for $500, work through a television set, contain a built-in modem, and be able to run both the Pascal and BASIC languages. Raskin, misspelling the name of his favorite apple, code-named the project Macintosh and dreamed up his own idea for a computer. “I thought it was more important to give people a choice of case color than a choice between the number of bytes of memory. I wanted it to become an indispensable part of a house. I wanted something that people would become addicted to.” Raskin suggested that Apple produce a battery-powered portable home computer that would sell for under $1,000. He built a cardboard mock-up and decided that the computer should have a built-in screen, should not contain any expansion slots, and should be accompanied by a thin manual. A year or so after starting work on the project he noted, “Apple II is a system. Macintosh is an appliance.”

  Raskin, a chunky, bearded man with a soft spot for model airplanes and music, set up shop in late 1979 and shuffled among several buildings, including Apple’s original office suite near the Good Earth Restaurant. In early 1981 Raskin, as Hertzfeld re-called, ran afoul of Apple politics. “The Lisa team in general told Steve to fuck off. Steve said, ‘I’ll get this team that’ll make a cheap computer and that will blow them off the face of the earth.’ Then Steve saw that Raskin had critical mass: He had a hardware engineer and a software engineer. Since Steve was a bigger kid than Raskin, he said, ‘I like that toy!’ and took it.”

  Raskin quickly fell victim to Jobs, who wanted to impose his own imprimatur on the project. Jobs added veterans from the early days of Apple to Raskin’s team. He tried to change the code-name of the project from Mac to Bicycle after reading a Scientific American article that described the personal computer as the bicycle of the twenty-first century. But he backed off when his group protested. After taking control of Mac, Jobs made his intentions clear. He bet John Couch, the head of the Lisa division, $5,000 that Mac would ship first.

  At first, Smith and Hertzfeld eyed Jobs with suspicion. The former had been raised in upstate New York where he had studied literature at junior college and become interested in a UNIVAC computer and phone phreaking. The first electronic device he had ever built was a blue box, which he constructed on his mother’s kitchen table. “I reckoned it was impossible to find it on the street and I wanted the satisfaction of building my own.” For phone phreaking he adopted the name Marty, and when he first visited California he stayed with John Draper. He attended some Homebrew meetings and, on moving permanently to California, built an office control system for doctors and dentists and bought a Commodore Pet because he couldn’t afford an Apple. Out of work, he helped a friend build a wall and was touring companies in a borrowed truck when he was offered a job as a technician in Apple’s service department. He repaired Apple IIs by day and studied the schematics at night. “I wanted to find out how the board worked by myself. I had almost subconscious dreams that I’d be dealing with logical elements in some way. I was always driven down to the lowest level of the system. I don’t like working on things if I don’t know how they work.”

  Smith was fished from the service department by a programmer who recognized his talent and recommended him to Raskin. By the spring of 1980 Smith had designed a prototype based on an eight-bit microprocessor. For about six months, the computer languished with no software. A programmer hired to write some of the software placed unshakable faith in the computer languages used in artificial intelligence work and had little sympathy for the demands of microcomputers. Then Smith started working with the M
otorola 68000 and by Christmas of 1980 had developed a second Mac. Hertzfeld, who was working on software for the Apple II, watched these changes with mounting envy. One night he stayed late and wrote a small program that produced a picture of Mr. Scrooge and the greeting: HI BURRELL.

  Hertzfeld had grown up in Philadelphia and started programming when he was fifteen. “I was amazed you could get this typewriter to do such-neat things.” He studied science and mathematics at Rhode Island’s Brown University and moved to Berkeley because he wanted to live in California and preferred the prospect of graduate studies to corporate life. He bought an Apple II six months after it appeared and nursed an impatience with some of his fellow students. “They were people who didn’t like programming. They liked talking about programming.” He wrote an I Ching game and took it to a local computer club, designed a peripheral for the Apple II and was startled when he found out how much some of the computer companies were paying. “I didn’t think it was the sort of thing you did for money. Now I’ve been corrupted by money and by thinking how much I can make.”

  Smith and Hertzfeld had gradually learned to live with Jobs and he with them. It was a delicate set of relationships glued together by the fact that they all needed each other. Hertzfeld and Smith worked around Jobs’s unpredictable nature. Hertzfeld explained, “He’d stop by and say, ‘This is a pile of shit’ or ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ The scary thing was that he’d say it about the same thing.” The pair floated in the uncertainty of whether Jobs liked them or whether he just liked them for the jobs they were performing. And Hertzfeld, three years after the start of the project, admitted, “I like working for Steve because of Mac but I don’t know if I like him.”

  Yet Jobs had instilled an urgency into the Mac project and his influence within the company had given it increasing prominence. One of the programmers who worked on the early stages of Mac had nicknamed Jobs “the reality distortion field” and the sci-fi moniker had stuck. Jobs had many of his group believing they were building another Apple II and his faith was almost strong enough to persuade them that they were working in a garage when all the tangible evidence suggested otherwise.

  Like all employees, Smith and Hertzfeld had grumbled about their boss. They complained that Jobs forbade them to show Mac to their friends while he paraded visitors, including his one-time flame, folk singer Joan Baez, through the lab. Their irritation mounted when it took Jobs months to concede that the Mac screen and 64K bytes of memory were too small before he ordered a redesign. They mumbled some more when Jobs refused to give them permission to sell a mouse interface for the Apple II. When Jobs arranged for the programmer developing the word processor for the Mac to receive a royalty of $1 for every copy sold, tempers rose. It had not taken Hertzfeld and Smith long to figure that, given Apple’s ambitions for the computer, the word processor would leave its author with larger tax problems than they were contemplating. Smith worried that Jobs wasn’t thinking boldly enough about future computers and, on hearing that the Mac group would move into a building occupied by personal computer systems division, muttered, “It says, ‘Thanks guys,’ but now you’re just like all the rest. You’re just ordinary guys. Mac will become another PCS and we’ll be just another big company.” On several occasions Hertzfeld had threatened to quit but each time Jobs had persuaded him to stay.

  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.”

  HALF RIGHT

  While 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 schema
tics 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.