Return to the Little Kingdom

by Michael Moritz

  Markkula, who was diplomatic and disliked imposing demands on others, asked Jobs and Wozniak to consider Scott as a possible president for Apple. Wozniak, anxious not to be burdened with any corporate drudgery, was impressed by Scott and flattered by his obvious infatuation with computers. “I felt very comfortable knowing that somebody else besides Steve would be around to manage production.” Jobs, however, was far less sure about this tumbling man who didn’t seem to care about Eastern philosophy and who preferred pizza to salad. He spent hours at a Bob’s Big Boy with Holt and Wozniak, ruminating about Scott. Holt recalled, “Jobs didn’t know whether he wanted to run the show or not. He didn’t have much confidence that Woz had much business acumen and was going to speak with him and help, if push came to shove, to keep the company on the right course. He was left in the uncertain position of not knowing how much power he was giving up.” If Scott proved unsatisfactory, Jobs also wanted to be free to repurchase his share of the stock. Markkula once again exercised his persuasive influence and explained to Jobs that it was not a question of power but whether Apple would be better managed.

  Jobs listened. He balanced the promise of future contributions against the tangible loss of power. He was strong enough to admit what he didn’t know and pugnacious enough not to get bowled over by men who were many years older. He was prepared to relinquish the sweat of a year, but was also consoled by simple arithmetic. Since any combination of Wozniak, Jobs, and Markkula controlled the majority of the company’s shares, they could unseat Scott at any time. It was a peculiar arrangement and Scott, who had become a guardian of other people’s investments, recognized reality. “I wondered whether I could really get anything done or whether we would argue all the time. My biggest concern was whether Jobs and I could get along. He was concerned that I wasn’t doing consumer stuff. I was concerned that he didn’t know what he was doing.” Since Scott was the nominal boss, he was paid $20,001 for the first year, one dollar more than the members of the triumvirate.

  Though, to one degree or another, they were all tekkies, Jobs, Wozniak, Holt, Markkula, and Scott had virtually nothing in common. They differed in age, appearance, background, and ambition. They were attracted to different sorts of lovers and had varying attitudes toward fidelity, pleasure, aesthetics, religion, money, and politics. A couple speckled their speech with obscenities while others almost blushed at the sound of a four-letter word. They were so different that a biologist presented with five chromosome specimens would probably have been surprised to learn the donors were all male and bipedal.

  There was Jobs who, though he certainly liked money and relished power, virtually fell into Apple for want of anything else to do; Wozniak, for whom the binary difference between one thousand and one million was far clearer than the monetary, derived his chief delight from displaying the power of his machine; Holt, who had never owned thirty thousand dollars in his life, was attracted by the prospect of making a quarter of a million dollars in five years; Markkula, who could not conceal his interest in the computer or his desire to bolster a personal portfolio; and Scott who, more than anything else, wanted to be the president of a company that would leap over the moon.

  “In China it could be marvelous,” Paola Ghiringelli exclaimed.

  An Apple II, an Apple III, a Lisa, and a Macintosh were lined up in battle order on a pair of steel tables. Two Mac marketing managers, Michael Murray and Michael Boich, were sitting in front of the computers, putting the finishing touches to a presentation they were about to give to the Belgian-born artist Jean-Michel Folon. Some months before, Steve Jobs, in his role as Apple aesthete, had been impressed by the bridge between romance and surrealism formed by Folon’s work. He had decided to marry the European artist with the California computer and, for a time, wanted Apple’s advertising to reflect Folon’s image of Mac. Jobs had contacted Folon, attended one of his shows in New York, and invited him to Cupertino. For Jobs the triple combination of art, New York, and Europe was irresistible. Folon, in turn, had sent some sketches of his ideas, which Jobs had been keeping on a chest of drawers in his bedroom.

  So it was no accident that Murray and Boich inhabited a Folonesque world. The gray felt walls of the conference room were draped with mock-ups of advertising posters, instruction manuals, and diskette sleeves devised by Apple’s graphics department from the slants, shades, and recurring figures of Folon’s work. A five-foot-high cardboard cutout of a Folon character with a melancholy demeanor, frumpy hat, and angular overcoat was propped against one wall.

  Murray had decided to offer Folon a royalty of a dollar for each Mac sold which, given that Apple eventually hoped to sell over a million Macs a year, was a lucrative contract. Boich was playing with the Lisa when the screen suddenly became a jumble of scrambled letters and numbers. He took a look and said, “I’m going to see if we can do something about this; otherwise we’re going to end up with a dead Lisa when Folon arrives.” Murray glanced at the mess and muttered, “We have a history of messing up presentations at Apple. We want to get this one right.” He returned to the Mac where he finished drawing a miniature version of one of Folon’s characters with a cartoon bubble enclosing the greeting BONJOUR MONSIEUR.

  When Folon arrived he brought a Parisian palette to Cupertino. A tall, rumpled man, he wore creased royal-blue painter’s pants, narrow crimson suspenders, a checkered Viyella shirt, a scuffed cotton jacket, and round, horn-rimmed spectacles. He was accompanied by Paola Ghiringelli, who was dressed in an orange corduroy waistcoat and fawn trousers, and Marek Millek, who worked as a graphic artist for Apple in Paris and was acting as Sherpa and interpreter. Folon immediately upset the carefully laid plans when he decided to investigate the computers.

  “Oh, regardez!” said Folon as he spotted Murray’s drawing.

  He was drawn to the machine and sat down for a demonstration of Macintosh and, as it turned out, a quick lesson in how computers worked, with Murray explaining things in short, clipped Pidgin English which Millek, in a Cockney accent, then translated into French. Murray started sketching some more.

  “Go to his eyes and put some eyeballs in,” Boich urged.

  “We can put freckles on his face,” Murray explained.

  Folon sat down and started to draw with the mouse. He looked at the picture that appeared on the screen and winced. “Ah. He doesn’t know how to draw now,” Ghiringelli exclaimed in a husky Italian accent. She turned to Murray and asked, “This will only be for drawing?”

  “No, no, no,” Murray said earnestly. “For writing, for typing as well.”

  They gathered around the long conference table with Murray standing by a flip chart covered with five basic questions about Macintosh.

  “Celles sont des bonnes questions,” Folon said as he slid a small tape recorder onto the table.

  “Macintosh,” explained Murray, “is a code name. But it has taken on a personality of its own. It is more than a fruit. Mac means the machine. The man. The Personality. The Character.”

  “What is a Macintosh?” asked Ghiringelli.

  “It’s an apple,” answered Murray.

  “An apple?” Paola Ghiringelli asked again.

  “Yes,” said Murray. “There are Golden Delicious, Pippins; there are probably ten kinds of apple.”

  “Ah! Macintosh is a kind of apple,” Ghiringelli exclaimed.

  Folon spoke with his hands. “In Europe,” Millek translated, “the word mac makes people think of machine. He thinks of speed. He thinks of a big guy. He thinks of macho.”

  “I think it’s a nice name,” Folon said quietly, “but in Europe it’s far from apple.”

  Murray explained the differences among all Apple’s computers and said, “We do not want to sell it as a technology machine. We want the product to have a personality and we want people to buy it because of its personality. We want to make it a cult product. We want people to buy it for its image as well as its utility.”

  He pointed to another question on the chart and asked rhetorically, “
Who will use it? It will be used on desks. The desks are in offices. The desks are in big offices . . . little offices . . . big cities . . . little cities . . . in colleges . . . . in the U.S. . . . in Europe . . . all over the world.”

  Millek exhaled and turned to Murray. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This is getting a bit complicated. In French when you say bureau it means ‘desk’ and ‘office.’ When you start saying desk in an office, it gets complicated.”

  “Is it secret?” asked Ghiringelli.

  “Very,” said Murray.

  “We have many friends at Olivetti and IBM,” Ghiringelli added.

  “It’s very, very secret,” Murray repeated.

  “Don’t talk to me about it,” Folon shivered.

  Suddenly Murray paused. “I don’t know how to say this.”

  “What?” asked Millek.

  “User interface,” said Murray.

  “Don’t say that, for God’s sake,” Millek said.

  “I want to say it’s easy to use,” Murray continued.

  “That’s better.” Millek sighed.

  Murray continued with a brief history of Apple, annotated with sales numbers and employee count. He and Folon talked about the possibility of Folon’s designing posters and a series of post-cards and working alongside one of the programmers to produce a game to accompany the computer. He described what he thought would be the eventual world market for personal computers. He then checked off the countries where he thought Apple wouldn’t find buyers for Macs and concluded, “Not China, not Russia, not India. Well, maybe one or two people in India.”

  “In China it could be marvelous,” Ghiringelli said with assurance. “They are very lazy. They count with an abacus. They will like it very much.”

  WHAT A MOTHERBOARD

  The push to complete the successor to the Apple computer was given greater urgency by the immovable threat of the First West Coast Computer Faire. There was an indignant tone to early advertisements for the fair. It was almost as if the Silicon Valley hobbyists felt their rightful place in the world of microcomputers had been usurped by a string of exhibitions held during 1976 in godforsaken spots where people weren’t supposed to be able to tell the difference between a microprocessor and a shift register. There were glum faces at Homebrew Club meetings as fairs took place in cities that were thousands of miles away from microcomputer’s Bethlehem—Detroit, Michigan, Trenton, New Jersey. So there was some relief when, shortly after Jobs and Wozniak had taken their cigar box to Atlantic City, word began to spread that a large fair was planned for San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium in the spring of 1977.

  The chief organizers of the fair were both Homebrew Club members and had originally envisaged a swap meet at Stanford but were turned down by the university authorities. Forced to look elsewhere and encouraged by the crowds that the Atlantic City show had attracted, they scrimped enough money to pay for the rental deposit on a large convention hall in San Francisco. Advertisements promising a large attendance and plenty of exhibitors had appeared in the Homebrew Club newsletter and Jobs, in September 1976, was one of the first to make a commitment to have a display. With grand promises about the size of the show, the number of exhibitors, and the conference panel, it was a natural forum to introduce a new computer. And for Wozniak, Jobs, and their newly acquired professional collaborators, the months leading up to the Computer Faire were a hectic scramble.

  Jobs thought the cigar boxes that sat on the SLAC desk tops during Homebrew meetings were as elegant as fly traps. The angular, blue and black sheet-metal case that housed Processor Technology’s Sol struck him as clumsy and industrial, “I got a bug up my rear that I wanted the computer in a plastic case.” No other microcomputer company had chosen that course. A plastic case was generally considered a needless expense compared to the cheaper and more pliable sheet metal. Hobbyists, so the arguments went, didn’t care as much for appearance as they did for substance. Jobs wanted to model the case for the Apple after those Hewlett-Packard used for its calculators. He admired their sleek, fresh lines, their hardy finish, and the way they looked at home on a table or desk. He drove to Macy’s department store in San Francisco and lingered in the kitchen and stereo departments looking at the design of household appliances. He was a very careful observer with a sensuous taste who knew what he liked and was determined to get what he wanted.

  Jobs approached a former workmate at Atari and the original Apple tie breaker, Ron Wayne, and asked them to come up with sketches for a case. His Atari chum produced some water-wash drawings full of angles, swoops, and compound curves. Ron Wayne’s design might have come from Rube Goldberg’s garage. The case had a removable Plexiglas top that was fastened to wooden sides by metal straps. To protect the computer against strands of hair, drops of coffee, and flecks of dust, Wayne incorporated a tambour door that slid down over the keyboard like the hood of a rolltop desk. As the door moved it tripped a switch concealed in a runner that turned the computer on and off. Jobs had little time for either of the designs and started a search for a more sophisticated approach.

  Jerry Mannock was recommended as a possible savior by one of Wozniak’s colleagues at Hewlett-Packard. At the beginning of January 1977 Jobs called Mannock, explained his dilemma, and suggested he attend a meeting of the Homebrew Club. Mannock had once wanted to be an electrical engineer, discovered that he preferred the concrete to the abstract, and for several years worked as a product designer at Hewlett-Packard. Bored with designing cases calculated to appeal to electrical engineers and alarmed by the sound of young men talking about retirement, he quit, joined a company that made devices for the handicapped, and almost immediately started to feel that he was being treated as a draftsman. “My stomach was in a knot going to work.” He quit once more, sold his cars, traveled around Europe with his wife, and when he returned to California, started his own firm. At the time Jobs called, Mannock was trying to build a clientele out of his home. A firmly built man with dark hair, Mannock took any project he could land. During his first year in business he had designed a solar home in New Mexico, accepted some small contracts for packaging, and scraped a $100 profit.

  Mannock found Jobs in the SLAC lobby standing beside a card table that carried the computer and talking to some other people. “He was time-sharing a conversation with three other people and he was doing a good job keeping up with all three conversations. I’d never run into anybody who did this.” Mannock discovered that Jobs wanted several plastic cases within twelve weeks in time for the formal introduction of the Apple II at the First West Coast Computer Faire. Mannock wasn’t discouraged by the tight deadlines. “I hadn’t done this before so I didn’t know any better.” When Jobs offered to pay $1,500 for mechanical drawings of a case, Mannock agreed but wanted to be paid in advance. “These were flaky-looking customers and I didn’t know if they were going to be around when the case was finished.” Jobs convinced him that Apple would be around to pay its bills and was virtually as safe as the Bank of America.

  Much of the design of the case was dictated by the computer. It had to have a removable lid, be high enough to house the cards that would slot into the motherboard, and be large enough to let some of the heat from the power supply dissipate. Mannock completed the drawings within three weeks. “I did a very conservative design that would blend in with other things. I wanted a good, honest statement in plastic and the minimum amount of visual clutter.” Once the general shape was settled there were only a few changes. A pair of indented handles on the side were eliminated because the whole case was slim enough to be gripped between thumb and pinkie. While Jobs was enthusiastic about the drawings Mannock presented for the case, he steadfastly refused to pay for a $300 foam-core mock-up produced for an advertisement.

  Just as Ron Wayne’s design for the case was set to one side, so was his original logo with its academic overtones. At the Regis McKenna Agency Rob Janov, a young art director, was assigned to the Apple account and set about designing a corporate logo. Armed with the i
dea that the computers would be sold to consumers and that their machine was one of the few to offer color, Janov set about drawing still lifes from a bowl of apples. “I wanted to simplify the shape of an apple.” He gouged a rounded chunk from one side of the Apple, seeing this as a playful comment on the world of bits and bytes but also as a novel design. To Janov the missing portion “prevented the apple from looking like a cherry tomato.” He ran six colorful stripes across the Apple, starting with a jaunty sprig of green, and the mixture had a slightly psychedelic tint. The overall result was enticing and warm. Janov recalled Jobs’s demands: “Steve always wanted a very high-quality look. He wanted something that looked expensive and didn’t look like some chunky model airplane.” Jobs was meticulous about the style and appearance of the logo, buzzing to the agency and fretting at Regis McKenna’s home in the evening. When Janov suggested that the six colors be separated by thin strips to make the reproduction easier, Jobs refused.