While the founders of Apple were fending off suitors, they were also busying themselves with further modifications to the computer. Jobs thought a quiet machine without a fan would sell better than some of the noisier computers that used fans to cool power supplies that were as hot as toasters. Wozniak had never been that interested in power supplies: When he and Fernandez developed the Cream Soda Computer it was the power supply that failed. When he and Baum designed the Data General Nova, they hadn’t even bothered to design a power supply. The power supplies for the Apple were afterthoughts. Power supplies were something to be plugged in at the last moment, something that could always be fished off a shelf at Haltek. The only time it was necessary to worry about a power supply was when it threatened to send a bolt of volts streaking through the computer—and blow out every sweetly tuned piece of digital electronics.
Power supplies belonged to an older, stodgier branch of electronics whose basic rules hadn’t changed that much since the early days of radio. Power supplies, like regulators and transformers, were analog devices, and there was an emotional and intellectual division between analog and digital electronics. Youngsters like Wozniak were much more interested in digital electronics, where change was more rapid. Their conceptual world was framed in terms of highs and lows and 1s and 0s and their lives circulated around handling solutions that were presented to them by the semiconductor manufacturers.
General-purpose engineers tended to be more adept at analog electronics, which drew from a wide range of scientific disciplines and required a more thorough grounding in mathematics and physics. Analog designers worried more about completeness, aware that the addition of a screw or the placing of a wire might affect the performance of their design. They fretted about current losses and were altogether a more circumspect, patient breed. Unlike digital designers who would exclaim “It works,” the analog designers would be more cautious, explaining, “It works within the bounds of the specs.”
So Jobs drove to Atari and asked Al Alcorn to recommend somebody who could help design a power supply that wouldn’t need a fan. He returned to the garage exploding with optimism, telling Wozniak and Wigginton that he had met the greatest analog designer in the history of the universe, an engineer who could design a power supply that would light up New York but still run off a six-volt battery. The subject of the excitement, Frederick Rodney Holt, was less confident about Apple. He met Jobs, surveyed all that was visible between hair and toe, and wondered whether Apple could afford to pay his consultancy fee. “I told him I was expensive. He said, That’s no problem.’ He just conned me into working.”
Holt started spending evenings and weekends at Apple, and Jobs and Wozniak discovered, once again, that appearances were deceptive. Holt looked as if he might have been the chief designer of a sci-fi machine that fired bolts of swizzle sticks. His face was creased with pleats; he had jade-colored eyes, a thatch of hair, and a bony frame that was usually decked in a turtleneck shirt, slacks, and waffle-stomper shoes. Thin fingers almost always held a Camel cigarette and were stained with the nicotine that gave him a raspy cough. But he was no dried-out, middle-aged engineer. Though old enough to be the father of both Wozniak and Jobs, Holt had first become a parent at the age of eighteen, a year after he had left home to marry the first of several wives.
As a youth he had inherited the complete works of Lenin from his grandfather, a Revolutionary Socialist who ran for governor of the State of Maine on the Eugene Debs ticket. And though Lenin came to share his teenage bookshelf with the works of Darwin, Holt decided that the triumph of the proletariat was infinitely preferable to the survival of the fittest. He found graduate work in mathematics at Ohio State lonely—“It was like playing chess with yourself”—edited a free-speech newspaper, and explored the private jealousies of radical-left splinter groups. He became national treasurer for the student portion of the National Coalition Against the War in Vietnam and was invited by a small New York publisher to write a book about the Logic of Marxism. But he was diverted by the call of politics and in 1965, when John Lindsay ran for mayor of New York City, Holt managed the rival campaign of a black taxi driver who stood as a Revolutionary Socialist. The duo succeeded in drawing far more attention from the FBI than from the New York electorate.
Alongside his political forays Holt developed an interest in both electronics and motorcycles. He developed, built, and installed some low-distortion hi-fi sets “with a lot of poop” and for almost ten years worked at an electronics company in the Midwest where he helped to design a low-cost oscilloscope. During evenings and weekends Holt graduated from riding motor scooters to Harley Davidsons and Triumphs, and from flat-track to illegal road racing. As the years passed and racers bought the latest motorcycles, Holt’s edge, which depended on his mechanical ability to modify stock machinery, began to evaporate. Nevertheless, when he moved to the West Coast from Ohio in the early seventies he installed his three motorcycles on a trailer and towed them across the country. In the spring of 1976 he abandoned racing because muscle-nerve damage in his thumbs prevented him from keeping a tight grip on the handlebars. The language of the motorcycle circuit still speckled his speech but his forced retirement and a bitter quarrel with a longtime friend at Atari nudged him toward Apple. “If I had still been racing motorcycles when Jobs came along, I probably would have told him to get lost.”
Holt found that Jobs and the unruly Apple computer presented intriguing problems: “It was a challenge to do something on a commercial scale that had never been done before. It was the kind of problem that has a certain intrinsic appeal to me.” However, Holt was not about to let any part-time consulting, no matter how interesting, interfere with his weekly game of pool. And Jobs and Wozniak soon discovered it was impossible to talk to Holt about any subject without finding that he was armed with something more than rudimentary knowledge. An off-the-cuff remark about the glaze on a piece of pottery was liable to provoke a discourse on chemical treatments. An admiring comment about a snapshot would prompt a discourse on photogravure techniques. Grumbles about the price of memory chips would spark a lecture on the evils of the capitalist system while a casual mention of poker was almost certain to produce a spirited card game. Holt, the youngsters at Apple soon noticed, was the sort of person who would want to be on speaking terms with an electron and was quite likely to sit down in a restaurant and, on the back of a napkin, prove that he didn’t exist.
“It costs a helluva lot to have a revolution,” Goldman said.
Beyond the windows a long maroon steel beam hung carelessly from a crane. From the ground some laborers flashed earthy semaphore signals at the crane driver. The white crowns of their construction hats made bouncing mirrors of the sun. For the two dozen people seated around a U-shaped table in an anemic ground-floor office the noise of the work on Apple’s new corporate headquarters was sealed off by tinted windows. The drooping beam and the white hats were like a scene torn from a silent film on construction safety.
A few of the people at the meeting doodled and stared through the windows. About half were marketing managers from different divisions at Apple while the others came from the Chiat-Day advertising agency. John Couch, the head of the division making Lisa, sat anxiously on the edge of his seat. Fred Hoar, Apple’s vice-president of communications, smoothed his carefully combed auburn hair and Henry Whitfield stood beside an overhead projector. Others concentrated on Fred Goldberg as he made some remarks about the campaign that he and his colleagues at the advertising agency had prepared for Apple. Goldberg described some of the preparations for advertisements that would appear simultaneously with the company shareholders’ meeting where Lisa and the Apple IIes were to be formally introduced. He then started to outline a plan for advertising all of Apple’s computers.
“We’ve got a job to cut through the confusion and make a brand a brand,” Goldberg said. “We’ve got to build confidence among new users about which computers to use and when. Most people don’t just buy the computer. They b
uy the company, its size and the confidence it inspires.” He expressed some faith in the effect of the advertisements. “The running of around an announcement offers much less chance of backfiring than PR. When you run advertising you know what you’re going to get. Spending corporate money demonstrates corporate confidence in the product. It makes a statement when you spend your own money.”
Goldberg introduced the agency’s creative director, Lee Clow. A tall man with a faint stoop and a beard, Clow inhaled deeply on a cigarette and propped some poster-sized advertisements on a table. He pointed at the posters and said, “The second coming is the tenor of what we think this piece should be.” He read a chunk of the copy: “Evolution. Revolution.” He paused. “It’s very delicate to say that everything everyone else makes is obsolete, but that’s what we are trying to say. It’s very important that the Lisa introduction show that everyone else is an also-ran.” Clow finished reading the ad copy and some of the people from Apple voiced their concerns.
“We don’t want the ads to step on the editorial,” Fred Hoar said. He pointed out that news reports would appear for a few days following the introductions of Lisa and the Apple IIe. “This is going to be a skyrocket. I want to give the PR some impact.”
Alan Oppenheimer, an Apple marketing manager with a generous smile and steel-framed spectacles, touched on a running sore. Though Mac and Lisa both relied on a mouse and on visual symbols, programs written for one wouldn’t work on another. So the marketers had their hands full trying to conceal the fact that Lisa and Mac might have been designed by different companies. “Maybe the master plan is not quite appropriate,” Oppenheimer said. “Mac and Lisa aren’t compatible. The technical press can see through it. They could take us apart.”
“The master-plan harmonic wouldn’t be something we’d ram home,” Hoar said, “but we’d like to dispel the idea that Apple is opportunistic, haphazard, and uncoordinated.”
John Couch rocked on the edge of his chair and commented sharply, “What we really want to say is ‘Here’s a personal office system. There’s been a hardware revolution in the seventies and there will be a software revolution in the eighties.’ That’s the message.”
A few seats down the table, Linda Goffen, who worked for Couch, nodded vigorously and added, “We have to preempt that terminology and make it our own.”
As the debate subsided Clow described the advertising agency’s proposal for linking advertisements for Lisa and Mac. He recited the tag line: “Introducing computers you don’t have to be afraid of even if you have to hold a mouse in your hand.”
“I think that’s almost technical suicide,” said Paul Dali, the tousle-haired head of marketing for the Apple II and Apple III. “Apart from the mouse interface they’re not similar. We shouldn’t be trying to create a family.”
“The only people that’ll beat us up on compatibility will be the Fortune 500,” Couch said in a soothing manner. ‘They’ll say, ‘Why can’t I take my word processor home from Lisa and plug it into Mac?’ They’ll think we’re a bunch of dummies.”
“It’s an issue.” Henry Whitfield sighed. “These things are incompatible. People are going to find out sooner or later that they’re not going to talk to each other. Most of the Fortune 1000 companies think we should have more compatibility. We’ll say we’ve tried to keep the price down to get back into more of a consumer marketplace.”
John Couch returned to the central theme of the meeting: how Apple could persuade people in large companies to buy Lisas and Macs. He started to complain about the data-processing managers who were used to controlling the computer power at large companies. “They’re more concerned about putting barriers up to prevent computers from getting to the rest of the world. They didn’t like Apple IIs running all over the place and now they’ve got IBM calling on them. We cannot compete with IBM from a sales and service standpoint so we’ve got to rely on technology. We’ve got to say, ‘It’s new technology. There’s a revolution out there. If the technology doesn’t meet your needs, still buy Apple because they’re way out in front of everybody.’”
“We’ve got to plant the flag right,” Paul Dali emphasized.
“There just isn’t enough money,” Fred Goldberg said, spreading his hands in a resigned way.
“We’ve been banging our heads against the wall to get more money,” Henry Whitfield observed. “We’re significantly underspending. We just don’t have enough money.”
“You cannot have a revolution and approach it with quarter-page ads,” the advertising agency’s Maurice Goldman agreed. “It costs a helluva lot to have a revolution.”
MERCEDES AND A CORVETTE
Apple Computer was caught in a thin, flimsy world of amateurs. It was a comfortable place that many microcomputer companies were content to occupy. The engineers could argue into the small hours about circuits and clever pieces of code. The founders could revel in their newfound authority, snipe at the staid ways of large companies, place large advertisements in small publications, lick their lips at the sight of several thousand dollars, and generally conduct themselves like tinpot emperors of banana republics. Many of these people never understood what they didn’t know and were either too wary, or too cocksure, to seek advice from others more experienced in the ways of the world.
These receptacles of wisdom sat in dozens of low-slung buildings with steel frames, concrete walls, and blank panes of glass. By the mid-seventies these monotonous industrial barns had largely replaced the mosaic of fields and orchards that had once stretched over the plain alongside the western fringes of San Francisco Bay. They were home for the dozens of companies that had been founded during the sixties and seventies as the center of electronic novelty drifted south from Sunnyvale toward San Jose. There was a clinical frailty to these buildings that were sometimes called “tilt-ups” because the walls were made from prefabricated blocks of poured concrete which were tilted into position. The buildings looked as if they had been supplied by a builder with a florist’s yard. There were fresh curbstones, gleaming black asphalt, and cropped grass that had all the smoothness and allure of Astroturf. It was an industrial Levittown.
A quick drive around Santa Clara or Mountain View brought a blur of logos and signs that seemed to be contractions or combinations of about five words: Advanced-Digi-Integrated-Micro-Technologies. The similar sounding names that stood by the driveways were familiar to any regular reader of Electronics News,but to say the companies were all the same was about as perceptive as observing that most shirts come with collars, sleeves, and buttons. Life behind the walls had a transitory flavor and the old seasonal rhythms of rural life had given way to a pattern associated with young companies that was almost biological. It tended to run through a cycle of ambition, enthusiasm, exhilaration, complication, disillusion, and frustration. An electronics association had taken to publishing a corporate genealogical chart, and chroniclers of the electronics industry would patiently explain to newcomers how Fairchild Semiconductor begat Intel Corporation and National Semiconductor and how they, in turn, spawned other companies. The chart, which grew longer and more entwined over the years, had its share of corporate divorces, second marriages, stepsons, and illegitimate offspring, and the breeding patterns were so incestuous that in humans they would have led to birth defects.
The founders and managers of these companies were fond of saying that there was nothing they might need that wasn’t within an hour’s drive. There were lawyers to draw up incorporation papers, venture capitalists to provide money, contractors to lay foundations, interior designers to decorate offices, accountants to check the books, distributors who stocked parts, job shops to perform tedious chores, public-relations agencies to court the press, and underwriters to prepare stock offerings. Many of these men had grown up in the semiconductor industry. They hopped between companies, left to form their own, and kept loose track of one another. They were mobile reservoirs of experience who knew whom to trust and steered business toward one another. It was a small
place where word and rumor traveled fast, where people frequently wound up working for someone they had once hired and where allegiances were to people rather than to companies. All these men worked or invested in the companies whose products eventually trickled down to Haltek and Halted and to the likes of Wozniak and Jobs. But for all the physical proximity, there was still a considerable distance between the professionals and the amateurs.
Jobs, with his keen internal gyrocompass, began to bridge the gap and called the marketing department at Intel to find out who was responsible for their distinctive advertisements. To the irritation of many Intel engineers, these weren’t cluttered with dull charts or black-and-white technical drawings and didn’t dwell on the esoteric strengths of a new chip. They used color and wraparound type and relied heavily on symbols to explain the potential power of the electronics. Poker chips meant profits, race cars, speed, cleavers, cost cutting, while hamburgers showed that chips could be made to order. Jobs discovered that the ideas and look came from an advertising and public-relations agency in Palo Alto that bore the name of its founder, Regis McKenna. Jobs rang the agency and was funneled toward Frank Burge who took informal responsibility for screening new businesses. Burge wasn’t about to be harried by some youngster who announced that he wanted to prepare a color brochure and said, “You guys do good stuff; I’d like you to do my mine.” Burge listened and told Jobs he would speak to him within the week. Jobs called Burge several more times. “There were always a pile of messages on my desk and Steve wouldn’t let his get to the bottom of the pile. I didn’t want to be rude to him so I finally said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come take a look.’ As I was driving over to the garage I was thinking, ‘Holy Christ, this guy is going to be something else. What’s the least amount of time I can spend with this clown without being rude and then get back to something more profitable.’”
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