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FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLING BIOGRAPHIES OF BENJAMIN

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BESTSELLING BIOGRAPHIES OF BENJAMIN
FRANKLIN AND ALBERT EINSTEIN, THIS IS THE EXCLUSIVE BIOGRAPHY
OF STEVE JOBS.

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as
interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors,
and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and
searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and
ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music,
phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the
ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create
value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a
company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of
engineering.
Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written
nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing offlimits. He
encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes
brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and
colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry,
devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative
products that resulted.
Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his
personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to
be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with
lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been the chairman of CNN and the
managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, and Kissinger: A Biography, and is the coauthor,
with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He and his
wife live in Washington, D.C.

MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
• THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS •

JACKET PHOTOGRAPHS: FRONT BY ALBERT WATSON;
BACK BY NORMAN SEEFF

COPYRIGHT © 2011 SIMON & SCHUSTER

ALSO BY WALTER ISAACSON

American Sketches

Einstein: His Life and Universe

A Benjamin Franklin Reader

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Kissinger: A Biography

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made
(with Evan Thomas)

Pro and Con

The people who are crazy enough
to think they can change
the world are the ones who do.

—Apple’s “Think Different” commercial, 1997

CONTENTS

Characters
Introduction: How This Book Came to Be

CHAPTER ONE
Childhood: Abandoned and Chosen
CHAPTER TWO
Odd Couple: The Two Steves
CHAPTER THREE
The Dropout: Turn On, Tune In . . .
CHAPTER FOUR
Atari and India: Zen and the Art of Game Design
CHAPTER FIVE
The Apple I: Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . .
CHAPTER SIX
The Apple II: Dawn of a New Age
CHAPTER SEVEN
Chrisann and Lisa: He Who Is Abandoned . . .
CHAPTER EIGHT
Xerox and Lisa: Graphical User Interfaces
CHAPTER NINE
Going Public: A Man of Wealth and Fame
CHAPTER TEN
The Mac Is Born: You Say You Want a Revolution
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Reality Distortion Field: Playing by His Own Set of Rules
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Design: Real Artists Simplify
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Building the Mac: The Journey Is the Reward
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Enter Sculley: The Pepsi Challenge
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Launch: A Dent in the Universe

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Gates and Jobs: When Orbits Intersect
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Icarus: What Goes Up . . .
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NeXT: Prometheus Unbound
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Pixar: Technology Meets Art
CHAPTER TWENTY
A Regular Guy: Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Family Man: At Home with the Jobs Clan
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Toy Story: Buzz and Woody to the Rescue
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Second Coming:
What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Restoration: The Loser Now Will Be Later to Win
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Think Different: Jobs as iCEO
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Design Principles: The Studio of Jobs and Ive
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The iMac: Hello (Again)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CEO: Still Crazy after All These Years
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Apple Stores: Genius Bars and Siena Sandstone
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Digital Hub: From iTunes to the iPod
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The iTunes Store: I’m the Pied Piper
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Music Man: The Sound Track of His Life
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Pixar’s Friends: . . . and Foes
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Twenty-first-century Macs: Setting Apple Apart
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Round One: Memento Mori
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The iPhone: Three Revolutionary Products in One

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Round Two: The Cancer Recurs
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The iPad: Into the Post-PC Era
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
New Battles: And Echoes of Old Ones
CHAPTER FORTY
To Infinity: The Cloud, the Spaceship, and Beyond
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Round Three: The Twilight Struggle
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Legacy: The Brightest Heaven of Invention

Paul Jobs with Steve, 1956

The Los Altos house with the garage where Apple was born

With the “SWAB JOB” school prank sign

CHAPTER ONE

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科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:01

CHILDHOOD

Abandoned and Chosen

The Adoption

When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a
wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was
decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was
a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean.
But it wasn’t his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter
of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group
she had originally planned to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul
got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that
lasted until death parted them more than forty years later.

Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even
though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and
calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he
wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he
joined the Coast Guard, even though he didn’t know how to swim. He was deployed on the
USS General M. C. Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General
Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he
occasionally found himself in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman.

Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in
Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child.
She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her
husband had been killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was
primed to start a new life.

Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that,
when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful
life. They had little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paul’s parents for a
few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got a job as a machinist for International
Harvester. His passion was tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his spare time
buying, restoring, and selling them. Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time
used car salesman.

Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to move
back there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of

Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a “repo man,”
picking the locks of cars whose owners hadn’t paid their loans and repossessing them. He
also bought, repaired, and sold some of the cars, making a decent enough living in the
process.

There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wanted children, but Clara
had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was implanted in a fallopian
tube rather than the uterus, and she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after nine
years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a child.

Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage.
Her father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay, where he and his
wife owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various other businesses, including
real estate and photoengraving. He was very strict, especially regarding his daughter’s
relationships, and he had strongly disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a
Catholic. Thus it was no surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a
graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah “John”
Jandali, a Muslim teaching assistant from Syria.

Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Syrian family. His father
owned oil refineries and multiple other businesses, with large holdings in Damascus and
Homs, and at one point pretty much controlled the price of wheat in the region. His mother,
he later said, was a “traditional Muslim woman” who was a “conservative, obedient
housewife.” Like the Schieble family, the Jandalis put a premium on education. Abdulfattah
was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, even though he was Muslim, and he got an
undergraduate degree at the American University in Beirut before entering the University
of Wisconsin to pursue a doctoral degree in political science.

In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months
in Homs, where she learned from his family to cook Syrian dishes. When they returned to
Wisconsin she discovered that she was pregnant. They were both twenty-three, but they
decided not to get married. Her father was dying at the time, and he had threatened to
disown her if she wed Abdulfattah. Nor was abortion an easy option in a small Catholic
community. So in early 1955, Joanne traveled to San Francisco, where she was taken into
the care of a kindly doctor who sheltered unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and
quietly arranged closed adoptions.

Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be adopted by college graduates. So the
doctor arranged for the baby to be placed with a lawyer and his wife. But when a boy was
born—on February 24, 1955—the designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and
backed out. Thus it was that the boy became the son not of a lawyer but of a high school
dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a
bookkeeper. Paul and Clara named their new baby Steven Paul Jobs.

When Joanne found out that her baby had been placed with a couple who had not even
graduated from high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers. The standoff lasted
weeks, even after the baby had settled into the Jobs household. Eventually Joanne relented,
with the stipulation that the couple promise—indeed sign a pledge—to fund a savings
account to pay for the boy’s college education.

There was another reason that Joanne was balky about signing the adoption papers. Her
father was about to die, and she planned to marry Jandali soon after. She held out hope, she
would later tell family members, sometimes tearing up at the memory, that once they were
married, she could get their baby boy back.

Arthur Schieble died in August 1955, after the adoption was finalized. Just after
Christmas that year, Joanne and Abdulfattah were married in St. Philip the Apostle Catholic
Church in Green Bay. He got his PhD in international politics the next year, and then they
had another child, a girl named Mona. After she and Jandali divorced in 1962, Joanne
embarked on a dreamy and peripatetic life that her daughter, who grew up to become the
acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson, would capture in her book Anywhere but Here. Because
Steve’s adoption had been closed, it would be twenty years before they would all find each
other.

Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. “My parents were very open
with me about that,” he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the lawn of his
house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. “So
does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. “Lightning bolts went off
in my head,” according to Jobs. “I remember running into the house, crying. And my
parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’ They were very serious and looked me straight
in the eye. They said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’ Both of my parents said that and
repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.”

Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he
regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth
left some scars. “I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives
directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,” said one
longtime colleague, Del Yocam. “He wants to control his environment, and he sees the
product as an extension of himself.” Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after
college, saw another effect. “Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain
that caused,” he said. “It made him independent. He followed the beat of a different
drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.”

Later in life, when he was the same age his biological father had been when he
abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He eventually took
responsibility for her.) Chrisann Brennan, the mother of that child, said that being put up
for adoption left Jobs “full of broken glass,” and it helps to explain some of his behavior.
“He who is abandoned is an abandoner,” she said. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs

at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the few who remained close to both Brennan and
Jobs. “The key question about Steve is why he can’t control himself at times from being so
reflexively cruel and harmful to some people,” he said. “That goes back to being
abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s
life.”

Jobs dismissed this. “There’s some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very
hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such
nonsense, but that’s ridiculous,” he insisted. “Knowing I was adopted may have made me
feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. I’ve always felt special. My
parents made me feel special.” He would later bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and
Clara Jobs as his “adoptive” parents or implied that they were not his “real” parents. “They
were my parents 1,000%,” he said. When speaking about his biological parents, on the
other hand, he was curt: “They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not harsh, it’s just the
way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.”

Silicon Valley

The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a
stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and
three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs. The finance company where
Paul worked as a repo man, CIT, had transferred him down to its Palo Alto office, but he
could not afford to live there, so they landed in a subdivision in Mountain View, a less
expensive town just to the south.

There Paul tried to pass along his love of mechanics and cars. “Steve, this is your
workbench now,” he said as he marked off a section of the table in their garage. Jobs
remembered being impressed by his father’s focus on craftsmanship. “I thought my dad’s
sense of design was pretty good,” he said, “because he knew how to build anything. If we
needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I
could work with him.”

Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in
Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a
lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the
backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. “He loved doing
things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

His father continued to refurbish and resell used cars, and he festooned the garage with
pictures of his favorites. He would point out the detailing of the design to his son: the lines,
the vents, the chrome, the trim of the seats. After work each day, he would change into his
dungarees and retreat to the garage, often with Steve tagging along. “I figured I could get
him nailed down with a little mechanical ability, but he really wasn’t interested in getting

his hands dirty,” Paul later recalled. “He never really cared too much about mechanical
things.”

“I wasn’t that into fixing cars,” Jobs admitted. “But I was eager to hang out with my
dad.” Even as he was growing more aware that he had been adopted, he was becoming
more attached to his father. One day when he was about eight, he discovered a photograph
of his father from his time in the Coast Guard. “He’s in the engine room, and he’s got his
shirt off and looks like James Dean. It was one of those Oh wow moments for a kid. Wow,
oooh, my parents were actually once very young and really good-looking.”

Through cars, his father gave Steve his first exposure to electronics. “My dad did not
have a deep understanding of electronics, but he’d encountered it a lot in automobiles and
other things he would fix. He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very
interested in that.” Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts. “Every
weekend, there’d be a junkyard trip. We’d be looking for a generator, a carburetor, all sorts
of components.” He remembered watching his father negotiate at the counter. “He was a
good bargainer, because he knew better than the guys at the counter what the parts should
cost.” This helped fulfill the pledge his parents made when he was adopted. “My college
fund came from my dad paying $50 for a Ford Falcon or some other beat-up car that didn’t
run, working on it for a few weeks, and selling it for $250—and not telling the IRS.”

The Jobses’ house and the others in their neighborhood were built by the real estate
developer Joseph Eichler, whose company spawned more than eleven thousand homes in
various California subdivisions between 1950 and 1974. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s
vision of simple modern homes for the American “everyman,” Eichler built inexpensive
houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam
construction, concrete slab floors, and lots of sliding glass doors. “Eichler did a great
thing,” Jobs said on one of our walks around the neighborhood. “His houses were smart
and cheap and good. They brought clean design and simple taste to lower-income people.
They had awesome little features, like radiant heating in the floors. You put carpet on them,
and we had nice toasty floors when we were kids.”

Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making
nicely designed products for the mass market. “I love it when you can bring really great
design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,” he said as he pointed
out the clean elegance of the houses. “It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we
tried to do with the first Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.”

Across the street from the Jobs family lived a man who had become successful as a real
estate agent. “He wasn’t that bright,” Jobs recalled, “but he seemed to be making a fortune.
So my dad thought, ‘I can do that.’ He worked so hard, I remember. He took these night
classes, passed the license test, and got into real estate. Then the bottom fell out of the
market.” As a result, the family found itself financially strapped for a year or so while
Steve was in elementary school. His mother took a job as a bookkeeper for Varian

Associates, a company that made scientific instruments, and they took out a second
mortgage. One day his fourth-grade teacher asked him, “What is it you don’t understand
about the universe?” Jobs replied, “I don’t understand why all of a sudden my dad is so
broke.” He was proud that his father never adopted a servile attitude or slick style that may
have made him a better salesman. “You had to suck up to people to sell real estate, and he
wasn’t good at that and it wasn’t in his nature. I admired him for that.” Paul Jobs went back
to being a mechanic.

His father was calm and gentle, traits that his son later praised more than emulated. He
was also resolute. Jobs described one example:

Nearby was an engineer who was working at Westinghouse. He was a single guy,
beatnik type. He had a girlfriend. She would babysit me sometimes. Both my parents
worked, so I would come here right after school for a couple of hours. He would get drunk
and hit her a couple of times. She came over one night, scared out of her wits, and he came
over drunk, and my dad stood him down—saying “She’s here, but you’re not coming in.”
He stood right there. We like to think everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was
one of those engineers who had messed-up lives.

What made the neighborhood different from the thousands of other spindly-tree
subdivisions across America was that even the ne’er-do-wells tended to be engineers.
“When we moved here, there were apricot and plum orchards on all of these corners,” Jobs
recalled. “But it was beginning to boom because of military investment.” He soaked up the
history of the valley and developed a yearning to play his own role. Edwin Land of
Polaroid later told him about being asked by Eisenhower to help build the U-2 spy plane
cameras to see how real the Soviet threat was. The film was dropped in canisters and
returned to the NASA Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, not far from where Jobs lived.
“The first computer terminal I ever saw was when my dad brought me to the Ames Center,”
he said. “I fell totally in love with it.”

Other defense contractors sprouted nearby during the 1950s. The Lockheed Missiles
and Space Division, which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles, was founded in
1956 next to the NASA Center; by the time Jobs moved to the area four years later, it
employed twenty thousand people. A few hundred yards away, Westinghouse built facilities
that produced tubes and electrical transformers for the missile systems. “You had all these
military companies on the cutting edge,” he recalled. “It was mysterious and high-tech and
made living here very exciting.”

In the wake of the defense industries there arose a booming economy based on
technology. Its roots stretched back to 1938, when David Packard and his new wife moved

into a house in Palo Alto that had a shed where his friend Bill Hewlett was soon ensconced.
The house had a garage—an appendage that would prove both useful and iconic in the
valley—in which they tinkered around until they had their first product, an audio oscillator.
By the 1950s, Hewlett-Packard was a fast-growing company making technical instruments.

Fortunately there was a place nearby for entrepreneurs who had outgrown their garages.
In a move that would help transform the area into the cradle of the tech revolution, Stanford
University’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman, created a seven-hundred-acre
industrial park on university land for private companies that could commercialize the ideas
of his students. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, where Clara Jobs worked. “Terman
came up with this great idea that did more than anything to cause the tech industry to grow
up here,” Jobs said. By the time Jobs was ten, HP had nine thousand employees and was
the blue-chip company where every engineer seeking financial stability wanted to work.

The most important technology for the region’s growth was, of course, the
semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one of the inventors of the transistor at
Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to
build transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive germanium that was then
commonly used. But Shockley became increasingly erratic and abandoned his silicon
transistor project, which led eight of his engineers—most notably Robert Noyce and
Gordon Moore—to break away to form Fairchild Semiconductor. That company grew to
twelve thousand employees, but it fragmented in 1968, when Noyce lost a power struggle
to become CEO. He took Gordon Moore and founded a company that they called
Integrated Electronics Corporation, which they soon smartly abbreviated to Intel. Their
third employee was Andrew Grove, who later would grow the company by shifting its
focus from memory chips to microprocessors. Within a few years there would be more than
fifty companies in the area making semiconductors.

The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously
discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based
on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled
about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed
in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the
Intel 4004, which was dubbed a “microprocessor.” Moore’s Law has held generally true to
this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of
young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for
their forward-leaning products.

The chip industry gave the region a new name when Don Hoefler, a columnist for the
weekly trade paper Electronic News, began a series in January 1971 entitled “Silicon
Valley USA.” The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley, which stretches from South San Francisco
through Palo Alto to San Jose, has as its commercial backbone El Camino Real, the royal
road that once connected California’s twenty-one mission churches and is now a bustling

avenue that connects companies and startups accounting for a third of the venture capital
investment in the United States each year. “Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the
place,” Jobs said. “That made me want to be a part of it.”

Like most kids, he became infused with the passions of the grown-ups around him.
“Most of the dads in the neighborhood did really neat stuff, like photovoltaics and batteries
and radar,” Jobs recalled. “I grew up in awe of that stuff and asking people about it.” The
most important of these neighbors, Larry Lang, lived seven doors away. “He was my model
of what an HP engineer was supposed to be: a big ham radio operator, hard-core electronics
guy,” Jobs recalled. “He would bring me stuff to play with.” As we walked up to Lang’s old
house, Jobs pointed to the driveway. “He took a carbon microphone and a battery and a
speaker, and he put it on this driveway. He had me talk into the carbon mike and it
amplified out of the speaker.” Jobs had been taught by his father that microphones always
required an electronic amplifier. “So I raced home, and I told my dad that he was wrong.”

“No, it needs an amplifier,” his father assured him. When Steve protested otherwise, his
father said he was crazy. “It can’t work without an amplifier. There’s some trick.”

“I kept saying no to my dad, telling him he had to see it, and finally he actually walked
down with me and saw it. And he said, ‘Well I’ll be a bat out of hell.’”

Jobs recalled the incident vividly because it was his first realization that his father did
not know everything. Then a more disconcerting discovery began to dawn on him: He was
smarter than his parents. He had always admired his father’s competence and savvy. “He
was not an educated man, but I had always thought he was pretty damn smart. He didn’t
read much, but he could do a lot. Almost everything mechanical, he could figure it out.” Yet
the carbon microphone incident, Jobs said, began a jarring process of realizing that he was
in fact more clever and quick than his parents. “It was a very big moment that’s burned into
my mind. When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for
having thought that. I will never forget that moment.” This discovery, he later told friends,
along with the fact that he was adopted, made him feel apart—detached and separate—
from both his family and the world.

Another layer of awareness occurred soon after. Not only did he discover that he was
brighter than his parents, but he discovered that they knew this. Paul and Clara Jobs were
loving parents, and they were willing to adapt their lives to suit a son who was very smart
—and also willful. They would go to great lengths to accommodate him. And soon Steve
discovered this fact as well. “Both my parents got me. They felt a lot of responsibility once
they sensed that I was special. They found ways to keep feeding me stuff and putting me in
better schools. They were willing to defer to my needs.”

So he grew up not only with a sense of having once been abandoned, but also with a
sense that he was special. In his own mind, that was more important in the formation of his
personality.

School

Even before Jobs started elementary school, his mother had taught him how to read.
This, however, led to some problems once he got to school. “I was kind of bored for the
first few years, so I occupied myself by getting into trouble.” It also soon became clear that
Jobs, by both nature and nurture, was not disposed to accept authority. “I encountered
authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And
they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”

His school, Monta Loma Elementary, was a series of low-slung 1950s buildings four
blocks from his house. He countered his boredom by playing pranks. “I had a good friend
named Rick Ferrentino, and we’d get into all sorts of trouble,” he recalled. “Like we made
little posters announcing ‘Bring Your Pet to School Day.’ It was crazy, with dogs chasing
cats all over, and the teachers were beside themselves.” Another time they convinced some
kids to tell them the combination numbers for their bike locks. “Then we went outside and
switched all of the locks, and nobody could get their bikes. It took them until late that night
to straighten things out.” When he was in third grade, the pranks became a bit more
dangerous. “One time we set off an explosive under the chair of our teacher, Mrs. Thurman.
We gave her a nervous twitch.”

Not surprisingly, he was sent home two or three times before he finished third grade.
By then, however, his father had begun to treat him as special, and in his calm but firm
manner he made it clear that he expected the school to do the same. “Look, it’s not his
fault,” Paul Jobs told the teachers, his son recalled. “If you can’t keep him interested, it’s
your fault.” His parents never punished him for his transgressions at school. “My father’s
father was an alcoholic and whipped him with a belt, but I’m not sure if I ever got
spanked.” Both of his parents, he added, “knew the school was at fault for trying to make
me memorize stupid stuff rather than stimulating me.” He was already starting to show the
admixture of sensitivity and insensitivity, bristliness and detachment, that would mark him
for the rest of his life.

When it came time for him to go into fourth grade, the school decided it was best to put
Jobs and Ferrentino into separate classes. The teacher for the advanced class was a spunky
woman named Imogene Hill, known as “Teddy,” and she became, Jobs said, “one of the
saints of my life.” After watching him for a couple of weeks, she figured that the best way
to handle him was to bribe him. “After school one day, she gave me this workbook with
math problems in it, and she said, ‘I want you to take it home and do this.’ And I thought,
‘Are you nuts?’ And then she pulled out one of these giant lollipops that seemed as big as
the world. And she said, ‘When you’re done with it, if you get it mostly right, I will give
you this and five dollars.’ And I handed it back within two days.” After a few months, he no
longer required the bribes. “I just wanted to learn and to please her.”

She reciprocated by getting him a hobby kit for grinding a lens and making a camera. “I
learned more from her than any other teacher, and if it hadn’t been for her I’m sure I would

have gone to jail.” It reinforced, once again, the idea that he was special. “In my class, it
was just me she cared about. She saw something in me.”

It was not merely intelligence that she saw. Years later she liked to show off a picture of
that year’s class on Hawaii Day. Jobs had shown up without the suggested Hawaiian shirt,
but in the picture he is front and center wearing one. He had, literally, been able to talk the
shirt off another kid’s back.

Near the end of fourth grade, Mrs. Hill had Jobs tested. “I scored at the high school
sophomore level,” he recalled. Now that it was clear, not only to himself and his parents
but also to his teachers, that he was intellectually special, the school made the remarkable
proposal that he skip two grades and go right into seventh; it would be the easiest way to
keep him challenged and stimulated. His parents decided, more sensibly, to have him skip
only one grade.

The transition was wrenching. He was a socially awkward loner who found himself
with kids a year older. Worse yet, the sixth grade was in a different school, Crittenden
Middle. It was only eight blocks from Monta Loma Elementary, but in many ways it was a
world apart, located in a neighborhood filled with ethnic gangs. “Fights were a daily
occurrence; as were shakedowns in bathrooms,” wrote the Silicon Valley journalist Michael
S. Malone. “Knives were regularly brought to school as a show of macho.” Around the
time that Jobs arrived, a group of students were jailed for a gang rape, and the bus of a
neighboring school was destroyed after its team beat Crittenden’s in a wrestling match.

Jobs was often bullied, and in the middle of seventh grade he gave his parents an
ultimatum. “I insisted they put me in a different school,” he recalled. Financially this was a
tough demand. His parents were barely making ends meet, but by this point there was little
doubt that they would eventually bend to his will. “When they resisted, I told them I would
just quit going to school if I had to go back to Crittenden. So they researched where the
best schools were and scraped together every dime and bought a house for $21,000 in a
nicer district.”

The move was only three miles to the south, to a former apricot orchard in Los Altos
that had been turned into a subdivision of cookie-cutter tract homes. Their house, at 2066
Crist Drive, was one story with three bedrooms and an all-important attached garage with a
roll-down door facing the street. There Paul Jobs could tinker with cars and his son with
electronics.

Its other significant attribute was that it was just over the line inside what was then the
Cupertino-Sunnyvale School District, one of the safest and best in the valley. “When I
moved here, these corners were still orchards,” Jobs pointed out as we walked in front of
his old house. “The guy who lived right there taught me how to be a good organic gardener
and to compost. He grew everything to perfection. I never had better food in my life. That’s
when I began to appreciate organic fruits and vegetables.”

Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him to have
a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came
to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968 Life magazine published a shocking cover
showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted
the church’s pastor. “If I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even
before I do it?”

The pastor answered, “Yes, God knows everything.”

Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, “Well, does God know about this and
what’s going to happen to those children?”

“Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.”

Jobs announced that he didn’t want to have anything to do with worshipping such a
God, and he never went back to church. He did, however, spend years studying and trying
to practice the tenets of Zen Buddhism. Reflecting years later on his spiritual feelings, he
said that religion was at its best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than
received dogma. “The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith
rather than on living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it,” he told me. “I think
different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house
exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery.”

Paul Jobs was then working at Spectra-Physics, a company in nearby Santa Clara that
made lasers for electronics and medical products. As a machinist, he crafted the prototypes
of products that the engineers were devising. His son was fascinated by the need for
perfection. “Lasers require precision alignment,” Jobs said. “The really sophisticated ones,
for airborne applications or medical, had very precise features. They would tell my dad
something like, ‘This is what we want, and we want it out of one piece of metal so that the
coefficients of expansion are all the same.’ And he had to figure out how to do it.” Most
pieces had to be made from scratch, which meant that Paul had to create custom tools and
dies. His son was impressed, but he rarely went to the machine shop. “It would have been
fun if he had gotten to teach me how to use a mill and lathe. But unfortunately I never
went, because I was more interested in electronics.”

One summer Paul took Steve to Wisconsin to visit the family’s dairy farm. Rural life
did not appeal to Steve, but one image stuck with him. He saw a calf being born, and he
was amazed when the tiny animal struggled up within minutes and began to walk. “It was
not something she had learned, but it was instead hardwired into her,” he recalled. “A
human baby couldn’t do that. I found it remarkable, even though no one else did.” He put it
in hardware-software terms: “It was as if something in the animal’s body and in its brain
had been engineered to work together instantly rather than being learned.”

In ninth grade Jobs went to Homestead High, which had a sprawling campus of two-
story cinderblock buildings painted pink that served two thousand students. “It was
designed by a famous prison architect,” Jobs recalled. “They wanted to make it
indestructible.” He had developed a love of walking, and he walked the fifteen blocks to
school by himself each day.

He had few friends his own age, but he got to know some seniors who were immersed
in the counterculture of the late 1960s. It was a time when the geek and hippie worlds were
beginning to show some overlap. “My friends were the really smart kids,” he said. “I was
interested in math and science and electronics. They were too, and also into LSD and the
whole counterculture trip.”

His pranks by then typically involved electronics. At one point he wired his house with
speakers. But since speakers can also be used as microphones, he built a control room in
his closet, where he could listen in on what was happening in other rooms. One night, when
he had his headphones on and was listening in on his parents’ bedroom, his father caught
him and angrily demanded that he dismantle the system. He spent many evenings visiting
the garage of Larry Lang, the engineer who lived down the street from his old house. Lang
eventually gave Jobs the carbon microphone that had fascinated him, and he turned him on
to Heathkits, those assemble-it-yourself kits for making ham radios and other electronic
gear that were beloved by the soldering set back then. “Heathkits came with all the boards
and parts color-coded, but the manual also explained the theory of how it operated,” Jobs
recalled. “It made you realize you could build and understand anything. Once you built a
couple of radios, you’d see a TV in the catalogue and say, ‘I can build that as well,’ even if
you didn’t. I was very lucky, because when I was a kid both my dad and the Heathkits
made me believe I could build anything.”

Lang also got him into the Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club, a group of fifteen or so
students who met in the company cafeteria on Tuesday nights. “They would get an engineer
from one of the labs to come and talk about what he was working on,” Jobs recalled. “My
dad would drive me there. I was in heaven. HP was a pioneer of light-emitting diodes. So
we talked about what to do with them.” Because his father now worked for a laser
company, that topic particularly interested him. One night he cornered one of HP’s laser
engineers after a talk and got a tour of the holography lab. But the most lasting impression
came from seeing the small computers the company was developing. “I saw my first
desktop computer there. It was called the 9100A, and it was a glorified calculator but also
really the first desktop computer. It was huge, maybe forty pounds, but it was a beauty of a
thing. I fell in love with it.”

The kids in the Explorers Club were encouraged to do projects, and Jobs decided to
build a frequency counter, which measures the number of pulses per second in an electronic
signal. He needed some parts that HP made, so he picked up the phone and called the CEO.
“Back then, people didn’t have unlisted numbers. So I looked up Bill Hewlett in Palo Alto

and called him at home. And he answered and chatted with me for twenty minutes. He got
me the parts, but he also got me a job in the plant where they made frequency counters.”
Jobs worked there the summer after his freshman year at Homestead High. “My dad would
drive me in the morning and pick me up in the evening.”

His work mainly consisted of “just putting nuts and bolts on things” on an assembly
line. There was some resentment among his fellow line workers toward the pushy kid who
had talked his way in by calling the CEO. “I remember telling one of the supervisors, ‘I
love this stuff, I love this stuff,’ and then I asked him what he liked to do best. And he said,
‘To fuck, to fuck.’” Jobs had an easier time ingratiating himself with the engineers who
worked one floor above. “They served doughnuts and coffee every morning at ten. So I’d
go upstairs and hang out with them.”

Jobs liked to work. He also had a newspaper route—his father would drive him when it
was raining—and during his sophomore year spent weekends and the summer as a stock
clerk at a cavernous electronics store, Haltek. It was to electronics what his father’s
junkyards were to auto parts: a scavenger’s paradise sprawling over an entire city block
with new, used, salvaged, and surplus components crammed onto warrens of shelves,
dumped unsorted into bins, and piled in an outdoor yard. “Out in the back, near the bay,
they had a fenced-in area with things like Polaris submarine interiors that had been ripped
and sold for salvage,” he recalled. “All the controls and buttons were right there. The colors
were military greens and grays, but they had these switches and bulb covers of amber and
red. There were these big old lever switches that, when you flipped them, it was awesome,
like you were blowing up Chicago.”

At the wooden counters up front, laden with thick catalogues in tattered binders, people
would haggle for switches, resistors, capacitors, and sometimes the latest memory chips.
His father used to do that for auto parts, and he succeeded because he knew the value of
each better than the clerks. Jobs followed suit. He developed a knowledge of electronic
parts that was honed by his love of negotiating and turning a profit. He would go to
electronic flea markets, such as the San Jose swap meet, haggle for a used circuit board that
contained some valuable chips or components, and then sell those to his manager at Haltek.

Jobs was able to get his first car, with his father’s help, when he was fifteen. It was a
two-tone Nash Metropolitan that his father had fitted out with an MG engine. Jobs didn’t
really like it, but he did not want to tell his father that, or miss out on the chance to have his
own car. “In retrospect, a Nash Metropolitan might seem like the most wickedly cool car,”
he later said. “But at the time it was the most uncool car in the world. Still, it was a car, so
that was great.” Within a year he had saved up enough from his various jobs that he could
trade up to a red Fiat 850 coupe with an Abarth engine. “My dad helped me buy and inspect
it. The satisfaction of getting paid and saving up for something, that was very exciting.”

That same summer, between his sophomore and junior years at Homestead, Jobs began
smoking marijuana. “I got stoned for the first time that summer. I was fifteen, and then

began using pot regularly.” At one point his father found some dope in his son’s Fiat.
“What’s this?” he asked. Jobs coolly replied, “That’s marijuana.” It was one of the few
times in his life that he faced his father’s anger. “That was the only real fight I ever got in
with my dad,” he said. But his father again bent to his will. “He wanted me to promise that
I’d never use pot again, but I wouldn’t promise.” In fact by his senior year he was also
dabbling in LSD and hash as well as exploring the mind-bending effects of sleep
deprivation. “I was starting to get stoned a bit more. We would also drop acid occasionally,
usually in fields or in cars.”

He also flowered intellectually during his last two years in high school and found
himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were geekily immersed
in electronics and those who were into literature and creative endeavors. “I started to listen
to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology—
Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear.” His other favorites included Moby-Dick and the
poems of Dylan Thomas. I asked him why he related to King Lear and Captain Ahab, two
of the most willful and driven characters in literature, but he didn’t respond to the
connection I was making, so I let it drop. “When I was a senior I had this phenomenal AP
English class. The teacher was this guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway. He took a
bunch of us snowshoeing in Yosemite.”

One course that Jobs took would become part of Silicon Valley lore: the electronics
class taught by John McCollum, a former Navy pilot who had a showman’s flair for
exciting his students with such tricks as firing up a Tesla coil. His little stockroom, to which
he would lend the key to pet students, was crammed with transistors and other components
he had scored.

McCollum’s classroom was in a shed-like building on the edge of the campus, next to
the parking lot. “This is where it was,” Jobs recalled as he peered in the window, “and here,
next door, is where the auto shop class used to be.” The juxtaposition highlighted the shift
from the interests of his father’s generation. “Mr. McCollum felt that electronics class was
the new auto shop.”

McCollum believed in military discipline and respect for authority. Jobs didn’t. His
aversion to authority was something he no longer tried to hide, and he affected an attitude
that combined wiry and weird intensity with aloof rebelliousness. McCollum later said,
“He was usually off in a corner doing something on his own and really didn’t want to have
much of anything to do with either me or the rest of the class.” He never trusted Jobs with a
key to the stockroom. One day Jobs needed a part that was not available, so he made a
collect call to the manufacturer, Burroughs in Detroit, and said he was designing a new
product and wanted to test out the part. It arrived by air freight a few days later. When
McCollum asked how he had gotten it, Jobs described—with defiant pride—the collect call
and the tale he had told. “I was furious,” McCollum said. “That was not the way I wanted

my students to behave.” Jobs’s response was, “I don’t have the money for the phone call.
They’ve got plenty of money.”

Jobs took McCollum’s class for only one year, rather than the three that it was offered.
For one of his projects, he made a device with a photocell that would switch on a circuit
when exposed to light, something any high school science student could have done. He was
far more interested in playing with lasers, something he learned from his father. With a few
friends, he created light shows for parties by bouncing lasers off mirrors that were attached
to the speakers of his stereo system

CHAPTER TWO

ODD COUPLE

The Two Steves

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:02

While a student in McCollum’s class, Jobs became friends with a graduate who was the
teacher’s all-time favorite and a school legend for his wizardry in the class. Stephen
Wozniak, whose younger brother had been on a swim team with Jobs, was almost five
years older than Jobs and far more knowledgeable about electronics. But emotionally and
socially he was still a high school geek.
Like Jobs, Wozniak learned a lot at his father’s knee. But their lessons were different.
Paul Jobs was a high school dropout who, when fixing up cars, knew how to turn a tidy
profit by striking the right deal on parts. Francis Wozniak, known as Jerry, was a brilliant
engineering graduate from Cal Tech, where he had quarterbacked the football team, who
became a rocket scientist at Lockheed. He exalted engineering and looked down on those in
business, marketing, and sales. “I remember him telling me that engineering was the
highest level of importance you could reach in the world,” Steve Wozniak later recalled. “It
takes society to a new level.”
One of Steve Wozniak’s first memories was going to his father’s workplace on a
weekend and being shown electronic parts, with his dad “putting them on a table with me
so I got to play with them.” He watched with fascination as his father tried to get a
waveform line on a video screen to stay flat so he could show that one of his circuit designs
was working properly. “I could see that whatever my dad was doing, it was important and
good.” Woz, as he was known even then, would ask about the resistors and transistors lying
around the house, and his father would pull out a blackboard to illustrate what they did.
“He would explain what a resistor was by going all the way back to atoms and electrons.
He explained how resistors worked when I was in second grade, not by equations but by
having me picture it.”
Woz’s father taught him something else that became ingrained in his childlike, socially
awkward personality: Never lie. “My dad believed in honesty. Extreme honesty. That’s the
biggest thing he taught me. I never lie, even to this day.” (The only partial exception was in
the service of a good practical joke.) In addition, he imbued his son with an aversion to
extreme ambition, which set Woz apart from Jobs. At an Apple product launch event in
2010, forty years after they met, Woz reflected on their differences. “My father told me,
‘You always want to be in the middle,’” he said. “I didn’t want to be up with the high-level
people like Steve. My dad was an engineer, and that’s what I wanted to be. I was way too
shy ever to be a business leader like Steve.”
By fourth grade Wozniak became, as he put it, one of the “electronics kids.” He had an
easier time making eye contact with a transistor than with a girl, and he developed the
chunky and stooped look of a guy who spends most of his time hunched over circuit
boards. At the same age when Jobs was puzzling over a carbon microphone that his dad
couldn’t explain, Wozniak was using transistors to build an intercom system featuring
amplifiers, relays, lights, and buzzers that connected the kids’ bedrooms of six houses in
the neighborhood. And at an age when Jobs was building Heathkits, Wozniak was
assembling a transmitter and receiver from Hallicrafters, the most sophisticated radios
available.
Woz spent a lot of time at home reading his father’s electronics journals, and he became
enthralled by stories about new computers, such as the powerful ENIAC. Because Boolean

algebra came naturally to him, he marveled at how simple, rather than complex, the
computers were. In eighth grade he built a calculator that included one hundred transistors,
two hundred diodes, and two hundred resistors on ten circuit boards. It won top prize in a
local contest run by the Air Force, even though the competitors included students through
twelfth grade.
Woz became more of a loner when the boys his age began going out with girls and
partying, endeavors that he found far more complex than designing circuits. “Where before
I was popular and riding bikes and everything, suddenly I was socially shut out,” he
recalled. “It seemed like nobody spoke to me for the longest time.” He found an outlet by
playing juvenile pranks. In twelfth grade he built an electronic metronome—one of those
tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class—and realized it sounded like a bomb.
So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school
locker; he rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Later that day he got
called to the principal’s office. He thought it was because he had won, yet again, the
school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police. The principal had been
summoned when the device was found, bravely ran onto the football field clutching it to his
chest, and pulled the wires off. Woz tried and failed to suppress his laughter. He actually
got sent to the juvenile detention center, where he spent the night. It was a memorable
experience. He taught the other prisoners how to disconnect the wires leading to the ceiling
fans and connect them to the bars so people got shocked when touching them.
Getting shocked was a badge of honor for Woz. He prided himself on being a hardware
engineer, which meant that random shocks were routine. He once devised a roulette game
where four people put their thumbs in a slot; when the ball landed, one would get shocked.
“Hardware guys will play this game, but software guys are too chicken,” he noted.
During his senior year he got a part-time job at Sylvania and had the chance to work on a
computer for the first time. He learned FORTRAN from a book and read the manuals for
most of the systems of the day, starting with the Digital Equipment PDP-8. Then he studied
the specs for the latest microchips and tried to redesign the computers using these newer
parts. The challenge he set himself was to replicate the design using the fewest components
possible. Each night he would try to improve his drawing from the night before. By the end
of his senior year, he had become a master. “I was now designing computers with half the
number of chips the actual company had in their own design, but only on paper.” He never
told his friends. After all, most seventeen-year-olds were getting their kicks in other ways.
On Thanksgiving weekend of his senior year, Wozniak visited the University of
Colorado. It was closed for the holiday, but he found an engineering student who took him
on a tour of the labs. He begged his father to let him go there, even though the out-of-state
tuition was more than the family could easily afford. They struck a deal: He would be
allowed to go for one year, but then he would transfer to De Anza Community College
back home. After arriving at Colorado in the fall of 1969, he spent so much time playing
pranks (such as producing reams of printouts saying “Fuck Nixon”) that he failed a couple
of his courses and was put on probation. In addition, he created a program to calculate
Fibonacci numbers that burned up so much computer time the university threatened to bill

him for the cost. So he readily lived up to his bargain with his parents and transferred to De
Anza.
After a pleasant year at De Anza, Wozniak took time off to make some money. He found
work at a company that made computers for the California Motor Vehicle Department, and
a coworker made him a wonderful offer: He would provide some spare chips so Wozniak
could make one of the computers he had been sketching on paper. Wozniak decided to use
as few chips as possible, both as a personal challenge and because he did not want to take
advantage of his colleague’s largesse.
Much of the work was done in the garage of a friend just around the corner, Bill
Fernandez, who was still at Homestead High. To lubricate their efforts, they drank large
amounts of Cragmont cream soda, riding their bikes to the Sunnyvale Safeway to return the
bottles, collect the deposits, and buy more. “That’s how we started referring to it as the
Cream Soda Computer,” Wozniak recalled. It was basically a calculator capable of
multiplying numbers entered by a set of switches and displaying the results in binary code
with little lights.
When it was finished, Fernandez told Wozniak there was someone at Homestead High he
should meet. “His name is Steve. He likes to do pranks like you do, and he’s also into
building electronics like you are.” It may have been the most significant meeting in a
Silicon Valley garage since Hewlett went into Packard’s thirty-two years earlier. “Steve and
I just sat on the sidewalk in front of Bill’s house for the longest time, just sharing stories—
mostly about pranks we’d pulled, and also what kind of electronic designs we’d done,”
Wozniak recalled. “We had so much in common. Typically, it was really hard for me to
explain to people what kind of design stuff I worked on, but Steve got it right away. And I
liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy.” Jobs was also impressed.
“Woz was the first person I’d met who knew more electronics than I did,” he once said,
stretching his own expertise. “I liked him right away. I was a little more mature than my
years, and he was a little less mature than his, so it evened out. Woz was very bright, but
emotionally he was my age.”
In addition to their interest in computers, they shared a passion for music. “It was an
incredible time for music,” Jobs recalled. “It was like living at a time when Beethoven and
Mozart were alive. Really. People will look back on it that way. And Woz and I were
deeply into it.” In particular, Wozniak turned Jobs on to the glories of Bob Dylan. “We
tracked down this guy in Santa Cruz who put out this newsletter on Dylan,” Jobs said.
“Dylan taped all of his concerts, and some of the people around him were not scrupulous,
because soon there were tapes all around. Bootlegs of everything. And this guy had them
all.”
Hunting down Dylan tapes soon became a joint venture. “The two of us would go
tramping through San Jose and Berkeley and ask about Dylan bootlegs and collect them,”
said Wozniak. “We’d buy brochures of Dylan lyrics and stay up late interpreting them.
Dylan’s words struck chords of creative thinking.” Added Jobs, “I had more than a hundred
hours, including every concert on the ’65 and ’66 tour,” the one where Dylan went electric.
Both of them bought high-end TEAC reel-to-reel tape decks. “I would use mine at a low
speed to record many concerts on one tape,” said Wozniak. Jobs matched his obsession:

“Instead of big speakers I bought a pair of awesome headphones and would just lie in my
bed and listen to that stuff for hours.”
Jobs had formed a club at Homestead High to put on music-and-light shows and also
play pranks. (They once glued a gold-painted toilet seat onto a flower planter.) It was called
the Buck Fry Club, a play on the name of the principal. Even though they had already
graduated, Wozniak and his friend Allen Baum joined forces with Jobs, at the end of his
junior year, to produce a farewell gesture for the departing seniors. Showing off the
Homestead campus four decades later, Jobs paused at the scene of the escapade and
pointed. “See that balcony? That’s where we did the banner prank that sealed our
friendship.” On a big bedsheet Baum had tie-dyed with the school’s green and white colors,
they painted a huge hand flipping the middle-finger salute. Baum’s nice Jewish mother
helped them draw it and showed them how to do the shading and shadows to make it look
more real. “I know what that is,” she snickered. They devised a system of ropes and pulleys
so that it could be dramatically lowered as the graduating class marched past the balcony,
and they signed it “SWAB JOB,” the initials of Wozniak and Baum combined with part of
Jobs’s name. The prank became part of school lore—and got Jobs suspended one more
time.
Another prank involved a pocket device Wozniak built that could emit TV signals. He
would take it to a room where a group of people were watching TV, such as in a dorm, and
secretly press the button so that the screen would get fuzzy with static. When someone got
up and whacked the set, Wozniak would let go of the button and the picture would clear up.
Once he had the unsuspecting viewers hopping up and down at his will, he would make
things harder. He would keep the picture fuzzy until someone touched the antenna.
Eventually he would make people think they had to hold the antenna while standing on one
foot or touching the top of the set. Years later, at a keynote presentation where he was
having his own trouble getting a video to work, Jobs broke from his script and recounted
the fun they had with the device. “Woz would have it in his pocket and we’d go into a dorm
. . . where a bunch of folks would be, like, watching Star Trek, and he’d screw up the TV,
and someone would go up to fix it, and just as they had the foot off the ground he would
turn it back on, and as they put their foot back on the ground he’d screw it up again.”
Contorting himself into a pretzel onstage, Jobs concluded to great laughter, “And within
five minutes he would have someone like this.”

错误！超链接引用无效。

The ultimate combination of pranks and electronics—and the escapade that helped to create
Apple—was launched one Sunday afternoon when Wozniak read an article in Esquire that
his mother had left for him on the kitchen table. It was September 1971, and he was about
to drive off the next day to Berkeley, his third college. The story, Ron Rosenbaum’s
“Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” described how hackers and phone phreakers had found
ways to make long-distance calls for free by replicating the tones that routed signals on the
AT&T network. “Halfway through the article, I had to call my best friend, Steve Jobs, and

read parts of this long article to him,” Wozniak recalled. He knew that Jobs, then beginning
his senior year, was one of the few people who would share his excitement.
A hero of the piece was John Draper, a hacker known as Captain Crunch because he had
discovered that the sound emitted by the toy whistle that came with the breakfast cereal
was the same 2600 Hertz tone used by the phone network’s call-routing switches. It could
fool the system into allowing a long-distance call to go through without extra charges. The
article revealed that other tones that served to route calls could be found in an issue of the
Bell System Technical Journal, which AT&T immediately began asking libraries to pull
from their shelves.
As soon as Jobs got the call from Wozniak that Sunday afternoon, he knew they would
have to get their hands on the technical journal right away. “Woz picked me up a few
minutes later, and we went to the library at SLAC [the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center]
to see if we could find it,” Jobs recounted. It was Sunday and the library was closed, but
they knew how to get in through a door that was rarely locked. “I remember that we were
furiously digging through the stacks, and it was Woz who finally found the journal with all
the frequencies. It was like, holy shit, and we opened it and there it was. We kept saying to
ourselves, ‘It’s real. Holy shit, it’s real.’ It was all laid out—the tones, the frequencies.”
Wozniak went to Sunnyvale Electronics before it closed that evening and bought the
parts to make an analog tone generator. Jobs had built a frequency counter when he was
part of the HP Explorers Club, and they used it to calibrate the desired tones. With a dial,
they could replicate and tape-record the sounds specified in the article. By midnight they
were ready to test it. Unfortunately the oscillators they used were not quite stable enough to
replicate the right chirps to fool the phone company. “We could see the instability using
Steve’s frequency counter,” recalled Wozniak, “and we just couldn’t make it work. I had to
leave for Berkeley the next morning, so we decided I would work on building a digital
version once I got there.”
No one had ever created a digital version of a Blue Box, but Woz was made for the
challenge. Using diodes and transistors from Radio Shack, and with the help of a music
student in his dorm who had perfect pitch, he got it built before Thanksgiving. “I have
never designed a circuit I was prouder of,” he said. “I still think it was incredible.”
One night Wozniak drove down from Berkeley to Jobs’s house to try it. They attempted
to call Wozniak’s uncle in Los Angeles, but they got a wrong number. It didn’t matter; their
device had worked. “Hi! We’re calling you for free! We’re calling you for free!” Wozniak
shouted. The person on the other end was confused and annoyed. Jobs chimed in, “We’re
calling from California! From California! With a Blue Box.” This probably baffled the man
even more, since he was also in California.
At first the Blue Box was used for fun and pranks. The most daring of these was when
they called the Vatican and Wozniak pretended to be Henry Kissinger wanting to speak to
the pope. “Ve are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and ve need to talk to de pope,” Woz
intoned. He was told that it was 5:30 a.m. and the pope was sleeping. When he called back,
he got a bishop who was supposed to serve as the translator. But they never actually got the
pope on the line. “They realized that Woz wasn’t Henry Kissinger,” Jobs recalled. “We
were at a public phone booth.”

It was then that they reached an important milestone, one that would establish a pattern
in their partnerships: Jobs came up with the idea that the Blue Box could be more than
merely a hobby; they could build and sell them. “I got together the rest of the components,
like the casing and power supply and keypads, and figured out how we could price it,” Jobs
said, foreshadowing roles he would play when they founded Apple. The finished product
was about the size of two decks of playing cards. The parts cost about $40, and Jobs
decided they should sell it for $150.
Following the lead of other phone phreaks such as Captain Crunch, they gave themselves
handles. Wozniak became “Berkeley Blue,” Jobs was “Oaf Tobark.” They took the device
to college dorms and gave demonstrations by attaching it to a phone and speaker. While the
potential customers watched, they would call the Ritz in London or a dial-a-joke service in
Australia. “We made a hundred or so Blue Boxes and sold almost all of them,” Jobs
recalled.
The fun and profits came to an end at a Sunnyvale pizza parlor. Jobs and Wozniak were
about to drive to Berkeley with a Blue Box they had just finished making. Jobs needed
money and was eager to sell, so he pitched the device to some guys at the next table. They
were interested, so Jobs went to a phone booth and demonstrated it with a call to Chicago.
The prospects said they had to go to their car for money. “So we walk over to the car, Woz
and me, and I’ve got the Blue Box in my hand, and the guy gets in, reaches under the seat,
and he pulls out a gun,” Jobs recounted. He had never been that close to a gun, and he was
terrified. “So he’s pointing the gun right at my stomach, and he says, ‘Hand it over,
brother.’ My mind raced. There was the car door here, and I thought maybe I could slam it
on his legs and we could run, but there was this high probability that he would shoot me.
So I slowly handed it to him, very carefully.” It was a weird sort of robbery. The guy who
took the Blue Box actually gave Jobs a phone number and said he would try to pay for it if
it worked. When Jobs later called the number, the guy said he couldn’t figure out how to
use it. So Jobs, in his felicitous way, convinced the guy to meet him and Wozniak at a
public place. But they ended up deciding not to have another encounter with the gunman,
even on the off chance they could get their $150.
The partnership paved the way for what would be a bigger adventure together. “If it
hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there wouldn’t have been an Apple,” Jobs later reflected.
“I’m 100% sure of that. Woz and I learned how to work together, and we gained the
confidence that we could solve technical problems and actually put something into
production.” They had created a device with a little circuit board that could control billions
of dollars’ worth of infrastructure. “You cannot believe how much confidence that gave
us.” Woz came to the same conclusion: “It was probably a bad idea selling them, but it
gave us a taste of what we could do with my engineering skills and his vision.” The Blue
Box adventure established a template for a partnership that would soon be born. Wozniak
would be the gentle wizard coming up with a neat invention that he would have been happy
just to give away, and Jobs would figure out how to make it user-friendly, put it together in
a package, market it, and make a few bucks.

CHAPTER THREE

THE DROPOUT

Turn On, Tune In . . .

Chrisann Brennan

Toward the end of his senior year at Homestead, in the spring of 1972, Jobs started
going out with a girl named Chrisann Brennan, who was about his age but still a junior.
With her light brown hair, green eyes, high cheekbones, and fragile aura, she was very
attractive. She was also enduring the breakup of her parents’ marriage, which made her
vulnerable. “We worked together on an animated movie, then started going out, and she
became my first real girlfriend,” Jobs recalled. As Brennan later said, “Steve was kind of
crazy. That’s why I was attracted to him.”

Jobs’s craziness was of the cultivated sort. He had begun his lifelong experiments with
compulsive diets, eating only fruits and vegetables, so he was as lean and tight as a
whippet. He learned to stare at people without blinking, and he perfected long silences
punctuated by staccato bursts of fast talking. This odd mix of intensity and aloofness,
combined with his shoulder-length hair and scraggly beard, gave him the aura of a crazed
shaman. He oscillated between charismatic and creepy. “He shuffled around and looked
half-mad,” recalled Brennan. “He had a lot of angst. It was like a big darkness around
him.”

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat
field just outside Sunnyvale. “It was great,” he recalled. “I had been listening to a lot of
Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling
of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming
through the wheat.”

That summer of 1972, after his graduation, he and Brennan moved to a cabin in the
hills above Los Altos. “I’m going to go live in a cabin with Chrisann,” he announced to his
parents one day. His father was furious. “No you’re not,” he said. “Over my dead body.”
They had recently fought about marijuana, and once again the younger Jobs was willful. He
just said good-bye and walked out.

Brennan spent a lot of her time that summer painting; she was talented, and she did a
picture of a clown for Jobs that he kept on the wall. Jobs wrote poetry and played guitar. He
could be brutally cold and rude to her at times, but he was also entrancing and able to
impose his will. “He was an enlightened being who was cruel,” she recalled. “That’s a
strange combination.”

Midway through the summer, Jobs was almost killed when his red Fiat caught fire. He
was driving on Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz Mountains with a high school friend,
Tim Brown, who looked back, saw flames coming from the engine, and casually said to
Jobs, “Pull over, your car is on fire.” Jobs did. His father, despite their arguments, drove out
to the hills to tow the Fiat home.

In order to find a way to make money for a new car, Jobs got Wozniak to drive him to
De Anza College to look on the help-wanted bulletin board. They discovered that the
Westgate Shopping Center in San Jose was seeking college students who could dress up in
costumes and amuse the kids. So for $3 an hour, Jobs, Wozniak, and Brennan donned
heavy full-body costumes and headgear to play Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter, and
the White Rabbit. Wozniak, in his earnest and sweet way, found it fun. “I said, ‘I want to do
it, it’s my chance, because I love children.’ I think Steve looked at it as a lousy job, but I
looked at it as a fun adventure.” Jobs did indeed find it a pain. “It was hot, the costumes
were heavy, and after a while I felt like I wanted to smack some of the kids.” Patience was
never one of his virtues.

Reed College

Seventeen years earlier, Jobs’s parents had made a pledge when they adopted him: He
would go to college. So they had worked hard and saved dutifully for his college fund,
which was modest but adequate by the time he graduated. But Jobs, becoming ever more
willful, did not make it easy. At first he toyed with not going to college at all. “I think I
might have headed to New York if I didn’t go to college,” he recalled, musing on how
different his world—and perhaps all of ours—might have been if he had chosen that path.
When his parents pushed him to go to college, he responded in a passive-aggressive way.
He did not consider state schools, such as Berkeley, where Woz then was, despite the fact
that they were more affordable. Nor did he look at Stanford, just up the road and likely to
offer a scholarship. “The kids who went to Stanford, they already knew what they wanted
to do,” he said. “They weren’t really artistic. I wanted something that was more artistic and
interesting.”

Instead he insisted on applying only to Reed College, a private liberal arts school in
Portland, Oregon, that was one of the most expensive in the nation. He was visiting Woz at
Berkeley when his father called to say an acceptance letter had arrived from Reed, and he
tried to talk Steve out of going there. So did his mother. It was far more than they could
afford, they said. But their son responded with an ultimatum: If he couldn’t go to Reed, he
wouldn’t go anywhere. They relented, as usual.

Reed had only one thousand students, half the number at Homestead High. It was
known for its free-spirited hippie lifestyle, which combined somewhat uneasily with its
rigorous academic standards and core curriculum. Five years earlier Timothy Leary, the
guru of psychedelic enlightenment, had sat cross-legged at the Reed College commons
while on his League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD) college tour, during which he exhorted
his listeners, “Like every great religion of the past we seek to find the divinity within. . . .
These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present—turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Many of Reed’s students took all three of those injunctions seriously; the dropout rate
during the 1970s was more than one-third.

When it came time for Jobs to matriculate in the fall of 1972, his parents drove him up
to Portland, but in another small act of rebellion he refused to let them come on campus. In
fact he refrained from even saying good-bye or thanks. He recounted the moment later with
uncharacteristic regret:

It’s one of the things in life I really feel ashamed about. I was not very sensitive, and I
hurt their feelings. I shouldn’t have. They had done so much to make sure I could go there,
but I just didn’t want them around. I didn’t want anyone to know I had parents. I wanted to
be like an orphan who had bummed around the country on trains and just arrived out of
nowhere, with no roots, no connections, no background.

In late 1972, there was a fundamental shift happening in American campus life. The
nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and the draft that accompanied it, was winding
down. Political activism at colleges receded and in many late-night dorm conversations was
replaced by an interest in pathways to personal fulfillment. Jobs found himself deeply
influenced by a variety of books on spirituality and enlightenment, most notably Be Here
Now, a guide to meditation and the wonders of psychedelic drugs by Baba Ram Dass, born
Richard Alpert. “It was profound,” Jobs said. “It transformed me and many of my friends.”

The closest of those friends was another wispy-bearded freshman named Daniel Kottke,
who met Jobs a week after they arrived at Reed and shared his interest in Zen, Dylan, and
acid. Kottke, from a wealthy New York suburb, was smart but low-octane, with a sweet
flower-child demeanor made even mellower by his interest in Buddhism. That spiritual
quest had caused him to eschew material possessions, but he was nonetheless impressed by
Jobs’s tape deck. “Steve had a TEAC reel-to-reel and massive quantities of Dylan
bootlegs,” Kottke recalled. “He was both really cool and high-tech.”

Jobs started spending much of his time with Kottke and his girlfriend, Elizabeth
Holmes, even after he insulted her at their first meeting by grilling her about how much
money it would take to get her to have sex with another man. They hitchhiked to the coast

together, engaged in the typical dorm raps about the meaning of life, attended the love
festivals at the local Hare Krishna temple, and went to the Zen center for free vegetarian
meals. “It was a lot of fun,” said Kottke, “but also philosophical, and we took Zen very
seriously.”

Jobs began sharing with Kottke other books, including Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by
Shunryu Suzuki, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, and Cutting
Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa. They created a meditation room in
the attic crawl space above Elizabeth Holmes’s room and fixed it up with Indian prints, a
dhurrie rug, candles, incense, and meditation cushions. “There was a hatch in the ceiling
leading to an attic which had a huge amount of space,” Jobs said. “We took psychedelic
drugs there sometimes, but mainly we just meditated.”

Jobs’s engagement with Eastern spirituality, and especially Zen Buddhism, was not just
some passing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his typical intensity, and it
became deeply ingrained in his personality. “Steve is very much Zen,” said Kottke. “It was
a deep influence. You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense
focus.” Jobs also became deeply influenced by the emphasis that Buddhism places on
intuition. “I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more
significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis,” he later said. His
intensity, however, made it difficult for him to achieve inner peace; his Zen awareness was
not accompanied by an excess of calm, peace of mind, or interpersonal mellowness.

He and Kottke enjoyed playing a nineteenth-century German variant of chess called
Kriegspiel, in which the players sit back-to-back; each has his own board and pieces and
cannot see those of his opponent. A moderator informs them if a move they want to make is
legal or illegal, and they have to try to figure out where their opponent’s pieces are. “The
wildest game I played with them was during a lashing rainstorm sitting by the fireside,”
recalled Holmes, who served as moderator. “They were tripping on acid. They were
moving so fast I could barely keep up with them.”

Another book that deeply influenced Jobs during his freshman year was Diet for a
Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé, which extolled the personal and planetary benefits
of vegetarianism. “That’s when I swore off meat pretty much for good,” he recalled. But
the book also reinforced his tendency to embrace extreme diets, which included purges,
fasts, or eating only one or two foods, such as carrots or apples, for weeks on end.

Jobs and Kottke became serious vegetarians during their freshman year. “Steve got into
it even more than I did,” said Kottke. “He was living off Roman Meal cereal.” They would
go shopping at a farmers’ co-op, where Jobs would buy a box of cereal, which would last a
week, and other bulk health food. “He would buy flats of dates and almonds and lots of
carrots, and he got a Champion juicer and we’d make carrot juice and carrot salads. There
is a story about Steve turning orange from eating so many carrots, and there is some truth
to that.” Friends remember him having, at times, a sunset-like orange hue.

Jobs’s dietary habits became even more obsessive when he read Mucusless Diet
Healing System by Arnold Ehret, an early twentieth-century German-born nutrition fanatic.
He believed in eating nothing but fruits and starchless vegetables, which he said prevented
the body from forming harmful mucus, and he advocated cleansing the body regularly
through prolonged fasts. That meant the end of even Roman Meal cereal—or any bread,
grains, or milk. Jobs began warning friends of the mucus dangers lurking in their bagels. “I
got into it in my typical nutso way,” he said. At one point he and Kottke went for an entire
week eating only apples, and then Jobs began to try even purer fasts. He started with two-
day fasts, and eventually tried to stretch them to a week or more, breaking them carefully
with large amounts of water and leafy vegetables. “After a week you start to feel fantastic,”
he said. “You get a ton of vitality from not having to digest all this food. I was in great
shape. I felt I could get up and walk to San Francisco anytime I wanted.”

Vegetarianism and Zen Buddhism, meditation and spirituality, acid and rock—Jobs
rolled together, in an amped-up way, the multiple impulses that were hallmarks of the
enlightenment-seeking campus subculture of the era. And even though he barely indulged it
at Reed, there was still an undercurrent of electronic geekiness in his soul that would
someday combine surprisingly well with the rest of the mix.

Robert Friedland

In order to raise some cash one day, Jobs decided to sell his IBM Selectric typewriter.
He walked into the room of the student who had offered to buy it only to discover that he
was having sex with his girlfriend. Jobs started to leave, but the student invited him to take
a seat and wait while they finished. “I thought, ‘This is kind of far out,’” Jobs later recalled.
And thus began his relationship with Robert Friedland, one of the few people in Jobs’s life
who were able to mesmerize him. He adopted some of Friedland’s charismatic traits and for
a few years treated him almost like a guru—until he began to see him as a charlatan.

Friedland was four years older than Jobs, but still an undergraduate. The son of an
Auschwitz survivor who became a prosperous Chicago architect, he had originally gone to
Bowdoin, a liberal arts college in Maine. But while a sophomore, he was arrested for
possession of 24,000 tablets of LSD worth $125,000. The local newspaper pictured him
with shoulder-length wavy blond hair smiling at the photographers as he was led away. He
was sentenced to two years at a federal prison in Virginia, from which he was paroled in
1972. That fall he headed off to Reed, where he immediately ran for student body
president, saying that he needed to clear his name from the “miscarriage of justice” he had
suffered. He won.

Friedland had heard Baba Ram Dass, the author of Be Here Now, give a speech in
Boston, and like Jobs and Kottke had gotten deeply into Eastern spirituality. During the
summer of 1973, he traveled to India to meet Ram Dass’s Hindu guru, Neem Karoli Baba,
famously known to his many followers as Maharaj-ji. When he returned that fall, Friedland
had taken a spiritual name and walked around in sandals and flowing Indian robes. He had

a room off campus, above a garage, and Jobs would go there many afternoons to seek him
out. He was entranced by the apparent intensity of Friedland’s conviction that a state of
enlightenment truly existed and could be attained. “He turned me on to a different level of
consciousness,” Jobs said.

Friedland found Jobs fascinating as well. “He was always walking around barefoot,” he
later told a reporter. “The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested
in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme.” Jobs had honed his trick of using
stares and silences to master other people. “One of his numbers was to stare at the person
he was talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs, ask some question, and would
want a response without the other person averting their eyes.”

According to Kottke, some of Jobs’s personality traits—including a few that lasted
throughout his career—were borrowed from Friedland. “Friedland taught Steve the reality
distortion field,” said Kottke. “He was charismatic and a bit of a con man and could bend
situations to his very strong will. He was mercurial, sure of himself, a little dictatorial.
Steve admired that, and he became more like that after spending time with Robert.”

Jobs also absorbed how Friedland made himself the center of attention. “Robert was
very much an outgoing, charismatic guy, a real salesman,” Kottke recalled. “When I first
met Steve he was shy and self-effacing, a very private guy. I think Robert taught him a lot
about selling, about coming out of his shell, of opening up and taking charge of a
situation.” Friedland projected a high-wattage aura. “He would walk into a room and you
would instantly notice him. Steve was the absolute opposite when he came to Reed. After
he spent time with Robert, some of it started to rub off.”

On Sunday evenings Jobs and Friedland would go to the Hare Krishna temple on the
western edge of Portland, often with Kottke and Holmes in tow. They would dance and
sing songs at the top of their lungs. “We would work ourselves into an ecstatic frenzy,”
Holmes recalled. “Robert would go insane and dance like crazy. Steve was more subdued,
as if he was embarrassed to let loose.” Then they would be treated to paper plates piled
high with vegetarian food.

Friedland had stewardship of a 220-acre apple farm, about forty miles southwest of
Portland, that was owned by an eccentric millionaire uncle from Switzerland named Marcel
Müller. After Friedland became involved with Eastern spirituality, he turned it into a
commune called the All One Farm, and Jobs would spend weekends there with Kottke,
Holmes, and like-minded seekers of enlightenment. The farm had a main house, a large
barn, and a garden shed, where Kottke and Holmes slept. Jobs took on the task of pruning
the Gravenstein apple trees. “Steve ran the apple orchard,” said Friedland. “We were in the
organic cider business. Steve’s job was to lead a crew of freaks to prune the orchard and
whip it back into shape.”

Monks and disciples from the Hare Krishna temple would come and prepare vegetarian
feasts redolent of cumin, coriander, and turmeric. “Steve would be starving when he
arrived, and he would stuff himself,” Holmes recalled. “Then he would go and purge. For
years I thought he was bulimic. It was very upsetting, because we had gone to all that
trouble of creating these feasts, and he couldn’t hold it down.”

Jobs was also beginning to have a little trouble stomaching Friedland’s cult leader style.
“Perhaps he saw a little bit too much of Robert in himself,” said Kottke. Although the
commune was supposed to be a refuge from materialism, Friedland began operating it more
as a business; his followers were told to chop and sell firewood, make apple presses and
wood stoves, and engage in other commercial endeavors for which they were not paid. One
night Jobs slept under the table in the kitchen and was amused to notice that people kept
coming in and stealing each other’s food from the refrigerator. Communal economics were
not for him. “It started to get very materialistic,” Jobs recalled. “Everybody got the idea
they were working very hard for Robert’s farm, and one by one they started to leave. I got
pretty sick of it.”

Many years later, after Friedland had become a billionaire copper and gold mining
executive—working out of Vancouver, Singapore, and Mongolia—I met him for drinks in
New York. That evening I emailed Jobs and mentioned my encounter. He telephoned me
from California within an hour and warned me against listening to Friedland. He said that
when Friedland was in trouble because of environmental abuses committed by some of his
mines, he had tried to contact Jobs to intervene with Bill Clinton, but Jobs had not
responded. “Robert always portrayed himself as a spiritual person, but he crossed the line
from being charismatic to being a con man,” Jobs said. “It was a strange thing to have one
of the spiritual people in your young life turn out to be, symbolically and in reality, a gold
miner.”

. . . Drop Out

Jobs quickly became bored with college. He liked being at Reed, just not taking the
required classes. In fact he was surprised when he found out that, for all of its hippie aura,
there were strict course requirements. When Wozniak came to visit, Jobs waved his
schedule at him and complained, “They are making me take all these courses.” Woz
replied, “Yes, that’s what they do in college.” Jobs refused to go to the classes he was
assigned and instead went to the ones he wanted, such as a dance class where he could
enjoy both the creativity and the chance to meet girls. “I would never have refused to take
the courses you were supposed to, that’s a difference in our personality,” Wozniak
marveled.

Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about spending so much of his parents’
money on an education that did not seem worthwhile. “All of my working-class parents’
savings were being spent on my college tuition,” he recounted in a famous commencement
address at Stanford. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:02

college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my
parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work
out okay.”

He didn’t actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to quit paying tuition and taking
classes that didn’t interest him. Remarkably, Reed tolerated that. “He had a very inquiring
mind that was enormously attractive,” said the dean of students, Jack Dudman. “He refused
to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.”
Dudman allowed Jobs to audit classes and stay with friends in the dorms even after he
stopped paying tuition.

“The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest
me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting,” he said. Among them was a
calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully
drawn. “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space
between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was
beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it
fascinating.”

It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection
of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great
design, elegance, human touches, and even romance. He would be in the fore of pushing
friendly graphical user interfaces. The calligraphy course would become iconic in that
regard. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have
never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just
copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

In the meantime Jobs eked out a bohemian existence on the fringes of Reed. He went
barefoot most of the time, wearing sandals when it snowed. Elizabeth Holmes made meals
for him, trying to keep up with his obsessive diets. He returned soda bottles for spare
change, continued his treks to the free Sunday dinners at the Hare Krishna temple, and
wore a down jacket in the heatless garage apartment he rented for $20 a month. When he
needed money, he found work at the psychology department lab maintaining the electronic
equipment that was used for animal behavior experiments. Occasionally Chrisann Brennan
would come to visit. Their relationship sputtered along erratically. But mostly he tended to
the stirrings of his own soul and personal quest for enlightenment.

“I came of age at a magical time,” he reflected later. “Our consciousness was raised by
Zen, and also by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit psychedelic drugs for making
him more enlightened. “Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important
things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t
remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was

important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the
stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

CHAPTER FOUR

ATARI AND INDIA

Zen and the Art of Game Design

Atari

In February 1974, after eighteen months of hanging around Reed, Jobs decided to move
back to his parents’ home in Los Altos and look for a job. It was not a difficult search. At
peak times during the 1970s, the classified section of the San Jose Mercury carried up to
sixty pages of technology help-wanted ads. One of those caught Jobs’s eye. “Have fun,
make money,” it said. That day Jobs walked into the lobby of the video game manufacturer
Atari and told the personnel director, who was startled by his unkempt hair and attire, that
he wouldn’t leave until they gave him a job.

Atari’s founder was a burly entrepreneur named Nolan Bushnell, who was a charismatic
visionary with a nice touch of showmanship in him—in other words, another role model
waiting to be emulated. After he became famous, he liked driving around in a Rolls,
smoking dope, and holding staff meetings in a hot tub. As Friedland had done and as Jobs
would learn to do, he was able to turn charm into a cunning force, to cajole and intimidate
and distort reality with the power of his personality. His chief engineer was Al Alcorn,
beefy and jovial and a bit more grounded, the house grown-up trying to implement the
vision and curb the enthusiasms of Bushnell. Their big hit thus far was a video game called
Pong, in which two players tried to volley a blip on a screen with two movable lines that
acted as paddles. (If you’re under thirty, ask your parents.)

When Jobs arrived in the Atari lobby wearing sandals and demanding a job, Alcorn was
the one who was summoned. “I was told, ‘We’ve got a hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s
not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or let him in?’ I said bring
him on in!”

Jobs thus became one of the first fifty employees at Atari, working as a technician for
$5 an hour. “In retrospect, it was weird to hire a dropout from Reed,” Alcorn recalled. “But

I saw something in him. He was very intelligent, enthusiastic, excited about tech.” Alcorn
assigned him to work with a straitlaced engineer named Don Lang. The next day Lang
complained, “This guy’s a goddamn hippie with b.o. Why did you do this to me? And he’s
impossible to deal with.” Jobs clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would
prevent not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn’t use deodorant or shower
regularly. It was a flawed theory.

Lang and others wanted to let Jobs go, but Bushnell worked out a solution. “The smell
and behavior wasn’t an issue with me,” he said. “Steve was prickly, but I kind of liked him.
So I asked him to go on the night shift. It was a way to save him.” Jobs would come in after
Lang and others had left and work through most of the night. Even thus isolated, he became
known for his brashness. On those occasions when he happened to interact with others, he
was prone to informing them that they were “dumb shits.” In retrospect, he stands by that
judgment. “The only reason I shone was that everyone else was so bad,” Jobs recalled.

Despite his arrogance (or perhaps because of it) he was able to charm Atari’s boss. “He
was more philosophical than the other people I worked with,” Bushnell recalled. “We used
to discuss free will versus determinism. I tended to believe that things were much more
determined, that we were programmed. If we had perfect information, we could predict
people’s actions. Steve felt the opposite.” That outlook accorded with his faith in the power
of the will to bend reality.

Jobs helped improve some of the games by pushing the chips to produce fun designs,
and Bushnell’s inspiring willingness to play by his own rules rubbed off on him. In
addition, he intuitively appreciated the simplicity of Atari’s games. They came with no
manual and needed to be uncomplicated enough that a stoned freshman could figure them
out. The only instructions for Atari’s Star Trek game were “1. Insert quarter. 2. Avoid
Klingons.”

Not all of his coworkers shunned Jobs. He became friends with Ron Wayne, a
draftsman at Atari, who had earlier started a company that built slot machines. It
subsequently failed, but Jobs became fascinated with the idea that it was possible to start
your own company. “Ron was an amazing guy,” said Jobs. “He started companies. I had
never met anybody like that.” He proposed to Wayne that they go into business together;
Jobs said he could borrow $50,000, and they could design and market a slot machine. But
Wayne had already been burned in business, so he declined. “I said that was the quickest
way to lose $50,000,” Wayne recalled, “but I admired the fact that he had a burning drive to
start his own business.”

One weekend Jobs was visiting Wayne at his apartment, engaging as they often did in
philosophical discussions, when Wayne said that there was something he needed to tell
him. “Yeah, I think I know what it is,” Jobs replied. “I think you like men.” Wayne said
yes. “It was my first encounter with someone who I knew was gay,” Jobs recalled. “He
planted the right perspective of it for me.” Jobs grilled him: “When you see a beautiful

woman, what do you feel?” Wayne replied, “It’s like when you look at a beautiful horse.
You can appreciate it, but you don’t want to sleep with it. You appreciate beauty for what it
is.” Wayne said that it is a testament to Jobs that he felt like revealing this to him. “Nobody
at Atari knew, and I could count on my toes and fingers the number of people I told in my
whole life. But I guess it just felt right to tell him, that he would understand, and it didn’t
have any effect on our relationship.”

India

One reason Jobs was eager to make some money in early 1974 was that Robert
Friedland, who had gone to India the summer before, was urging him to take his own
spiritual journey there. Friedland had studied in India with Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaj-ji),
who had been the guru to much of the sixties hippie movement. Jobs decided he should do
the same, and he recruited Daniel Kottke to go with him. Jobs was not motivated by mere
adventure. “For me it was a serious search,” he said. “I’d been turned on to the idea of
enlightenment and trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into things.” Kottke adds
that Jobs’s quest seemed driven partly by not knowing his birth parents. “There was a hole
in him, and he was trying to fill it.”

When Jobs told the folks at Atari that he was quitting to go search for a guru in India,
the jovial Alcorn was amused. “He comes in and stares at me and declares, ‘I’m going to
find my guru,’ and I say, ‘No shit, that’s super. Write me!’ And he says he wants me to help
pay, and I tell him, ‘Bullshit!’” Then Alcorn had an idea. Atari was making kits and
shipping them to Munich, where they were built into finished machines and distributed by a
wholesaler in Turin. But there was a problem: Because the games were designed for the
American rate of sixty frames per second, there were frustrating interference problems in
Europe, where the rate was fifty frames per second. Alcorn sketched out a fix with Jobs and
then offered to pay for him to go to Europe to implement it. “It’s got to be cheaper to get to
India from there,” he said. Jobs agreed. So Alcorn sent him on his way with the
exhortation, “Say hi to your guru for me.”

Jobs spent a few days in Munich, where he solved the interference problem, but in the
process he flummoxed the dark-suited German managers. They complained to Alcorn that
he dressed and smelled like a bum and behaved rudely. “I said, ‘Did he solve the problem?’
And they said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘If you got any more problems, you just call me, I got more
guys just like him!’ They said, ‘No, no we’ll take care of it next time.’” For his part, Jobs
was upset that the Germans kept trying to feed him meat and potatoes. “They don’t even
have a word for vegetarian,” he complained (incorrectly) in a phone call to Alcorn.

He had a better time when he took the train to see the distributor in Turin, where the
Italian pastas and his host’s camaraderie were more simpatico. “I had a wonderful couple of
weeks in Turin, which is this charged-up industrial town,” he recalled. “The distributor
took me every night to dinner at this place where there were only eight tables and no menu.
You’d just tell them what you wanted, and they made it. One of the tables was on reserve

for the chairman of Fiat. It was really super.” He next went to Lugano, Switzerland, where
he stayed with Friedland’s uncle, and from there took a flight to India.

When he got off the plane in New Delhi, he felt waves of heat rising from the tarmac,
even though it was only April. He had been given the name of a hotel, but it was full, so he
went to one his taxi driver insisted was good. “I’m sure he was getting some baksheesh,
because he took me to this complete dive.” Jobs asked the owner whether the water was
filtered and foolishly believed the answer. “I got dysentery pretty fast. I was sick, really
sick, a really high fever. I dropped from 160 pounds to 120 in about a week.”

Once he got healthy enough to move, he decided that he needed to get out of Delhi. So
he headed to the town of Haridwar, in western India near the source of the Ganges, which
was having a festival known as the Kumbh Mela. More than ten million people poured into
a town that usually contained fewer than 100,000 residents. “There were holy men all
around. Tents with this teacher and that teacher. There were people riding elephants, you
name it. I was there for a few days, but I decided that I needed to get out of there too.”

He went by train and bus to a village near Nainital in the foothills of the Himalayas.
That was where Neem Karoli Baba lived, or had lived. By the time Jobs got there, he was
no longer alive, at least in the same incarnation. Jobs rented a room with a mattress on the
floor from a family who helped him recuperate by feeding him vegetarian meals. “There
was a copy there of Autobiography of a Yogi in English that a previous traveler had left,
and I read it several times because there was not a lot to do, and I walked around from
village to village and recovered from my dysentery.” Among those who were part of the
community there was Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who was working to eradicate
smallpox and who later ran Google’s philanthropic arm and the Skoll Foundation. He
became Jobs’s lifelong friend.

At one point Jobs was told of a young Hindu holy man who was holding a gathering of
his followers at the Himalayan estate of a wealthy businessman. “It was a chance to meet a
spiritual being and hang out with his followers, but it was also a chance to have a good
meal. I could smell the food as we got near, and I was very hungry.” As Jobs was eating,
the holy man—who was not much older than Jobs—picked him out of the crowd, pointed
at him, and began laughing maniacally. “He came running over and grabbed me and made a
tooting sound and said, ‘You are just like a baby,’” recalled Jobs. “I was not relishing this
attention.” Taking Jobs by the hand, he led him out of the worshipful crowd and walked
him up to a hill, where there was a well and a small pond. “We sit down and he pulls out
this straight razor. I’m thinking he’s a nutcase and begin to worry. Then he pulls out a bar
of soap—I had long hair at the time—and he lathered up my hair and shaved my head. He
told me that he was saving my health.”

Daniel Kottke arrived in India at the beginning of the summer, and Jobs went back to
New Delhi to meet him. They wandered, mainly by bus, rather aimlessly. By this point Jobs
was no longer trying to find a guru who could impart wisdom, but instead was seeking

enlightenment through ascetic experience, deprivation, and simplicity. He was not able to
achieve inner calm. Kottke remembers him getting into a furious shouting match with a
Hindu woman in a village marketplace who, Jobs alleged, had been watering down the
milk she was selling them.

Yet Jobs could also be generous. When they got to the town of Manali, Kottke’s
sleeping bag was stolen with his traveler’s checks in it. “Steve covered my food expenses
and bus ticket back to Delhi,” Kottke recalled. He also gave Kottke the rest of his own
money, $100, to tide him over.

During his seven months in India, he had written to his parents only sporadically,
getting mail at the American Express office in New Delhi when he passed through, and so
they were somewhat surprised when they got a call from the Oakland airport asking them
to pick him up. They immediately drove up from Los Altos. “My head had been shaved, I
was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep, chocolate brown-red from
the sun,” he recalled. “So I’m sitting there and my parents walked past me about five times
and finally my mother came up and said ‘Steve?’ and I said ‘Hi!’”

They took him back home, where he continued trying to find himself. It was a pursuit
with many paths toward enlightenment. In the mornings and evenings he would meditate
and study Zen, and in between he would drop in to audit physics or engineering courses at
Stanford.

The Search

Jobs’s interest in Eastern spirituality, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and the search for
enlightenment was not merely the passing phase of a nineteen-year-old. Throughout his life
he would seek to follow many of the basic precepts of Eastern religions, such as the
emphasis on experiential prajñā, wisdom or cognitive understanding that is intuitively
experienced through concentration of the mind. Years later, sitting in his Palo Alto garden,
he reflected on the lasting influence of his trip to India:

Coming back to America was, for me, much more of a cultural shock than going to
India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do, they use
their intuition instead, and their intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world.
Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a
big impact on my work.

Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the
great achievement of Western civilization. In the villages of India, they never learned it.
They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways is
not. That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.

Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western
world as well as its capacity for rational thought. If you just sit and observe, you will see
how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does
calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things—that’s when your intuition
starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your
mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much
more than you could see before. It’s a discipline; you have to practice it.

Zen has been a deep influence in my life ever since. At one point I was thinking about
going to Japan and trying to get into the Eihei-ji monastery, but my spiritual advisor urged
me to stay here. He said there is nothing over there that isn’t here, and he was correct. I
learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet
a teacher, one will appear next door.

Jobs did in fact find a teacher right in his own neighborhood. Shunryu Suzuki, who
wrote Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and ran the San Francisco Zen Center, used to come to
Los Altos every Wednesday evening to lecture and meditate with a small group of
followers. After a while he asked his assistant, Kobun Chino Otogawa, to open a full-time
center there. Jobs became a faithful follower, along with his occasional girlfriend, Chrisann
Brennan, and Daniel Kottke and Elizabeth Holmes. He also began to go by himself on
retreats to the Tassajara Zen Center, a monastery near Carmel where Kobun also taught.

Kottke found Kobun amusing. “His English was atrocious,” he recalled. “He would
speak in a kind of haiku, with poetic, suggestive phrases. We would sit and listen to him,
and half the time we had no idea what he was going on about. I took the whole thing as a
kind of lighthearted interlude.” Holmes was more into the scene. “We would go to Kobun’s
meditations, sit on zafu cushions, and he would sit on a dais,” she said. “We learned how to
tune out distractions. It was a magical thing. One evening we were meditating with Kobun
when it was raining, and he taught us how to use ambient sounds to bring us back to focus
on our meditation.”

As for Jobs, his devotion was intense. “He became really serious and self-important and
just generally unbearable,” according to Kottke. He began meeting with Kobun almost
daily, and every few months they went on retreats together to meditate. “I ended up
spending as much time as I could with him,” Jobs recalled. “He had a wife who was a nurse
at Stanford and two kids. She worked the night shift, so I would go over and hang out with
him in the evenings. She would get home about midnight and shoo me away.” They
sometimes discussed whether Jobs should devote himself fully to spiritual pursuits, but
Kobun counseled otherwise. He assured Jobs that he could keep in touch with his spiritual
side while working in a business. The relationship turned out to be lasting and deep;
seventeen years later Kobun would perform Jobs’s wedding ceremony.

Jobs’s compulsive search for self-awareness also led him to undergo primal scream
therapy, which had recently been developed and popularized by a Los Angeles
psychotherapist named Arthur Janov. It was based on the Freudian theory that
psychological problems are caused by the repressed pains of childhood; Janov argued that
they could be resolved by re-suffering these primal moments while fully expressing the
pain—sometimes in screams. To Jobs, this seemed preferable to talk therapy because it
involved intuitive feeling and emotional action rather than just rational analyzing. “This
was not something to think about,” he later said. “This was something to do: to close your
eyes, hold your breath, jump in, and come out the other end more insightful.”

A group of Janov’s adherents ran a program called the Oregon Feeling Center in an old
hotel in Eugene that was managed by Jobs’s Reed College guru Robert Friedland, whose
All One Farm commune was nearby. In late 1974, Jobs signed up for a twelve-week course
of therapy there costing $1,000. “Steve and I were both into personal growth, so I wanted
to go with him,” Kottke recounted, “but I couldn’t afford it.”

Jobs confided to close friends that he was driven by the pain he was feeling about being
put up for adoption and not knowing about his birth parents. “Steve had a very profound
desire to know his physical parents so he could better know himself,” Friedland later said.
He had learned from Paul and Clara Jobs that his birth parents had both been graduate
students at a university and that his father might be Syrian. He had even thought about
hiring a private investigator, but he decided not to do so for the time being. “I didn’t want
to hurt my parents,” he recalled, referring to Paul and Clara.

“He was struggling with the fact that he had been adopted,” according to Elizabeth
Holmes. “He felt that it was an issue that he needed to get hold of emotionally.” Jobs
admitted as much to her. “This is something that is bothering me, and I need to focus on it,”
he said. He was even more open with Greg Calhoun. “He was doing a lot of soul-searching
about being adopted, and he talked about it with me a lot,” Calhoun recalled. “The primal
scream and the mucusless diets, he was trying to cleanse himself and get deeper into his
frustration about his birth. He told me he was deeply angry about the fact that he had been
given up.”

John Lennon had undergone the same primal scream therapy in 1970, and in December
of that year he released the song “Mother” with the Plastic Ono Band. It dealt with
Lennon’s own feelings about a father who had abandoned him and a mother who had been
killed when he was a teenager. The refrain includes the haunting chant “Mama don’t go,
Daddy come home.” Jobs used to play the song often.

Jobs later said that Janov’s teachings did not prove very useful. “He offered a ready-
made, buttoned-down answer which turned out to be far too oversimplistic. It became
obvious that it was not going to yield any great insight.” But Holmes contended that it
made him more confident: “After he did it, he was in a different place. He had a very

abrasive personality, but there was a peace about him for a while. His confidence improved
and his feelings of inadequacy were reduced.”

Jobs came to believe that he could impart that feeling of confidence to others and thus
push them to do things they hadn’t thought possible. Holmes had broken up with Kottke
and joined a religious cult in San Francisco that expected her to sever ties with all past
friends. But Jobs rejected that injunction. He arrived at the cult house in his Ford Ranchero
one day and announced that he was driving up to Friedland’s apple farm and she was to
come. Even more brazenly, he said she would have to drive part of the way, even though
she didn’t know how to use the stick shift. “Once we got on the open road, he made me get
behind the wheel, and he shifted the car until we got up to 55 miles per hour,” she recalled.
“Then he puts on a tape of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, lays his head in my lap, and goes
to sleep. He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his
life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn’t think I could do.”

It was the brighter side of what would become known as his reality distortion field. “If
you trust him, you can do things,” Holmes said. “If he’s decided that something should
happen, then he’s just going to make it happen.”

Breakout

One day in early 1975 Al Alcorn was sitting in his office at Atari when Ron Wayne
burst in. “Hey, Stevie is back!” he shouted.

“Wow, bring him on in,” Alcorn replied.

Jobs shuffled in barefoot, wearing a saffron robe and carrying a copy of Be Here Now,
which he handed to Alcorn and insisted he read. “Can I have my job back?” he asked.

“He looked like a Hare Krishna guy, but it was great to see him,” Alcorn recalled. “So I
said, sure!”

Once again, for the sake of harmony, Jobs worked mostly at night. Wozniak, who was
living in an apartment nearby and working at HP, would come by after dinner to hang out
and play the video games. He had become addicted to Pong at a Sunnyvale bowling alley,
and he was able to build a version that he hooked up to his home TV set.

One day in the late summer of 1975, Nolan Bushnell, defying the prevailing wisdom
that paddle games were over, decided to develop a single-player version of Pong; instead of
competing against an opponent, the player would volley the ball into a wall that lost a brick
whenever it was hit. He called Jobs into his office, sketched it out on his little blackboard,
and asked him to design it. There would be a bonus, Bushnell told him, for every chip
fewer than fifty that he used. Bushnell knew that Jobs was not a great engineer, but he
assumed, correctly, that he would recruit Wozniak, who was always hanging around. “I
looked at it as a two-for-one thing,” Bushnell recalled. “Woz was a better engineer.”

Wozniak was thrilled when Jobs asked him to help and proposed splitting the fee. “This
was the most wonderful offer in my life, to actually design a game that people would use,”
he recalled. Jobs said it had to be done in four days and with the fewest chips possible.
What he hid from Wozniak was that the deadline was one that Jobs had imposed, because
he needed to get to the All One Farm to help prepare for the apple harvest. He also didn’t
mention that there was a bonus tied to keeping down the number of chips.

“A game like this might take most engineers a few months,” Wozniak recalled. “I
thought that there was no way I could do it, but Steve made me sure that I could.” So he
stayed up four nights in a row and did it. During the day at HP, Wozniak would sketch out
his design on paper. Then, after a fast-food meal, he would go right to Atari and stay all
night. As Wozniak churned out the design, Jobs sat on a bench to his left implementing it
by wire-wrapping the chips onto a breadboard. “While Steve was breadboarding, I spent
time playing my favorite game ever, which was the auto racing game Gran Trak 10,”
Wozniak said.

Astonishingly, they were able to get the job done in four days, and Wozniak used only
forty-five chips. Recollections differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply gave Wozniak half
of the base fee and not the bonus Bushnell paid for saving five chips. It would be another
ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being shown the tale in a book on the history of
Atari titled Zap) that Jobs had been paid this bonus. “I think that Steve needed the money,
and he just didn’t tell me the truth,” Wozniak later said. When he talks about it now, there
are long pauses, and he admits that it causes him pain. “I wish he had just been honest. If
he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have just given it to
him. He was a friend. You help your friends.” To Wozniak, it showed a fundamental
difference in their characters. “Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don’t understand
why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another,” he said.
“But, you know, people are different.”

When Jobs learned this story was published, he called Wozniak to deny it. “He told me
that he didn’t remember doing it, and that if he did something like that he would remember
it, so he probably didn’t do it,” Wozniak recalled. When I asked Jobs directly, he became
unusually quiet and hesitant. “I don’t know where that allegation comes from,” he said. “I
gave him half the money I ever got. That’s how I’ve always been with Woz. I mean, Woz
stopped working in 1978. He never did one ounce of work after 1978. And yet he got
exactly the same shares of Apple stock that I did.”

Is it possible that memories are muddled and that Jobs did not, in fact, shortchange
Wozniak? “There’s a chance that my memory is all wrong and messed up,” Wozniak told
me, but after a pause he reconsidered. “But no. I remember the details of this one, the $350
check.” He confirmed his memory with Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn. “I remember
talking about the bonus money to Woz, and he was upset,” Bushnell said. “I said yes, there

was a bonus for each chip they saved, and he just shook his head and then clucked his
tongue.”

Whatever the truth, Wozniak later insisted that it was not worth rehashing. Jobs is a
complex person, he said, and being manipulative is just the darker facet of the traits that
make him successful. Wozniak would never have been that way, but as he points out, he
also could never have built Apple. “I would rather let it pass,” he said when I pressed the
point. “It’s not something I want to judge Steve by.”

The Atari experience helped shape Jobs’s approach to business and design. He
appreciated the user-friendliness of Atari’s insert-quarter-avoid-Klingons games. “That
simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person,” said Ron
Wayne. Jobs also absorbed some of Bushnell’s take-no-prisoners attitude. “Nolan wouldn’t
take no for an answer,” according to Alcorn, “and this was Steve’s first impression of how
things got done. Nolan was never abusive, like Steve sometimes is. But he had the same
driven attitude. It made me cringe, but dammit, it got things done. In that way Nolan was a
mentor for Jobs.”

Bushnell agreed. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in
Steve,” he said. “He was interested not just in engineering, but also the business aspects. I
taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend
to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’”

CHAPTER FIVE

THE APPLE I

Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . .

Daniel Kottke and Jobs with the Apple I at the Atlantic City computer fair, 1976

错误！超链接引用无效。

In San Francisco and the Santa Clara Valley during the late 1960s, various cultural currents
flowed together. There was the technology revolution that began with the growth of
military contractors and soon included electronics firms, microchip makers, video game
designers, and computer companies. There was a hacker subculture—filled with wireheads,
phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and just plain geeks—that included engineers who didn’t
conform to the HP mold and their kids who weren’t attuned to the wavelengths of the
subdivisions. There were quasi-academic groups doing studies on the effects of LSD;
participants included Doug Engelbart of the Augmentation Research Center in Palo Alto,
who later helped develop the computer mouse and graphical user interfaces, and Ken
Kesey, who celebrated the drug with music-and-light shows featuring a house band that
became the Grateful Dead. There was the hippie movement, born out of the Bay Area’s
beat generation, and the rebellious political activists, born out of the Free Speech
Movement at Berkeley. Overlaid on it all were various self-fulfillment movements pursuing
paths to personal enlightenment: Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream
and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.
This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was
embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at
Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just
something going on here,” he said, looking back at the time and place. “The best music

came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so
did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.”
Initially the technologists and the hippies did not interface well. Many in the
counterculture saw computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and
the power structure. In The Myth of the Machine, the historian Lewis Mumford warned that
computers were sucking away our freedom and destroying “life-enhancing values.” An
injunction on punch cards of the period—“Do not fold, spindle or mutilate”—became an
ironic phrase of the antiwar Left.
But by the early 1970s a shift was under way. “Computing went from being dismissed as
a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and
liberation,” John Markoff wrote in his study of the counterculture’s convergence with the
computer industry, What the Dormouse Said. It was an ethos lyrically expressed in Richard
Brautigan’s 1967 poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” and the
cyberdelic fusion was certified when Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had
become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, “Turn on, boot
up, jack in.” The musician Bono, who later became a friend of Jobs, often discussed with
him why those immersed in the rock-drugs-rebel counterculture of the Bay Area ended up
helping to create the personal computer industry. “The people who invented the twenty-first
century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because
they saw differently,” he said. “The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England,
Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an
anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.”
One person who encouraged the denizens of the counterculture to make common cause
with the hackers was Stewart Brand. A puckish visionary who generated fun and ideas over
many decades, Brand was a participant in one of the early sixties LSD studies in Palo Alto.
He joined with his fellow subject Ken Kesey to produce the acid-celebrating Trips Festival,
appeared in the opening scene of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and worked
with Doug Engelbart to create a seminal sound-and-light presentation of new technologies
called the Mother of All Demos. “Most of our generation scorned computers as the
embodiment of centralized control,” Brand later noted. “But a tiny contingent—later called
hackers—embraced computers and set about transforming them into tools of liberation.
That turned out to be the true royal road to the future.”
Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful
tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with the Whole
Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its
subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be
our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal
power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own
inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.
Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.”
Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: “I see God in the instruments and
mechanisms that work reliably.”

Jobs became a Whole Earth fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came
out in 1971, when he was still in high school, and he brought it with him to college and
then to the All One Farm. “On the back cover of their final issue” Jobs recalled, “was a
photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking
on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.’”
Brand sees Jobs as one of the purest embodiments of the cultural mix that the catalog
sought to celebrate. “Steve is right at the nexus of the counterculture and technology,” he
said. “He got the notion of tools for human use.”
Brand’s catalog was published with the help of the Portola Institute, a foundation
dedicated to the fledgling field of computer education. The foundation also helped launch
the People’s Computer Company, which was not a company at all but a newsletter and
organization with the motto “Computer power to the people.” There were occasional
Wednesday-night potluck dinners, and two of the regulars, Gordon French and Fred Moore,
decided to create a more formal club where news about personal electronics could be
shared.
They were energized by the arrival of the January 1975 issue of Popular Mechanics,
which had on its cover the first personal computer kit, the Altair. The Altair wasn’t much—
just a $495 pile of parts that had to be soldered to a board that would then do little—but for
hobbyists and hackers it heralded the dawn of a new era. Bill Gates and Paul Allen read the
magazine and started working on a version of BASIC, an easy-to-use programming
language, for the Altair. It also caught the attention of Jobs and Wozniak. And when an
Altair kit arrived at the People’s Computer Company, it became the centerpiece for the first
meeting of the club that French and Moore had decided to launch.

错误！超链接引用无效。

The group became known as the Homebrew Computer Club, and it encapsulated the Whole
Earth fusion between the counterculture and technology. It would become to the personal
computer era something akin to what the Turk’s Head coffeehouse was to the age of Dr.
Johnson, a place where ideas were exchanged and disseminated. Moore wrote the flyer for
the first meeting, held on March 5, 1975, in French’s Menlo Park garage: “Are you
building your own computer? Terminal, TV, typewriter?” it asked. “If so, you might like to
come to a gathering of people with like-minded interests.”
Allen Baum spotted the flyer on the HP bulletin board and called Wozniak, who agreed
to go with him. “That night turned out to be one of the most important nights of my life,”
Wozniak recalled. About thirty other people showed up, spilling out of French’s open
garage door, and they took turns describing their interests. Wozniak, who later admitted to
being extremely nervous, said he liked “video games, pay movies for hotels, scientific
calculator design, and TV terminal design,” according to the minutes prepared by Moore.
There was a demonstration of the new Altair, but more important to Wozniak was seeing
the specification sheet for a microprocessor.
As he thought about the microprocessor—a chip that had an entire central processing
unit on it—he had an insight. He had been designing a terminal, with a keyboard and

monitor, that would connect to a distant minicomputer. Using a microprocessor, he could
put some of the capacity of the minicomputer inside the terminal itself, so it could become
a small stand-alone computer on a desktop. It was an enduring idea: keyboard, screen, and
computer all in one integrated personal package. “This whole vision of a personal computer
just popped into my head,” he said. “That night, I started to sketch out on paper what would
later become known as the Apple I.”
At first he planned to use the same microprocessor that was in the Altair, an Intel 8080.
But each of those “cost almost more than my monthly rent,” so he looked for an alternative.
He found one in the Motorola 6800, which a friend at HP was able to get for $40 apiece.
Then he discovered a chip made by MOS Technologies that was electronically the same but
cost only $20. It would make his machine affordable, but it would carry a long-term cost.
Intel’s chips ended up becoming the industry standard, which would haunt Apple when its
computers were incompatible with it.
After work each day, Wozniak would go home for a TV dinner and then return to HP to
moonlight on his computer. He spread out the parts in his cubicle, figured out their
placement, and soldered them onto his motherboard. Then he began writing the software
that would get the microprocessor to display images on the screen. Because he could not
afford to pay for computer time, he wrote the code by hand. After a couple of months he
was ready to test it. “I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters
were displayed on the screen.” It was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal
computer. “It was the first time in history,” Wozniak later said, “anyone had typed a
character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front
of them.”
Jobs was impressed. He peppered Wozniak with questions: Could the computer ever be
networked? Was it possible to add a disk for memory storage? He also began to help Woz
get components. Particularly important were the dynamic random-access memory chips.
Jobs made a few calls and was able to score some from Intel for free. “Steve is just that sort
of person,” said Wozniak. “I mean, he knew how to talk to a sales representative. I could
never have done that. I’m too shy.”
Jobs began to accompany Wozniak to Homebrew meetings, carrying the TV monitor and
helping to set things up. The meetings now attracted more than one hundred enthusiasts and
had been moved to the auditorium of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Presiding
with a pointer and a free-form manner was Lee Felsenstein, another embodiment of the
merger between the world of computing and the counterculture. He was an engineering
school dropout, a participant in the Free Speech Movement, and an antiwar activist. He had
written for the alternative newspaper Berkeley Barb and then gone back to being a
computer engineer.
Woz was usually too shy to talk in the meetings, but people would gather around his
machine afterward, and he would proudly show off his progress. Moore had tried to instill
in the Homebrew an ethos of swapping and sharing rather than commerce. “The theme of
the club,” Woz said, “was ‘Give to help others.’” It was an expression of the hacker ethic
that information should be free and all authority mistrusted. “I designed the Apple I
because I wanted to give it away for free to other people,” said Wozniak.

This was not an outlook that Bill Gates embraced. After he and Paul Allen had
completed their BASIC interpreter for the Altair, Gates was appalled that members of the
Homebrew were making copies of it and sharing it without paying him. So he wrote what
would become a famous letter to the club: “As the majority of hobbyists must be aware,
most of you steal your software. Is this fair? . . . One thing you do is prevent good software
from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? . . . I would
appreciate letters from anyone who wants to pay up.”
Steve Jobs, similarly, did not embrace the notion that Wozniak’s creations, be it a Blue
Box or a computer, wanted to be free. So he convinced Wozniak to stop giving away copies
of his schematics. Most people didn’t have time to build it themselves anyway, Jobs
argued. “Why don’t we build and sell printed circuit boards to them?” It was an example of
their symbiosis. “Every time I’d design something great, Steve would find a way to make
money for us,” said Wozniak. Wozniak admitted that he would have never thought of doing
that on his own. “It never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s
hold them in the air and sell a few.’”
Jobs worked out a plan to pay a guy he knew at Atari to draw the circuit boards and then
print up fifty or so. That would cost about $1,000, plus the fee to the designer. They could
sell them for $40 apiece and perhaps clear a profit of $700. Wozniak was dubious that they
could sell them all. “I didn’t see how we would make our money back,” he recalled. He
was already in trouble with his landlord for bouncing checks and now had to pay each
month in cash.
Jobs knew how to appeal to Wozniak. He didn’t argue that they were sure to make
money, but instead that they would have a fun adventure. “Even if we lose our money,
we’ll have a company,” said Jobs as they were driving in his Volkswagen bus. “For once in
our lives, we’ll have a company.” This was enticing to Wozniak, even more than any
prospect of getting rich. He recalled, “I was excited to think about us like that. To be two
best friends starting a company. Wow. I knew right then that I’d do it. How could I not?”
In order to raise the money they needed, Wozniak sold his HP 65 calculator for $500,
though the buyer ended up stiffing him for half of that. For his part, Jobs sold his
Volkswagen bus for $1,500. But the person who bought it came to find him two weeks later
and said the engine had broken down, and Jobs agreed to pay for half of the repairs.
Despite these little setbacks, they now had, with their own small savings thrown in, about
$1,300 in working capital, the design for a product, and a plan. They would start their own
computer company.

错误！超链接引用无效。

Now that they had decided to start a business, they needed a name. Jobs had gone for
another visit to the All One Farm, where he had been pruning the Gravenstein apple trees,
and Wozniak picked him up at the airport. On the ride down to Los Altos, they bandied
around options. They considered some typical tech words, such as Matrix, and some
neologisms, such as Executek, and some straightforward boring names, like Personal
Computers Inc. The deadline for deciding was the next day, when Jobs wanted to start

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:03

filing the papers. Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. “I was on one of my fruitarian
diets,” he explained. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited,
and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us
ahead of Atari in the phone book.” He told Wozniak that if a better name did not hit them
by the next afternoon, they would just stick with Apple. And they did.
Apple. It was a smart choice. The word instantly signaled friendliness and simplicity. It
managed to be both slightly off-beat and as normal as a slice of pie. There was a whiff of
counterculture, back-to-nature earthiness to it, yet nothing could be more American. And
the two words together—Apple Computer—provided an amusing disjuncture. “It doesn’t
quite make sense,” said Mike Markkula, who soon thereafter became the first chairman of
the new company. “So it forces your brain to dwell on it. Apple and computers, that doesn’t
go together! So it helped us grow brand awareness.”
Wozniak was not yet ready to commit full-time. He was an HP company man at heart, or
so he thought, and he wanted to keep his day job there. Jobs realized he needed an ally to
help corral Wozniak and adjudicate if there was a disagreement. So he enlisted his friend
Ron Wayne, the middle-aged engineer at Atari who had once started a slot machine
company.
Wayne knew that it would not be easy to make Wozniak quit HP, nor was it necessary
right away. Instead the key was to convince him that his computer designs would be owned
by the Apple partnership. “Woz had a parental attitude toward the circuits he developed,
and he wanted to be able to use them in other applications or let HP use them,” Wayne said.
“Jobs and I realized that these circuits would be the core of Apple. We spent two hours in a
roundtable discussion at my apartment, and I was able to get Woz to accept this.” His
argument was that a great engineer would be remembered only if he teamed with a great
marketer, and this required him to commit his designs to the partnership. Jobs was so
impressed and grateful that he offered Wayne a 10% stake in the new partnership, turning
him into a tie-breaker if Jobs and Wozniak disagreed over an issue.
“They were very different, but they made a powerful team,” said Wayne. Jobs at times
seemed to be driven by demons, while Woz seemed a naïf who was toyed with by angels.
Jobs had a bravado that helped him get things done, occasionally by manipulating people.
He could be charismatic, even mesmerizing, but also cold and brutal. Wozniak, in contrast,
was shy and socially awkward, which made him seem childishly sweet. “Woz is very bright
in some areas, but he’s almost like a savant, since he was so stunted when it came to
dealing with people he didn’t know,” said Jobs. “We were a good pair.” It helped that Jobs
was awed by Wozniak’s engineering wizardry, and Wozniak was awed by Jobs’s business
drive. “I never wanted to deal with people and step on toes, but Steve could call up people
he didn’t know and make them do things,” Wozniak recalled. “He could be rough on people
he didn’t think were smart, but he never treated me rudely, even in later years when maybe
I couldn’t answer a question as well as he wanted.”
Even after Wozniak became convinced that his new computer design should become the
property of the Apple partnership, he felt that he had to offer it first to HP, since he was
working there. “I believed it was my duty to tell HP about what I had designed while
working for them. That was the right thing and the ethical thing.” So he demonstrated it to

his managers in the spring of 1976. The senior executive at the meeting was impressed, and
seemed torn, but he finally said it was not something that HP could develop. It was a
hobbyist product, at least for now, and didn’t fit into the company’s high-quality market
segments. “I was disappointed,” Wozniak recalled, “but now I was free to enter into the
Apple partnership.”
On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak went to Wayne’s apartment in Mountain View to
draw up the partnership agreement. Wayne said he had some experience “writing in
legalese,” so he composed the three-page document himself. His “legalese” got the better
of him. Paragraphs began with various flourishes: “Be it noted herewith . . . Be it further
noted herewith . . . Now the refore [sic], in consideration of the respective assignments of
interests . . .” But the division of shares and profits was clear—45%-45%-10%—and it was
stipulated that any expenditures of more than $100 would require agreement of at least two
of the partners. Also, the responsibilities were spelled out. “Wozniak shall assume both
general and major responsibility for the conduct of Electrical Engineering; Jobs shall
assume general responsibility for Electrical Engineering and Marketing, and Wayne shall
assume major responsibility for Mechanical Engineering and Documentation.” Jobs signed
in lowercase script, Wozniak in careful cursive, and Wayne in an illegible squiggle.
Wayne then got cold feet. As Jobs started planning to borrow and spend more money, he
recalled the failure of his own company. He didn’t want to go through that again. Jobs and
Wozniak had no personal assets, but Wayne (who worried about a global financial
Armageddon) kept gold coins hidden in his mattress. Because they had structured Apple as
a simple partnership rather than a corporation, the partners would be personally liable for
the debts, and Wayne was afraid potential creditors would go after him. So he returned to
the Santa Clara County office just eleven days later with a “statement of withdrawal” and
an amendment to the partnership agreement. “By virtue of a re-assessment of
understandings by and between all parties,” it began, “Wayne shall hereinafter cease to
function in the status of ‘Partner.’” It noted that in payment for his 10% of the company, he
received $800, and shortly afterward $1,500 more.
Had he stayed on and kept his 10% stake, at the end of 2010 it would have been worth
approximately $2.6 billion. Instead he was then living alone in a small home in Pahrump,
Nevada, where he played the penny slot machines and lived off his social security check.
He later claimed he had no regrets. “I made the best decision for me at the time. Both of
them were real whirlwinds, and I knew my stomach and it wasn’t ready for such a ride.”

Jobs and Wozniak took the stage together for a presentation to the Homebrew Computer
Club shortly after they signed Apple into existence. Wozniak held up one of their newly
produced circuit boards and described the microprocessor, the eight kilobytes of memory,
and the version of BASIC he had written. He also emphasized what he called the main
thing: “a human-typable keyboard instead of a stupid, cryptic front panel with a bunch of
lights and switches.” Then it was Jobs’s turn. He pointed out that the Apple, unlike the
Altair, had all the essential components built in. Then he challenged them with a question:
How much would people be willing to pay for such a wonderful machine? He was trying to

get them to see the amazing value of the Apple. It was a rhetorical flourish he would use at
product presentations over the ensuing decades.
The audience was not very impressed. The Apple had a cut-rate microprocessor, not the
Intel 8080. But one important person stayed behind to hear more. His name was Paul
Terrell, and in 1975 he had opened a computer store, which he dubbed the Byte Shop, on
Camino Real in Menlo Park. Now, a year later, he had three stores and visions of building a
national chain. Jobs was thrilled to give him a private demo. “Take a look at this,” he said.
“You’re going to like what you see.” Terrell was impressed enough to hand Jobs and Woz
his card. “Keep in touch,” he said.
“I’m keeping in touch,” Jobs announced the next day when he walked barefoot into the
Byte Shop. He made the sale. Terrell agreed to order fifty computers. But there was a
condition: He didn’t want just $50 printed circuit boards, for which customers would then
have to buy all the chips and do the assembly. That might appeal to a few hard-core
hobbyists, but not to most customers. Instead he wanted the boards to be fully assembled.
For that he was willing to pay about $500 apiece, cash on delivery.
Jobs immediately called Wozniak at HP. “Are you sitting down?” he asked. Wozniak said
he wasn’t. Jobs nevertheless proceeded to give him the news. “I was shocked, just
completely shocked,” Wozniak recalled. “I will never forget that moment.”
To fill the order, they needed about $15,000 worth of parts. Allen Baum, the third
prankster from Homestead High, and his father agreed to loan them $5,000. Jobs tried to
borrow more from a bank in Los Altos, but the manager looked at him and, not
surprisingly, declined. He went to Haltek Supply and offered an equity stake in Apple in
return for the parts, but the owner decided they were “a couple of young, scruffy-looking
guys,” and declined. Alcorn at Atari would sell them chips only if they paid cash up front.
Finally, Jobs was able to convince the manager of Cramer Electronics to call Paul Terrell to
confirm that he had really committed to a $25,000 order. Terrell was at a conference when
he heard over a loudspeaker that he had an emergency call (Jobs had been persistent). The
Cramer manager told him that two scruffy kids had just walked in waving an order from
the Byte Shop. Was it real? Terrell confirmed that it was, and the store agreed to front Jobs
the parts on thirty-day credit.

错误！超链接引用无效。

The Jobs house in Los Altos became the assembly point for the fifty Apple I boards that
had to be delivered to the Byte Shop within thirty days, when the payment for the parts
would come due. All available hands were enlisted: Jobs and Wozniak, plus Daniel Kottke,
his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes (who had broken away from the cult she’d joined), and
Jobs’s pregnant sister, Patty. Her vacated bedroom as well as the kitchen table and garage
were commandeered as work space. Holmes, who had taken jewelry classes, was given the
task of soldering chips. “Most I did well, but I got flux on a few of them,” she recalled.
This didn’t please Jobs. “We don’t have a chip to spare,” he railed, correctly. He shifted her
to bookkeeping and paperwork at the kitchen table, and he did the soldering himself. When
they completed a board, they would hand it off to Wozniak. “I would plug each assembled

board into the TV and keyboard to test it to see if it worked,” he said. “If it did, I put it in a
box. If it didn’t, I’d figure what pin hadn’t gotten into the socket right.”
Paul Jobs suspended his sideline of repairing old cars so that the Apple team could have
the whole garage. He put in a long old workbench, hung a schematic of the computer on the
new plasterboard wall he built, and set up rows of labeled drawers for the components. He
also built a burn box bathed in heat lamps so the computer boards could be tested by
running overnight at high temperatures. When there was the occasional eruption of temper,
an occurrence not uncommon around his son, Paul would impart some of his calm. “What’s
the matter?” he would say. “You got a feather up your ass?” In return he occasionally asked
to borrow back the TV set so he could watch the end of a football game. During some of
these breaks, Jobs and Kottke would go outside and play guitar on the lawn.
Clara Jobs didn’t mind losing most of her house to piles of parts and houseguests, but
she was frustrated by her son’s increasingly quirky diets. “She would roll her eyes at his
latest eating obsessions,” recalled Holmes. “She just wanted him to be healthy, and he
would be making weird pronouncements like, ‘I’m a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves
picked by virgins in the moonlight.’”
After a dozen assembled boards had been approved by Wozniak, Jobs drove them over to
the Byte Shop. Terrell was a bit taken aback. There was no power supply, case, monitor, or
keyboard. He had expected something more finished. But Jobs stared him down, and he
agreed to take delivery and pay.
After thirty days Apple was on the verge of being profitable. “We were able to build the
boards more cheaply than we thought, because I got a good deal on parts,” Jobs recalled.
“So the fifty we sold to the Byte Shop almost paid for all the material we needed to make a
hundred boards.” Now they could make a real profit by selling the remaining fifty to their
friends and Homebrew compatriots.
Elizabeth Holmes officially became the part-time bookkeeper at $4 an hour, driving
down from San Francisco once a week and figuring out how to port Jobs’s checkbook into
a ledger. In order to make Apple seem like a real company, Jobs hired an answering service,
which would relay messages to his mother. Ron Wayne drew a logo, using the ornate line-
drawing style of Victorian illustrated fiction, that featured Newton sitting under a tree
framed by a quote from Wordsworth: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of
thought, alone.” It was a rather odd motto, one that fit Wayne’s self-image more than Apple
Computer. Perhaps a better Wordsworth line would have been the poet’s description of
those involved in the start of the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive /
But to be young was very heaven!” As Wozniak later exulted, “We were participating in the
biggest revolution that had ever happened, I thought. I was so happy to be a part of it.”
Woz had already begun thinking about the next version of the machine, so they started
calling their current model the Apple I. Jobs and Woz would drive up and down Camino
Real trying to get the electronics stores to sell it. In addition to the fifty sold by the Byte
Shop and almost fifty sold to friends, they were building another hundred for retail outlets.
Not surprisingly, they had contradictory impulses: Wozniak wanted to sell them for about
what it cost to build them, but Jobs wanted to make a serious profit. Jobs prevailed. He
picked a retail price that was about three times what it cost to build the boards and a 33%

markup over the $500 wholesale price that Terrell and other stores paid. The result was
$666.66. “I was always into repeating digits,” Wozniak said. “The phone number for my
dial-a-joke service was 255-6666.” Neither of them knew that in the Book of Revelation
666 symbolized the “number of the beast,” but they soon were faced with complaints,
especially after 666 was featured in that year’s hit movie, The Omen. (In 2010 one of the
original Apple I computers was sold at auction by Christie’s for $213,000.)
The first feature story on the new machine appeared in the July 1976 issue of Interface, a
now-defunct hobbyist magazine. Jobs and friends were still making them by hand in his
house, but the article referred to him as the director of marketing and “a former private
consultant to Atari.” It made Apple sound like a real company. “Steve communicates with
many of the computer clubs to keep his finger on the heartbeat of this young industry,” the
article reported, and it quoted him explaining, “If we can rap about their needs, feelings and
motivations, we can respond appropriately by giving them what they want.”
By this time they had other competitors, in addition to the Altair, most notably the
IMSAI 8080 and Processor Technology Corporation’s SOL-20. The latter was designed by
Lee Felsenstein and Gordon French of the Homebrew Computer Club. They all had the
chance to go on display during Labor Day weekend of 1976, at the first annual Personal
Computer Festival, held in a tired hotel on the decaying boardwalk of Atlantic City, New
Jersey. Jobs and Wozniak took a TWA flight to Philadelphia, cradling one cigar box with
the Apple I and another with the prototype for the successor that Woz was working on.
Sitting in the row behind them was Felsenstein, who looked at the Apple I and pronounced
it “thoroughly unimpressive.” Wozniak was unnerved by the conversation in the row
behind him. “We could hear them talking in advanced business talk,” he recalled, “using
businesslike acronyms we’d never heard before.”
Wozniak spent most of his time in their hotel room, tweaking his new prototype. He was
too shy to stand at the card table that Apple had been assigned near the back of the
exhibition hall. Daniel Kottke had taken the train down from Manhattan, where he was now
attending Columbia, and he manned the table while Jobs walked the floor to inspect the
competition. What he saw did not impress him. Wozniak, he felt reassured, was the best
circuit engineer, and the Apple I (and surely its successor) could beat the competition in
terms of functionality. However, the SOL-20 was better looking. It had a sleek metal case, a
keyboard, a power supply, and cables. It looked as if it had been produced by grown-ups.
The Apple I, on the other hand, appeared as scruffy as its creators.

CHAPTER SIX

THE APPLE II

Dawn of a New Age

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As Jobs walked the floor of the Personal Computer Festival, he came to the realization that
Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop had been right: Personal computers should come in a
complete package. The next Apple, he decided, needed to have a great case and a built-in
keyboard, and be integrated end to end, from the power supply to the software. “My vision
was to create the first fully packaged computer,” he recalled. “We were no longer aiming
for the handful of hobbyists who liked to assemble their own computers, who knew how to
buy transformers and keyboards. For every one of them there were a thousand people who
would want the machine to be ready to run.”
In their hotel room on that Labor Day weekend of 1976, Wozniak tinkered with the
prototype of the new machine, to be named the Apple II, that Jobs hoped would take them
to this next level. They brought the prototype out only once, late at night, to test it on the
color projection television in one of the conference rooms. Wozniak had come up with an
ingenious way to goose the machine’s chips into creating color, and he wanted to see if it
would work on the type of television that uses a projector to display on a movie-like screen.
“I figured a projector might have a different color circuitry that would choke on my color
method,” he recalled. “So I hooked up the Apple II to this projector and it worked
perfectly.” As he typed on his keyboard, colorful lines and swirls burst on the screen across
the room. The only outsider who saw this first Apple II was the hotel’s technician. He said
he had looked at all the machines, and this was the one he would be buying.

To produce the fully packaged Apple II would require significant capital, so they
considered selling the rights to a larger company. Jobs went to Al Alcorn and asked for the
chance to pitch it to Atari’s management. He set up a meeting with the company’s
president, Joe Keenan, who was a lot more conservative than Alcorn and Bushnell. “Steve
goes in to pitch him, but Joe couldn’t stand him,” Alcorn recalled. “He didn’t appreciate
Steve’s hygiene.” Jobs was barefoot, and at one point put his feet up on a desk. “Not only
are we not going to buy this thing,” Keenan shouted, “but get your feet off my desk!”
Alcorn recalled thinking, “Oh, well. There goes that possibility.”
In September Chuck Peddle of the Commodore computer company came by the Jobs
house to get a demo. “We’d opened Steve’s garage to the sunlight, and he came in wearing
a suit and a cowboy hat,” Wozniak recalled. Peddle loved the Apple II, and he arranged a
presentation for his top brass a few weeks later at Commodore headquarters. “You might
want to buy us for a few hundred thousand dollars,” Jobs said when they got there.
Wozniak was stunned by this “ridiculous” suggestion, but Jobs persisted. The Commodore
honchos called a few days later to say they had decided it would be cheaper to build their
own machine. Jobs was not upset. He had checked out Commodore and decided that its
leadership was “sleazy.” Wozniak did not rue the lost money, but his engineering
sensibilities were offended when the company came out with the Commodore PET nine
months later. “It kind of sickened me. They made a real crappy product by doing it so
quick. They could have had Apple.”
The Commodore flirtation brought to the surface a potential conflict between Jobs and
Wozniak: Were they truly equal in what they contributed to Apple and what they should get
out of it? Jerry Wozniak, who exalted the value of engineers over mere entrepreneurs and
marketers, thought most of the money should be going to his son. He confronted Jobs
personally when he came by the Wozniak house. “You don’t deserve shit,” he told Jobs.
“You haven’t produced anything.” Jobs began to cry, which was not unusual. He had never
been, and would never be, adept at containing his emotions. He told Steve Wozniak that he
was willing to call off the partnership. “If we’re not fifty-fifty,” he said to his friend, “you
can have the whole thing.” Wozniak, however, understood better than his father the
symbiosis they had. If it had not been for Jobs, he might still be handing out schematics of
his boards for free at the back of Homebrew meetings. It was Jobs who had turned his
ingenious designs into a budding business, just as he had with the Blue Box. He agreed
they should remain partners.
It was a smart call. To make the Apple II successful required more than just Wozniak’s
awesome circuit design. It would need to be packaged into a fully integrated consumer
product, and that was Jobs’s role.
He began by asking their erstwhile partner Ron Wayne to design a case. “I assumed they
had no money, so I did one that didn’t require any tooling and could be fabricated in a
standard metal shop,” he said. His design called for a Plexiglas cover attached by metal
straps and a rolltop door that slid down over the keyboard.
Jobs didn’t like it. He wanted a simple and elegant design, which he hoped would set
Apple apart from the other machines, with their clunky gray metal cases. While haunting
the appliance aisles at Macy’s, he was struck by the Cuisinart food processors and decided

that he wanted a sleek case made of light molded plastic. At a Homebrew meeting, he
offered a local consultant, Jerry Manock, $1,500 to produce such a design. Manock,
dubious about Jobs’s appearance, asked for the money up front. Jobs refused, but Manock
took the job anyway. Within weeks he had produced a simple foam-molded plastic case that
was uncluttered and exuded friendliness. Jobs was thrilled.
Next came the power supply. Digital geeks like Wozniak paid little attention to
something so analog and mundane, but Jobs decided it was a key component. In particular
he wanted—as he would his entire career—to provide power in a way that avoided the need
for a fan. Fans inside computers were not Zen-like; they distracted. He dropped by Atari to
consult with Alcorn, who knew old-fashioned electrical engineering. “Al turned me on to
this brilliant guy named Rod Holt, who was a chain-smoking Marxist who had been
through many marriages and was an expert on everything,” Jobs recalled. Like Manock and
others meeting Jobs for the first time, Holt took a look at him and was skeptical. “I’m
expensive,” Holt said. Jobs sensed he was worth it and said that cost was no problem. “He
just conned me into working,” said Holt, who ended up joining Apple full-time.
Instead of a conventional linear power supply, Holt built one like those used in
oscilloscopes. It switched the power on and off not sixty times per second, but thousands of
times; this allowed it to store the power for far less time, and thus throw off less heat. “That
switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board was,” Jobs later
said. “Rod doesn’t get a lot of credit for this in the history books, but he should. Every
computer now uses switching power supplies, and they all rip off Rod’s design.” For all of
Wozniak’s brilliance, this was not something he could have done. “I only knew vaguely
what a switching power supply was,” Woz admitted.
Jobs’s father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the
craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board
inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight
enough.
This passion for perfection led him to indulge his instinct to control. Most hackers and
hobbyists liked to customize, modify, and jack various things into their computers. To Jobs,
this was a threat to a seamless end-to-end user experience. Wozniak, a hacker at heart,
disagreed. He wanted to include eight slots on the Apple II for users to insert whatever
smaller circuit boards and peripherals they might want. Jobs insisted there be only two, for
a printer and a modem. “Usually I’m really easy to get along with, but this time I told him,
‘If that’s what you want, go get yourself another computer,’” Wozniak recalled. “I knew
that people like me would eventually come up with things to add to any computer.”
Wozniak won the argument that time, but he could sense his power waning. “I was in a
position to do that then. I wouldn’t always be.”

错误！超链接引用无效。

All of this required money. “The tooling of this plastic case was going to cost, like,
$100,000,” Jobs said. “Just to get this whole thing into production was going to be, like,
$200,000.” He went back to Nolan Bushnell, this time to get him to put in some money and

take a minority equity stake. “He asked me if I would put $50,000 in and he would give me
a third of the company,” said Bushnell. “I was so smart, I said no. It’s kind of fun to think
about that, when I’m not crying.”
Bushnell suggested that Jobs try Don Valentine, a straight-shooting former marketing
manager at National Semiconductor who had founded Sequoia Capital, a pioneering
venture capital firm. Valentine arrived at the Jobses’ garage in a Mercedes wearing a blue
suit, button-down shirt, and rep tie. His first impression was that Jobs looked and smelled
odd. “Steve was trying to be the embodiment of the counterculture. He had a wispy beard,
was very thin, and looked like Ho Chi Minh.”
Valentine, however, did not become a preeminent Silicon Valley investor by relying on
surface appearances. What bothered him more was that Jobs knew nothing about marketing
and seemed content to peddle his product to individual stores one by one. “If you want me
to finance you,” Valentine told him, “you need to have one person as a partner who
understands marketing and distribution and can write a business plan.” Jobs tended to be
either bristly or solicitous when older people offered him advice. With Valentine he was the
latter. “Send me three suggestions,” he replied. Valentine did, Jobs met them, and he
clicked with one of them, a man named Mike Markkula, who would end up playing a
critical role at Apple for the next two decades.
Markkula was only thirty-three, but he had already retired after working at Fairchild and
then Intel, where he made millions on his stock options when the chip maker went public.
He was a cautious and shrewd man, with the precise moves of someone who had been a
gymnast in high school, and he excelled at figuring out pricing strategies, distribution
networks, marketing, and finance. Despite being slightly reserved, he had a flashy side
when it came to enjoying his newly minted wealth. He built himself a house in Lake Tahoe
and later an outsize mansion in the hills of Woodside. When he showed up for his first
meeting at Jobs’s garage, he was driving not a dark Mercedes like Valentine, but a highly
polished gold Corvette convertible. “When I arrived at the garage, Woz was at the
workbench and immediately began showing off the Apple II,” Markkula recalled. “I looked
past the fact that both guys needed a haircut and was amazed by what I saw on that
workbench. You can always get a haircut.”
Jobs immediately liked Markkula. “He was short and he had been passed over for the top
marketing job at Intel, which I suspect made him want to prove himself.” He also struck
Jobs as decent and fair. “You could tell that if he could screw you, he wouldn’t. He had a
real moral sense to him.” Wozniak was equally impressed. “I thought he was the nicest
person ever,” he recalled. “Better still, he actually liked what we had!”
Markkula proposed to Jobs that they write a business plan together. “If it comes out well,
I’ll invest,” Markkula said, “and if not, you’ve got a few weeks of my time for free.” Jobs
began going to Markkula’s house in the evenings, kicking around projections and talking
through the night. “We made a lot of assumptions, such as about how many houses would
have a personal computer, and there were nights we were up until 4 a.m.,” Jobs recalled.
Markkula ended up writing most of the plan. “Steve would say, ‘I will bring you this
section next time,’ but he usually didn’t deliver on time, so I ended up doing it.”

Markkula’s plan envisioned ways of getting beyond the hobbyist market. “He talked
about introducing the computer to regular people in regular homes, doing things like
keeping track of your favorite recipes or balancing your checkbook,” Wozniak recalled.
Markkula made a wild prediction: “We’re going to be a Fortune 500 company in two
years,” he said. “This is the start of an industry. It happens once in a decade.” It would take
Apple seven years to break into the Fortune 500, but the spirit of Markkula’s prediction
turned out to be true.
Markkula offered to guarantee a line of credit of up to $250,000 in return for being made
a one-third equity participant. Apple would incorporate, and he along with Jobs and
Wozniak would each own 26% of the stock. The rest would be reserved to attract future
investors. The three met in the cabana by Markkula’s swimming pool and sealed the deal.
“I thought it was unlikely that Mike would ever see that $250,000 again, and I was
impressed that he was willing to risk it,” Jobs recalled.
Now it was necessary to convince Wozniak to come on board full-time. “Why can’t I
keep doing this on the side and just have HP as my secure job for life?” he asked. Markkula
said that wouldn’t work, and he gave Wozniak a deadline of a few days to decide. “I felt
very insecure in starting a company where I would be expected to push people around and
control what they did,” Wozniak recalled. “I’d decided long ago that I would never become
someone authoritative.” So he went to Markkula’s cabana and announced that he was not
leaving HP.
Markkula shrugged and said okay. But Jobs got very upset. He cajoled Wozniak; he got
friends to try to convince him; he cried, yelled, and threw a couple of fits. He even went to
Wozniak’s parents’ house, burst into tears, and asked Jerry for help. By this point
Wozniak’s father had realized there was real money to be made by capitalizing on the
Apple II, and he joined forces on Jobs’s behalf. “I started getting phone calls at work and
home from my dad, my mom, my brother, and various friends,” Wozniak recalled. “Every
one of them told me I’d made the wrong decision.” None of that worked. Then Allen
Baum, their Buck Fry Club mate at Homestead High, called. “You really ought to go ahead
and do it,” he said. He argued that if he joined Apple full-time, he would not have to go
into management or give up being an engineer. “That was exactly what I needed to hear,”
Wozniak later said. “I could stay at the bottom of the organization chart, as an engineer.”
He called Jobs and declared that he was now ready to come on board.
On January 3, 1977, the new corporation, the Apple Computer Co., was officially
created, and it bought out the old partnership that had been formed by Jobs and Wozniak
nine months earlier. Few people noticed. That month the Homebrew surveyed its members
and found that, of the 181 who owned personal computers, only six owned an Apple. Jobs
was convinced, however, that the Apple II would change that.
Markkula would become a father figure to Jobs. Like Jobs’s adoptive father, he would
indulge Jobs’s strong will, and like his biological father, he would end up abandoning him.
“Markkula was as much a father-son relationship as Steve ever had,” said the venture
capitalist Arthur Rock. He began to teach Jobs about marketing and sales. “Mike really
took me under his wing,” Jobs recalled. “His values were much aligned with mine. He

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:03

emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal
should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”
Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing
Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with
the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other
company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide
to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally
important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an
opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge
a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most
useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as
slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired
qualities.”
For the rest of his career, Jobs would understand the needs and desires of customers
better than any other business leader, he would focus on a handful of core products, and he
would care, sometimes obsessively, about marketing and image and even the details of
packaging. “When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience
to set the tone for how you perceive the product,” he said. “Mike taught me that.”

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The first step in this process was convincing the Valley’s premier publicist, Regis
McKenna, to take on Apple as a client. McKenna was from a large working-class
Pittsburgh family, and bred into his bones was a steeliness that he cloaked with charm. A
college dropout, he had worked for Fairchild and National Semiconductor before starting
his own PR and advertising firm. His two specialties were doling out exclusive interviews
with his clients to journalists he had cultivated and coming up with memorable ad
campaigns that created brand awareness for products such as microchips. One of these was
a series of colorful magazine ads for Intel that featured racing cars and poker chips rather
than the usual dull performance charts. These caught Jobs’s eye. He called Intel and asked
who created them. “Regis McKenna,” he was told. “I asked them what Regis McKenna
was,” Jobs recalled, “and they told me he was a person.” When Jobs phoned, he couldn’t
get through to McKenna. Instead he was transferred to Frank Burge, an account executive,
who tried to put him off. Jobs called back almost every day.
Burge finally agreed to drive out to the Jobs garage. “Holy Christ, this guy is going to be
something else,” he recalled thinking. “What’s the least amount of time I can spend with
this clown without being rude.” Then, when he was confronted with the unwashed and
shaggy Jobs, two things hit him: “First, he was an incredibly smart young man. Second, I
didn’t understand a fiftieth of what he was talking about.”
So Jobs and Wozniak were invited to have a meeting with, as his impish business cards
read, “Regis McKenna, himself.” This time it was the normally shy Wozniak who became
prickly. McKenna glanced at an article Wozniak was writing about Apple and suggested
that it was too technical and needed to be livened up. “I don’t want any PR man touching

my copy,” Wozniak snapped. McKenna suggested it was time for them to leave his office.
“But Steve called me back right away and said he wanted to meet again,” McKenna
recalled. “This time he came without Woz, and we hit it off.”
McKenna had his team get to work on brochures for the Apple II. The first thing they did
was to replace Ron Wayne’s ornate Victorian woodcut-style logo, which ran counter to
McKenna’s colorful and playful advertising style. So an art director, Rob Janoff, was
assigned to create a new one. “Don’t make it cute,” Jobs ordered. Janoff came up with a
simple apple shape in two versions, one whole and the other with a bite taken out of it. The
first looked too much like a cherry, so Jobs chose the one with a bite. He also picked a
version that was striped in six colors, with psychedelic hues sandwiched between whole-
earth green and sky blue, even though that made printing the logo significantly more
expensive. Atop the brochure McKenna put a maxim, often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci,
that would become the defining precept of Jobs’s design philosophy: “Simplicity is the
ultimate sophistication.”

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The introduction of the Apple II was scheduled to coincide with the first West Coast
Computer Faire, to be held in April 1977 in San Francisco, organized by a Homebrew
stalwart, Jim Warren. Jobs signed Apple up for a booth as soon as he got the information
packet. He wanted to secure a location right at the front of the hall as a dramatic way to
launch the Apple II, and so he shocked Wozniak by paying $5,000 in advance. “Steve
decided that this was our big launch,” said Wozniak. “We would show the world we had a
great machine and a great company.”
It was an application of Markkula’s admonition that it was important to “impute” your
greatness by making a memorable impression on people, especially when launching a new
product. That was reflected in the care that Jobs took with Apple’s display area. Other
exhibitors had card tables and poster board signs. Apple had a counter draped in black
velvet and a large pane of backlit Plexiglas with Janoff’s new logo. They put on display the
only three Apple IIs that had been finished, but empty boxes were piled up to give the
impression that there were many more on hand.
Jobs was furious that the computer cases had arrived with tiny blemishes on them, so he
had his handful of employees sand and polish them. The imputing even extended to
gussying up Jobs and Wozniak. Markkula sent them to a San Francisco tailor for three-
piece suits, which looked faintly ridiculous on them, like tuxes on teenagers. “Markkula
explained how we would all have to dress up nicely, how we should appear and look, how
we should act,” Wozniak recalled.
It was worth the effort. The Apple II looked solid yet friendly in its sleek beige case,
unlike the intimidating metal-clad machines and naked boards on the other tables. Apple
got three hundred orders at the show, and Jobs met a Japanese textile maker, Mizushima
Satoshi, who became Apple’s first dealer in Japan.
The fancy clothes and Markkula’s injunctions could not, however, stop the irrepressible
Wozniak from playing some practical jokes. One program that he displayed tried to guess

people’s nationality from their last name and then produced the relevant ethnic jokes. He
also created and distributed a hoax brochure for a new computer called the “Zaltair,” with
all sorts of fake ad-copy superlatives like “Imagine a car with five wheels.” Jobs briefly fell
for the joke and even took pride that the Apple II stacked up well against the Zaltair in the
comparison chart. He didn’t realize who had pulled the prank until eight years later, when
Woz gave him a framed copy of the brochure as a birthday gift.

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Apple was now a real company, with a dozen employees, a line of credit, and the daily
pressures that can come from customers and suppliers. It had even moved out of the Jobses’
garage, finally, into a rented office on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, about a mile
from where Jobs and Wozniak went to high school.
Jobs did not wear his growing responsibilities gracefully. He had always been
temperamental and bratty. At Atari his behavior had caused him to be banished to the night
shift, but at Apple that was not possible. “He became increasingly tyrannical and sharp in
his criticism,” according to Markkula. “He would tell people, ‘That design looks like shit.’”
He was particularly rough on Wozniak’s young programmers, Randy Wigginton and Chris
Espinosa. “Steve would come in, take a quick look at what I had done, and tell me it was
shit without having any idea what it was or why I had done it,” said Wigginton, who was
just out of high school.
There was also the issue of his hygiene. He was still convinced, against all evidence, that
his vegan diets meant that he didn’t need to use a deodorant or take regular showers. “We
would have to literally put him out the door and tell him to go take a shower,” said
Markkula. “At meetings we had to look at his dirty feet.” Sometimes, to relieve stress, he
would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues.
Markkula was averse to confrontation, so he decided to bring in a president, Mike Scott,
to keep a tighter rein on Jobs. Markkula and Scott had joined Fairchild on the same day in
1967, had adjoining offices, and shared the same birthday, which they celebrated together
each year. At their birthday lunch in February 1977, when Scott was turning thirty-two,
Markkula invited him to become Apple’s new president.
On paper he looked like a great choice. He was running a manufacturing line for
National Semiconductor, and he had the advantage of being a manager who fully
understood engineering. In person, however, he had some quirks. He was overweight,
afflicted with tics and health problems, and so tightly wound that he wandered the halls
with clenched fists. He also could be argumentative. In dealing with Jobs, that could be
good or bad.
Wozniak quickly embraced the idea of hiring Scott. Like Markkula, he hated dealing
with the conflicts that Jobs engendered. Jobs, not surprisingly, had more conflicted
emotions. “I was only twenty-two, and I knew I wasn’t ready to run a real company,” he
said. “But Apple was my baby, and I didn’t want to give it up.” Relinquishing any control
was agonizing to him. He wrestled with the issue over long lunches at Bob’s Big Boy

hamburgers (Woz’s favorite place) and at the Good Earth restaurant (Jobs’s). He finally
acquiesced, reluctantly.
Mike Scott, called “Scotty” to distinguish him from Mike Markkula, had one primary
duty: managing Jobs. This was usually accomplished by Jobs’s preferred mode of meeting,
which was taking a walk together. “My very first walk was to tell him to bathe more often,”
Scott recalled. “He said that in exchange I had to read his fruitarian diet book and consider
it as a way to lose weight.” Scott never adopted the diet or lost much weight, and Jobs
made only minor modifications to his hygiene. “Steve was adamant that he bathed once a
week, and that was adequate as long as he was eating a fruitarian diet.”
Jobs’s desire for control and disdain for authority was destined to be a problem with the
man who was brought in to be his regent, especially when Jobs discovered that Scott was
one of the only people he had yet encountered who would not bend to his will. “The
question between Steve and me was who could be most stubborn, and I was pretty good at
that,” Scott said. “He needed to be sat on, and he sure didn’t like that.” Jobs later said, “I
never yelled at anyone more than I yelled at Scotty.”
An early showdown came over employee badge numbers. Scott assigned #1 to Wozniak
and #2 to Jobs. Not surprisingly, Jobs demanded to be #1. “I wouldn’t let him have it,
because that would stoke his ego even more,” said Scott. Jobs threw a tantrum, even cried.
Finally, he proposed a solution. He would have badge #0. Scott relented, at least for the
purpose of the badge, but the Bank of America required a positive integer for its payroll
system and Jobs’s remained #2.
There was a more fundamental disagreement that went beyond personal petulance. Jay
Elliot, who was hired by Jobs after a chance meeting in a restaurant, noted Jobs’s salient
trait: “His obsession is a passion for the product, a passion for product perfection.” Mike
Scott, on the other hand, never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over
pragmatism. The design of the Apple II case was one of many examples. The Pantone
company, which Apple used to specify colors for its plastic, had more than two thousand
shades of beige. “None of them were good enough for Steve,” Scott marveled. “He wanted
to create a different shade, and I had to stop him.” When the time came to tweak the design
of the case, Jobs spent days agonizing over just how rounded the corners should be. “I
didn’t care how rounded they were,” said Scott, “I just wanted it decided.” Another dispute
was over engineering benches. Scott wanted a standard gray; Jobs insisted on special-order
benches that were pure white. All of this finally led to a showdown in front of Markkula
about whether Jobs or Scott had the power to sign purchase orders; Markkula sided with
Scott. Jobs also insisted that Apple be different in how it treated customers. He wanted a
one-year warranty to come with the Apple II. This flabbergasted Scott; the usual warranty
was ninety days. Again Jobs dissolved into tears during one of their arguments over the
issue. They walked around the parking lot to calm down, and Scott decided to relent on this
one.
Wozniak began to rankle at Jobs’s style. “Steve was too tough on people. I wanted our
company to feel like a family where we all had fun and shared whatever we made.” Jobs,
for his part, felt that Wozniak simply would not grow up. “He was very childlike. He did a
great version of BASIC, but then never could buckle down and write the floating-point

BASIC we needed, so we ended up later having to make a deal with Microsoft. He was just
too unfocused.”
But for the time being the personality clashes were manageable, mainly because the
company was doing so well. Ben Rosen, the analyst whose newsletters shaped the opinions
of the tech world, became an enthusiastic proselytizer for the Apple II. An independent
developer came up with the first spreadsheet and personal finance program for personal
computers, VisiCalc, and for a while it was available only on the Apple II, turning the
computer into something that businesses and families could justify buying. The company
began attracting influential new investors. The pioneering venture capitalist Arthur Rock
had initially been unimpressed when Markkula sent Jobs to see him. “He looked as if he
had just come back from seeing that guru he had in India,” Rock recalled, “and he kind of
smelled that way too.” But after Rock scoped out the Apple II, he made an investment and
joined the board.
The Apple II would be marketed, in various models, for the next sixteen years, with
close to six million sold. More than any other machine, it launched the personal computer
industry. Wozniak deserves the historic credit for the design of its awe-inspiring circuit
board and related operating software, which was one of the era’s great feats of solo
invention. But Jobs was the one who integrated Wozniak’s boards into a friendly package,
from the power supply to the sleek case. He also created the company that sprang up
around Wozniak’s machines. As Regis McKenna later said, “Woz designed a great
machine, but it would be sitting in hobby shops today were it not for Steve Jobs.”
Nevertheless most people considered the Apple II to be Wozniak’s creation. That would
spur Jobs to pursue the next great advance, one that he could call his own.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHRISANN AND LISA

He Who Is Abandoned . . .

Ever since they had lived together in a cabin during the summer after he graduated from
high school, Chrisann Brennan had woven in and out of Jobs’s life. When he returned from
India in 1974, they spent time together at Robert Friedland’s farm. “Steve invited me up
there, and we were just young and easy and free,” she recalled. “There was an energy there
that went to my heart.”

When they moved back to Los Altos, their relationship drifted into being, for the most
part, merely friendly. He lived at home and worked at Atari; she had a small apartment and
spent a lot of time at Kobun Chino’s Zen center. By early 1975 she had begun a
relationship with a mutual friend, Greg Calhoun. “She was with Greg, but went back to
Steve occasionally,” according to Elizabeth Holmes. “That was pretty much the way it was
with all of us. We were sort of shifting back and forth; it was the seventies, after all.”
Calhoun had been at Reed with Jobs, Friedland, Kottke, and Holmes. Like the others, he
became deeply involved with Eastern spirituality, dropped out of Reed, and found his way
to Friedland’s farm. There he moved into an eight-by twenty-foot chicken coop that he
converted into a little house by raising it onto cinderblocks and building a sleeping loft
inside. In the spring of 1975 Brennan moved in with him, and the next year they decided to
make their own pilgrimage to India. Jobs advised Calhoun not to take Brennan with him,
saying that she would interfere with his spiritual quest, but they went together anyway. “I
was just so impressed by what happened to Steve on his trip to India that I wanted to go
there,” she said.
Theirs was a serious trip, beginning in March 1976 and lasting almost a year. At one
point they ran out of money, so Calhoun hitchhiked to Iran to teach English in Tehran.
Brennan stayed in India, and when Calhoun’s teaching stint was over they hitchhiked to
meet each other in the middle, in Afghanistan. The world was a very different place back
then.
After a while their relationship frayed, and they returned from India separately. By the
summer of 1977 Brennan had moved back to Los Altos, where she lived for a while in a
tent on the grounds of Kobun Chino’s Zen center. By this time Jobs had moved out of his
parents’ house and was renting a $600 per month suburban ranch house in Cupertino with
Daniel Kottke. It was an odd scene of free-spirited hippie types living in a tract house they
dubbed Rancho Suburbia. “It was a four-bedroom house, and we occasionally rented one of
the bedrooms out to all sorts of crazy people, including a stripper for a while,” recalled
Jobs. Kottke couldn’t quite figure out why Jobs had not just gotten his own house, which
he could have afforded by then. “I think he just wanted to have a roommate,” Kottke
speculated.
Even though her relationship with Jobs was sporadic, Brennan soon moved in as well.
This made for a set of living arrangements worthy of a French farce. The house had two big
bedrooms and two tiny ones. Jobs, not surprisingly, commandeered the largest of them, and
Brennan (who was not really living with him) moved into the other big bedroom. “The two
middle rooms were like for babies, and I didn’t want either of them, so I moved into the
living room and slept on a foam pad,” said Kottke. They turned one of the small rooms into
space for meditating and dropping acid, like the attic space they had used at Reed. It was
filled with foam packing material from Apple boxes. “Neighborhood kids used to come
over and we would toss them in it and it was great fun,” said Kottke, “but then Chrisann
brought home some cats who peed in the foam, and then we had to get rid of it.”
Living in the house at times rekindled the physical relationship between Brennan and
Jobs, and within a few months she was pregnant. “Steve and I were in and out of a
relationship for five years before I got pregnant,” she said. “We didn’t know how to be

together and we didn’t know how to be apart.” When Greg Calhoun hitchhiked from
Colorado to visit them on Thanksgiving 1977, Brennan told him the news: “Steve and I got
back together, and now I’m pregnant, but now we are on again and off again, and I don’t
know what to do.”
Calhoun noticed that Jobs was disconnected from the whole situation. He even tried to
convince Calhoun to stay with them and come to work at Apple. “Steve was just not
dealing with Chrisann or the pregnancy,” he recalled. “He could be very engaged with you
in one moment, but then very disengaged. There was a side to him that was frighteningly
cold.”
When Jobs did not want to deal with a distraction, he sometimes just ignored it, as if he
could will it out of existence. At times he was able to distort reality not just for others but
even for himself. In the case of Brennan’s pregnancy, he simply shut it out of his mind.
When confronted, he would deny that he knew he was the father, even though he admitted
that he had been sleeping with her. “I wasn’t sure it was my kid, because I was pretty sure I
wasn’t the only one she was sleeping with,” he told me later. “She and I were not really
even going out when she got pregnant. She just had a room in our house.” Brennan had no
doubt that Jobs was the father. She had not been involved with Greg or any other men at the
time.
Was he lying to himself, or did he not know that he was the father? “I just think he
couldn’t access that part of his brain or the idea of being responsible,” Kottke said.
Elizabeth Holmes agreed: “He considered the option of parenthood and considered the
option of not being a parent, and he decided to believe the latter. He had other plans for his
life.”
There was no discussion of marriage. “I knew that she was not the person I wanted to
marry, and we would never be happy, and it wouldn’t last long,” Jobs later said. “I was all
in favor of her getting an abortion, but she didn’t know what to do. She thought about it
repeatedly and decided not to, or I don’t know that she ever really decided—I think time
just decided for her.” Brennan told me that it was her choice to have the baby: “He said he
was fine with an abortion but never pushed for it.” Interestingly, given his own background,
he was adamantly against one option. “He strongly discouraged me putting the child up for
adoption,” she said.
There was a disturbing irony. Jobs and Brennan were both twenty-three, the same age
that Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali had been when they had Jobs. He had not yet
tracked down his biological parents, but his adoptive parents had told him some of their
tale. “I didn’t know then about this coincidence of our ages, so it didn’t affect my
discussions with Chrisann,” he later said. He dismissed the notion that he was somehow
following his biological father’s pattern of getting his girlfriend pregnant when he was
twenty-three, but he did admit that the ironic resonance gave him pause. “When I did find
out that he was twenty-three when he got Joanne pregnant with me, I thought, whoa!”
The relationship between Jobs and Brennan quickly deteriorated. “Chrisann would get
into this kind of victim mode, when she would say that Steve and I were ganging up on
her,” Kottke recalled. “Steve would just laugh and not take her seriously.” Brennan was
not, as even she later admitted, very emotionally stable. She began breaking plates,

throwing things, trashing the house, and writing obscene words in charcoal on the wall. She
said that Jobs kept provoking her with his callousness: “He was an enlightened being who
was cruel.” Kottke was caught in the middle. “Daniel didn’t have that DNA of ruthlessness,
so he was a bit flipped by Steve’s behavior,” according to Brennan. “He would go from
‘Steve’s not treating you right’ to laughing at me with Steve.”
Robert Friedland came to her rescue. “He heard that I was pregnant, and he said to come
on up to the farm to have the baby,” she recalled. “So I did.” Elizabeth Holmes and other
friends were still living there, and they found an Oregon midwife to help with the delivery.
On May 17, 1978, Brennan gave birth to a baby girl. Three days later Jobs flew up to be
with them and help name the new baby. The practice on the commune was to give children
Eastern spiritual names, but Jobs insisted that she had been born in America and ought to
have a name that fit. Brennan agreed. They named her Lisa Nicole Brennan, not giving her
the last name Jobs. And then he left to go back to work at Apple. “He didn’t want to have
anything to do with her or with me,” said Brennan.
She and Lisa moved to a tiny, dilapidated house in back of a home in Menlo Park. They
lived on welfare because Brennan did not feel up to suing for child support. Finally, the
County of San Mateo sued Jobs to try to prove paternity and get him to take financial
responsibility. At first Jobs was determined to fight the case. His lawyers wanted Kottke to
testify that he had never seen them in bed together, and they tried to line up evidence that
Brennan had been sleeping with other men. “At one point I yelled at Steve on the phone,
‘You know that is not true,’” Brennan recalled. “He was going to drag me through court
with a little baby and try to prove I was a whore and that anyone could have been the father
of that baby.”
A year after Lisa was born, Jobs agreed to take a paternity test. Brennan’s family was
surprised, but Jobs knew that Apple would soon be going public and he decided it was best
to get the issue resolved. DNA tests were new, and the one that Jobs took was done at
UCLA. “I had read about DNA testing, and I was happy to do it to get things settled,” he
said. The results were pretty dispositive. “Probability of paternity . . . is 94.41%,” the report
read. The California courts ordered Jobs to start paying $385 a month in child support, sign
an agreement admitting paternity, and reimburse the county $5,856 in back welfare
payments. He was given visitation rights but for a long time didn’t exercise them.
Even then Jobs continued at times to warp the reality around him. “He finally told us on
the board,” Arthur Rock recalled, “but he kept insisting that there was a large probability
that he wasn’t the father. He was delusional.” He told a reporter for Time, Michael Moritz,
that when you analyzed the statistics, it was clear that “28% of the male population in the
United States could be the father.” It was not only a false claim but an odd one. Worse yet,
when Chrisann Brennan later heard what he said, she mistakenly thought that Jobs was
hyperbolically claiming that she might have slept with 28% of the men in the United States.
“He was trying to paint me as a slut or a whore,” she recalled. “He spun the whore image
onto me in order to not take responsibility.”
Years later Jobs was remorseful for the way he behaved, one of the few times in his life
he admitted as much:

I wish I had handled it differently. I could not see myself as a father then, so I didn’t
face up to it. But when the test results showed she was my daughter, it’s not true that I
doubted it. I agreed to support her until she was eighteen and give some money to Chrisann
as well. I found a house in Palo Alto and fixed it up and let them live there rent-free. Her
mother found her great schools which I paid for. I tried to do the right thing. But if I could
do it over, I would do a better job.

Once the case was resolved, Jobs began to move on with his life—maturing in some
respects, though not all. He put aside drugs, eased away from being a strict vegan, and cut
back the time he spent on Zen retreats. He began getting stylish haircuts and buying suits
and shirts from the upscale San Francisco haberdashery Wilkes Bashford. And he settled
into a serious relationship with one of Regis McKenna’s employees, a beautiful Polynesian-
Polish woman named Barbara Jasinski.
There was still, to be sure, a childlike rebellious streak in him. He, Jasinski, and Kottke
liked to go skinny-dipping in Felt Lake on the edge of Interstate 280 near Stanford, and he
bought a 1966 BMW R60/2 motorcycle that he adorned with orange tassels on the
handlebars. He could also still be bratty. He belittled waitresses and frequently returned
food with the proclamation that it was “garbage.” At the company’s first Halloween party,
in 1979, he dressed in robes as Jesus Christ, an act of semi-ironic self-awareness that he
considered funny but that caused a lot of eye rolling. Even his initial stirrings of
domesticity had some quirks. He bought a proper house in the Los Gatos hills, which he
adorned with a Maxfield Parrish painting, a Braun coffeemaker, and Henckels knives. But
because he was so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings, it remained mostly
barren, lacking beds or chairs or couches. Instead his bedroom had a mattress in the center,
framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji on the walls, and an Apple II on the floor.

CHAPTER EIGHT

XEROX AND LISA

Graphical User Interfaces

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:05

The Apple II took the company from Jobs’s garage to the pinnacle of a new industry. Its
sales rose dramatically, from 2,500 units in 1977 to 210,000 in 1981. But Jobs was restless.

The Apple II could not remain successful forever, and he knew that, no matter how much
he had done to package it, from power cord to case, it would always be seen as Wozniak’s
masterpiece. He needed his own machine. More than that, he wanted a product that would,
in his words, make a dent in the universe.
At first he hoped that the Apple III would play that role. It would have more memory, the
screen would display eighty characters across rather than forty, and it would handle
uppercase and lowercase letters. Indulging his passion for industrial design, Jobs decreed
the size and shape of the external case, and he refused to let anyone alter it, even as
committees of engineers added more components to the circuit boards. The result was
piggybacked boards with poor connectors that frequently failed. When the Apple III began
shipping in May 1980, it flopped. Randy Wigginton, one of the engineers, summed it up:
“The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a group orgy, and later everybody
had this bad headache, and there’s this bastard child, and everyone says, ‘It’s not mine.’”
By then Jobs had distanced himself from the Apple III and was thrashing about for ways
to produce something more radically different. At first he flirted with the idea of
touchscreens, but he found himself frustrated. At one demonstration of the technology, he
arrived late, fidgeted awhile, then abruptly cut off the engineers in the middle of their
presentation with a brusque “Thank you.” They were confused. “Would you like us to
leave?” one asked. Jobs said yes, then berated his colleagues for wasting his time.
Then he and Apple hired two engineers from Hewlett-Packard to conceive a totally new
computer. The name Jobs chose for it would have caused even the most jaded psychiatrist
to do a double take: the Lisa. Other computers had been named after daughters of their
designers, but Lisa was a daughter Jobs had abandoned and had not yet fully admitted was
his. “Maybe he was doing it out of guilt,” said Andrea Cunningham, who worked at Regis
McKenna on public relations for the project. “We had to come up with an acronym so that
we could claim it was not named after Lisa the child.” The one they reverse-engineered was
“local integrated systems architecture,” and despite being meaningless it became the
official explanation for the name. Among the engineers it was referred to as “Lisa: invented
stupid acronym.” Years later, when I asked about the name, Jobs admitted simply,
“Obviously it was named for my daughter.”
The Lisa was conceived as a $2,000 machine based on a sixteen-bit microprocessor,
rather than the eight-bit one used in the Apple II. Without the wizardry of Wozniak, who
was still working quietly on the Apple II, the engineers began producing a straightforward
computer with a conventional text display, unable to push the powerful microprocessor to
do much exciting stuff. Jobs began to grow impatient with how boring it was turning out to
be.
There was, however, one programmer who was infusing the project with some life: Bill
Atkinson. He was a doctoral student in neuroscience who had experimented with his fair
share of acid. When he was asked to come work for Apple, he declined. But then Apple
sent him a nonrefundable plane ticket, and he decided to use it and let Jobs try to persuade
him. “We are inventing the future,” Jobs told him at the end of a three-hour pitch. “Think
about surfing on the front edge of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-

paddling at the tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun. Come
down here and make a dent in the universe.” Atkinson did.
With his shaggy hair and droopy moustache that did not hide the animation in his face,
Atkinson had some of Woz’s ingenuity along with Jobs’s passion for awesome products.
His first job was to develop a program to track a stock portfolio by auto-dialing the Dow
Jones service, getting quotes, then hanging up. “I had to create it fast because there was a
magazine ad for the Apple II showing a hubby at the kitchen table looking at an Apple
screen filled with graphs of stock prices, and his wife is beaming at him—but there wasn’t
such a program, so I had to create one.” Next he created for the Apple II a version of
Pascal, a high-level programming language. Jobs had resisted, thinking that BASIC was all
the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson, “Since you’re so passionate about it, I’ll give
you six days to prove me wrong.” He did, and Jobs respected him ever after.
By the fall of 1979 Apple was breeding three ponies to be potential successors to the
Apple II workhorse. There was the ill-fated Apple III. There was the Lisa project, which
was beginning to disappoint Jobs. And somewhere off Jobs’s radar screen, at least for the
moment, there was a small skunkworks project for a low-cost machine that was being
developed by a colorful employee named Jef Raskin, a former professor who had taught
Bill Atkinson. Raskin’s goal was to make an inexpensive “computer for the masses” that
would be like an appliance—a self-contained unit with computer, keyboard, monitor, and
software all together—and have a graphical interface. He tried to turn his colleagues at
Apple on to a cutting-edge research center, right in Palo Alto, that was pioneering such
ideas.

错误！超链接引用无效。

The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been
established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely located, for
better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox
corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay,
who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to
invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”
Kay pushed the vision of a small personal computer, dubbed the “Dynabook,” that would
be easy enough for children to use. So Xerox PARC’s engineers began to develop user-
friendly graphics that could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made
computer screens intimidating. The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop. The
screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point
and click on the one you wanted to use.
This graphical user interface—or GUI, pronounced “gooey”—was facilitated by another
concept pioneered at Xerox PARC: bitmapping. Until then, most computers were character-
based. You would type a character on a keyboard, and the computer would generate that
character on the screen, usually in glowing greenish phosphor against a dark background.
Since there were a limited number of letters, numerals, and symbols, it didn’t take a whole
lot of computer code or processing power to accomplish this. In a bitmap system, on the

other hand, each and every pixel on the screen is controlled by bits in the computer’s
memory. To render something on the screen, such as a letter, the computer has to tell each
pixel to be light or dark or, in the case of color displays, what color to be. This uses a lot of
computing power, but it permits gorgeous graphics, fonts, and gee-whiz screen displays.
Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became features of Xerox PARC’s prototype
computers, such as the Alto, and its object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk. Jef
Raskin decided that these features were the future of computing. So he began urging Jobs
and other Apple colleagues to go check out Xerox PARC.
Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as an insufferable theorist or, to use Jobs’s
own more precise terminology, “a shithead who sucks.” So Raskin enlisted his friend
Atkinson, who fell on the other side of Jobs’s shithead/genius division of the world, to
convince Jobs to take an interest in what was happening at Xerox PARC. What Raskin
didn’t know was that Jobs was working on a more complex deal. Xerox’s venture capital
division wanted to be part of the second round of Apple financing during the summer of
1979. Jobs made an offer: “I will let you invest a million dollars in Apple if you will open
the kimono at PARC.” Xerox accepted. It agreed to show Apple its new technology and in
return got to buy 100,000 shares at about $10 each.
By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox’s $1 million worth of shares were
worth $17.6 million. But Apple got the better end of the bargain. Jobs and his colleagues
went to see Xerox PARC’s technology in December 1979 and, when Jobs realized he
hadn’t been shown enough, got an even fuller demonstration a few days later. Larry Tesler
was one of the Xerox scientists called upon to do the briefings, and he was thrilled to show
off the work that his bosses back east had never seemed to appreciate. But the other briefer,
Adele Goldberg, was appalled that her company seemed willing to give away its crown
jewels. “It was incredibly stupid, completely nuts, and I fought to prevent giving Jobs much
of anything,” she recalled.
Goldberg got her way at the first briefing. Jobs, Raskin, and the Lisa team leader John
Couch were ushered into the main lobby, where a Xerox Alto had been set up. “It was a
very controlled show of a few applications, primarily a word-processing one,” Goldberg
said. Jobs wasn’t satisfied, and he called Xerox headquarters demanding more.
So he was invited back a few days later, and this time he brought a larger team that
included Bill Atkinson and Bruce Horn, an Apple programmer who had worked at Xerox
PARC. They both knew what to look for. “When I arrived at work, there was a lot of
commotion, and I was told that Jobs and a bunch of his programmers were in the
conference room,” said Goldberg. One of her engineers was trying to keep them entertained
with more displays of the word-processing program. But Jobs was growing impatient.
“Let’s stop this bullshit!” he kept shouting. So the Xerox folks huddled privately and
decided to open the kimono a bit more, but only slowly. They agreed that Tesler could
show off Smalltalk, the programming language, but he would demonstrate only what was
known as the “unclassified” version. “It will dazzle [Jobs] and he’ll never know he didn’t
get the confidential disclosure,” the head of the team told Goldberg.
They were wrong. Atkinson and others had read some of the papers published by Xerox
PARC, so they knew they were not getting a full description. Jobs phoned the head of the

Xerox venture capital division to complain; a call immediately came back from corporate
headquarters in Connecticut decreeing that Jobs and his group should be shown everything.
Goldberg stormed out in a rage.
When Tesler finally showed them what was truly under the hood, the Apple folks were
astonished. Atkinson stared at the screen, examining each pixel so closely that Tesler could
feel the breath on his neck. Jobs bounced around and waved his arms excitedly. “He was
hopping around so much I don’t know how he actually saw most of the demo, but he did,
because he kept asking questions,” Tesler recalled. “He was the exclamation point for every
step I showed.” Jobs kept saying that he couldn’t believe that Xerox had not
commercialized the technology. “You’re sitting on a gold mine,” he shouted. “I can’t
believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.”
The Smalltalk demonstration showed three amazing features. One was how computers
could be networked; the second was how object-oriented programming worked. But Jobs
and his team paid little attention to these attributes because they were so amazed by the
third feature, the graphical interface that was made possible by a bitmapped screen. “It was
like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” Jobs recalled. “I could see what the future of
computing was destined to be.”
When the Xerox PARC meeting ended after more than two hours, Jobs drove Bill
Atkinson back to the Apple office in Cupertino. He was speeding, and so were his mind
and mouth. “This is it!” he shouted, emphasizing each word. “We’ve got to do it!” It was
the breakthrough he had been looking for: bringing computers to the people, with the
cheerful but affordable design of an Eichler home and the ease of use of a sleek kitchen
appliance.
“How long would this take to implement?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Atkinson replied. “Maybe six months.” It was a wildly optimistic
assessment, but also a motivating one.

错误！超链接引用无效。

The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the
chronicles of industry. Jobs occasionally endorsed this view, with pride. As he once said,
“Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been
shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Another assessment, also sometimes endorsed by Jobs, is that what transpired was less a
heist by Apple than a fumble by Xerox. “They were copier-heads who had no clue about
what a computer could do,” he said of Xerox’s management. “They just grabbed defeat
from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire
computer industry.”
Both assessments contain a lot of truth, but there is more to it than that. There falls a
shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of
innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.
Jobs and his engineers significantly improved the graphical interface ideas they saw at
Xerox PARC, and then were able to implement them in ways that Xerox never could

accomplish. For example, the Xerox mouse had three buttons, was complicated, cost $300
apiece, and didn’t roll around smoothly; a few days after his second Xerox PARC visit,
Jobs went to a local industrial design firm, IDEO, and told one of its founders, Dean
Hovey, that he wanted a simple single-button model that cost $15, “and I want to be able to
use it on Formica and my blue jeans.” Hovey complied.
The improvements were in not just the details but the entire concept. The mouse at
Xerox PARC could not be used to drag a window around the screen. Apple’s engineers
devised an interface so you could not only drag windows and files around, you could even
drop them into folders. The Xerox system required you to select a command in order to do
anything, ranging from resizing a window to changing the extension that located a file. The
Apple system transformed the desktop metaphor into virtual reality by allowing you to
directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate things. And Apple’s engineers worked in
tandem with its designers—with Jobs spurring them on daily—to improve the desktop
concept by adding delightful icons and menus that pulled down from a bar atop each
window and the capability to open files and folders with a double click.
It’s not as if Xerox executives ignored what their scientists had created at PARC. In fact
they did try to capitalize on it, and in the process they showed why good execution is as
important as good ideas. In 1981, well before the Apple Lisa or Macintosh, they introduced
the Xerox Star, a machine that featured their graphical user interface, mouse, bitmapped
display, windows, and desktop metaphor. But it was clunky (it could take minutes to save a
large file), costly ($16,595 at retail stores), and aimed mainly at the networked office
market. It flopped; only thirty thousand were ever sold.
Jobs and his team went to a Xerox dealer to look at the Star as soon as it was released.
But he deemed it so worthless that he told his colleagues they couldn’t spend the money to
buy one. “We were very relieved,” he recalled. “We knew they hadn’t done it right, and that
we could—at a fraction of the price.” A few weeks later he called Bob Belleville, one of the
hardware designers on the Xerox Star team. “Everything you’ve ever done in your life is
shit,” Jobs said, “so why don’t you come work for me?” Belleville did, and so did Larry
Tesler.
In his excitement, Jobs began to take over the daily management of the Lisa project,
which was being run by John Couch, the former HP engineer. Ignoring Couch, he dealt
directly with Atkinson and Tesler to insert his own ideas, especially on Lisa’s graphical
interface design. “He would call me at all hours, 2 a.m. or 5 a.m.,” said Tesler. “I loved it.
But it upset my bosses at the Lisa division.” Jobs was told to stop making out-of-channel
calls. He held himself back for a while, but not for long.
One important showdown occurred when Atkinson decided that the screen should have a
white background rather than a dark one. This would allow an attribute that both Atkinson
and Jobs wanted: WYSIWYG, pronounced “wiz-ee-wig,” an acronym for “What you see is
what you get.” What you saw on the screen was what you’d get when you printed it out.
“The hardware team screamed bloody murder,” Atkinson recalled. “They said it would
force us to use a phosphor that was a lot less persistent and would flicker more.” So
Atkinson enlisted Jobs, who came down on his side. The hardware folks grumbled, but then
went off and figured it out. “Steve wasn’t much of an engineer himself, but he was very

good at assessing people’s answers. He could tell whether the engineers were defensive or
unsure of themselves.”
One of Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we
rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one
clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around,
just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you
moved the top ones. Of course, on a computer screen there are no layers of pixels
underneath the pixels that you see, so there are no windows actually lurking underneath the
ones that appear to be on top. To create the illusion of overlapping windows requires
complex coding that involves what are called “regions.” Atkinson pushed himself to make
this trick work because he thought he had seen this capability during his visit to Xerox
PARC. In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they
were amazed that he had done so. “I got a feeling for the empowering aspect of naïveté,”
Atkinson said. “Because I didn’t know it couldn’t be done, I was enabled to do it.” He was
working so hard that one morning, in a daze, he drove his Corvette into a parked truck and
nearly killed himself. Jobs immediately drove to the hospital to see him. “We were pretty
worried about you,” he said when Atkinson regained consciousness. Atkinson gave him a
pained smile and replied, “Don’t worry, I still remember regions.”
Jobs also had a passion for smooth scrolling. Documents should not lurch line by line as
you scroll through them, but instead should flow. “He was adamant that everything on the
interface had a good feeling to the user,” Atkinson said. They also wanted a mouse that
could easily move the cursor in any direction, not just up-down/left-right. This required
using a ball rather than the usual two wheels. One of the engineers told Atkinson that there
was no way to build such a mouse commercially. After Atkinson complained to Jobs over
dinner, he arrived at the office the next day to discover that Jobs had fired the engineer.
When his replacement met Atkinson, his first words were, “I can build the mouse.”
Atkinson and Jobs became best friends for a while, eating together at the Good Earth
most nights. But John Couch and the other professional engineers on his Lisa team, many
of them buttoned-down HP types, resented Jobs’s meddling and were infuriated by his
frequent insults. There was also a clash of visions. Jobs wanted to build a VolksLisa, a
simple and inexpensive product for the masses. “There was a tug-of-war between people
like me, who wanted a lean machine, and those from HP, like Couch, who were aiming for
the corporate market,” Jobs recalled.
Both Mike Scott and Mike Markkula were intent on bringing some order to Apple and
became increasingly concerned about Jobs’s disruptive behavior. So in September 1980,
they secretly plotted a reorganization. Couch was made the undisputed manager of the Lisa
division. Jobs lost control of the computer he had named after his daughter. He was also
stripped of his role as vice president for research and development. He was made non-
executive chairman of the board. This position allowed him to remain Apple’s public face,
but it meant that he had no operating control. That hurt. “I was upset and felt abandoned by
Markkula,” he said. “He and Scotty felt I wasn’t up to running the Lisa division. I brooded
about it a lot.”

CHAPTER NINE

GOING PUBLIC

A Man of Wealth and Fame

When Mike Markkula joined Jobs and Wozniak to turn their fledgling partnership into the
Apple Computer Co. in January 1977, they valued it at $5,309. Less than four years later
they decided it was time to take it public. It would become the most oversubscribed initial
public offering since that of Ford Motors in 1956. By the end of December 1980, Apple
would be valued at $1.79 billion. Yes, billion. In the process it would make three hundred
people millionaires.
Daniel Kottke was not one of them. He had been Jobs’s soul mate in college, in India, at
the All One Farm, and in the rental house they shared during the Chrisann Brennan crisis.
He joined Apple when it was headquartered in Jobs’s garage, and he still worked there as

With Wozniak, 1981

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:06

an hourly employee. But he was not at a high enough level to be cut in on the stock options
that were awarded before the IPO. “I totally trusted Steve, and I assumed he would take
care of me like I’d taken care of him, so I didn’t push,” said Kottke. The official reason he
wasn’t given stock options was that he was an hourly technician, not a salaried engineer,
which was the cutoff level for options. Even so, he could have justifiably been given
“founder’s stock,” but Jobs decided not to. “Steve is the opposite of loyal,” according to
Andy Hertz-feld, an early Apple engineer who has nevertheless remained friends with him.
“He’s anti-loyal. He has to abandon the people he is close to.”
Kottke decided to press his case with Jobs by hovering outside his office and catching
him to make a plea. But at each encounter, Jobs brushed him off. “What was really so
difficult for me is that Steve never told me I wasn’t eligible,” recalled Kottke. “He owed
me that as a friend. When I would ask him about stock, he would tell me I had to talk to my
manager.” Finally, almost six months after the IPO, Kottke worked up the courage to march
into Jobs’s office and try to hash out the issue. But when he got in to see him, Jobs was so
cold that Kottke froze. “I just got choked up and began to cry and just couldn’t talk to
him,” Kottke recalled. “Our friendship was all gone. It was so sad.”
Rod Holt, the engineer who had built the power supply, was getting a lot of options, and
he tried to turn Jobs around. “We have to do something for your buddy Daniel,” he said,
and he suggested they each give him some of their own options. “Whatever you give him, I
will match it,” said Holt. Replied Jobs, “Okay. I will give him zero.”
Wozniak, not surprisingly, had the opposite attitude. Before the shares went public, he
decided to sell, at a very low price, two thousand of his options to forty different midlevel
employees. Most of his beneficiaries made enough to buy a home. Wozniak bought a dream
home for himself and his new wife, but she soon divorced him and kept the house. He also
later gave shares outright to employees he felt had been shortchanged, including Kottke,
Fernandez, Wigginton, and Espinosa. Everyone loved Wozniak, all the more so after his
generosity, but many also agreed with Jobs that he was “awfully naïve and childlike.” A
few months later a United Way poster showing a destitute man went up on a company
bulletin board. Someone scrawled on it “Woz in 1990.”
Jobs was not naïve. He had made sure his deal with Chrisann Brennan was signed before
the IPO occurred.
Jobs was the public face of the IPO, and he helped choose the two investment banks
handling it: the traditional Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley and the untraditional boutique
firm Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco. “Steve was very irreverent toward the guys from
Morgan Stanley, which was a pretty uptight firm in those days,” recalled Bill Hambrecht.
Morgan Stanley planned to price the offering at $18, even though it was obvious the shares
would quickly shoot up. “Tell me what happens to this stock that we priced at eighteen?”
Jobs asked the bankers. “Don’t you sell it to your good customers? If so, how can you
charge me a 7% commission?” Hambrecht recognized that there was a basic unfairness in
the system, and he later went on to formulate the idea of a reverse auction to price shares
before an IPO.
Apple went public the morning of December 12, 1980. By then the bankers had priced
the stock at $22 a share. It went to $29 the first day. Jobs had come into the Hambrecht &

Quist office just in time to watch the opening trades. At age twenty-five, he was now worth
$256 million.

Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke
and a billionaire, Steve Jobs’s attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an
antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give
them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then
decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed
to weave together rather than conflict.
He had a great love for some material objects, especially those that were finely designed
and crafted, such as Porsche and Mercedes cars, Henckels knives and Braun appliances,
BMW motorcycles and Ansel Adams prints, Bösendorfer pianos and Bang & Olufsen audio
equipment. Yet the houses he lived in, no matter how rich he became, tended not to be
ostentatious and were furnished so simply they would have put a Shaker to shame. Neither
then nor later would he travel with an entourage, keep a personal staff, or even have
security protection. He bought a nice car, but always drove himself. When Markkula asked
Jobs to join him in buying a Lear jet, he declined (though he eventually would demand of
Apple a Gulfstream to use). Like his father, he could be flinty when bargaining with
suppliers, but he didn’t allow a craving for profits to take precedence over his passion for
building great products.
Thirty years after Apple went public, he reflected on what it was like to come into money
suddenly:
I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I
would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I
could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty
simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful,
because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t
have to worry about money.
I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently.
Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and
then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned
into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to
myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.

He was not particularly philanthropic. He briefly set up a foundation, but he discovered
that it was annoying to have to deal with the person he had hired to run it, who kept talking
about “venture” philanthropy and how to “leverage” giving. Jobs became contemptuous of
people who made a display of philanthropy or thinking they could reinvent it. Earlier he
had quietly sent in a $5,000 check to help launch Larry Brilliant’s Seva Foundation to fight
diseases of poverty, and he even agreed to join the board. But when Brilliant brought some
board members, including Wavy Gravy and Jerry Garcia, to Apple right after its IPO to

solicit a donation, Jobs was not forthcoming. He instead worked on finding ways that a
donated Apple II and a VisiCalc program could make it easier for the foundation to do a
survey it was planning on blindness in Nepal.
His biggest personal gift was to his parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, to whom he gave about
$750,000 worth of stock. They sold some to pay off the mortgage on their Los Altos home,
and their son came over for the little celebration. “It was the first time in their lives they
didn’t have a mortgage,” Jobs recalled. “They had a handful of their friends over for the
party, and it was really nice.” Still, they didn’t consider buying a nicer house. “They
weren’t interested in that,” Jobs said. “They had a life they were happy with.” Their only
splurge was to take a Princess cruise each year. The one through the Panama Canal “was
the big one for my dad,” according to Jobs, because it reminded him of when his Coast
Guard ship went through on its way to San Francisco to be decommissioned.
With Apple’s success came fame for its poster boy. Inc. became the first magazine to put
him on its cover, in October 1981. “This man has changed business forever,” it proclaimed.
It showed Jobs with a neatly trimmed beard and well-styled long hair, wearing blue jeans
and a dress shirt with a blazer that was a little too satiny. He was leaning on an Apple II and
looking directly into the camera with the mesmerizing stare he had picked up from Robert
Friedland. “When Steve Jobs speaks, it is with the gee-whiz enthusiasm of someone who
sees the future and is making sure it works,” the magazine reported.
Time followed in February 1982 with a package on young entrepreneurs. The cover was
a painting of Jobs, again with his hypnotic stare. Jobs, said the main story, “practically
singlehanded created the personal computer industry.” The accompanying profile, written
by Michael Moritz, noted, “At 26, Jobs heads a company that six years ago was located in a
bedroom and garage of his parents’ house, but this year it is expected to have sales of $600
million. . . . As an executive, Jobs has sometimes been petulant and harsh on subordinates.
Admits he: ‘I’ve got to learn to keep my feelings private.’”
Despite his new fame and fortune, he still fancied himself a child of the counterculture.
On a visit to a Stanford class, he took off his Wilkes Bashford blazer and his shoes, perched
on top of a table, and crossed his legs into a lotus position. The students asked questions,
such as when Apple’s stock price would rise, which Jobs brushed off. Instead he spoke of
his passion for future products, such as someday making a computer as small as a book.
When the business questions tapered off, Jobs turned the tables on the well-groomed
students. “How many of you are virgins?” he asked. There were nervous giggles. “How
many of you have taken LSD?” More nervous laughter, and only one or two hands went up.
Later Jobs would complain about the new generation of kids, who seemed to him more
materialistic and careerist than his own. “When I went to school, it was right after the
sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in,” he said. “Now
students aren’t even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much.” His
generation, he said, was different. “The idealistic wind of the sixties is still at our backs,
though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them
forever.”

CHAPTER TEN

THE MAC IS BORN

You Say You Want a Revolution

Jobs in 1982

Jef Raskin’s Baby

Jef Raskin was the type of character who could enthrall Steve Jobs—or annoy him. As it
turned out, he did both. A philosophical guy who could be both playful and ponderous,
Raskin had studied computer science, taught music and visual arts, conducted a chamber
opera company, and organized guerrilla theater. His 1967 doctoral thesis at U.C. San Diego
argued that computers should have graphical rather than text-based interfaces. When he got
fed up with teaching, he rented a hot air balloon, flew over the chancellor’s house, and
shouted down his decision to quit.
When Jobs was looking for someone to write a manual for the Apple II in 1976, he
called Raskin, who had his own little consulting firm. Raskin went to the garage, saw
Wozniak beavering away at a workbench, and was convinced by Jobs to write the manual
for $50. Eventually he became the manager of Apple’s publications department. One of
Raskin’s dreams was to build an inexpensive computer for the masses, and in 1979 he
convinced Mike Markkula to put him in charge of a small development project code-named

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:07

“Annie” to do just that. Since Raskin thought it was sexist to name computers after women,
he redubbed the project in honor of his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh. But he
changed the spelling in order not to conflict with the name of the audio equipment maker
McIntosh Laboratory. The proposed computer became known as the Macintosh.
Raskin envisioned a machine that would sell for $1,000 and be a simple appliance, with
screen and keyboard and computer all in one unit. To keep the cost down, he proposed a
tiny five-inch screen and a very cheap (and underpowered) microprocessor, the Motorola
6809. Raskin fancied himself a philosopher, and he wrote his thoughts in an ever-
expanding notebook that he called “The Book of Macintosh.” He also issued occasional
manifestos. One of these was called “Computers by the Millions,” and it began with an
aspiration: “If personal computers are to be truly personal, it will have to be as likely as not
that a family, picked at random, will own one.”
Throughout 1979 and early 1980 the Macintosh project led a tenuous existence. Every
few months it would almost get killed off, but each time Raskin managed to cajole
Markkula into granting clemency. It had a research team of only four engineers located in
the original Apple office space next to the Good Earth restaurant, a few blocks from the
company’s new main building. The work space was filled with enough toys and radio-
controlled model airplanes (Raskin’s passion) to make it look like a day care center for
geeks. Every now and then work would cease for a loosely organized game of Nerf ball
tag. Andy Hertzfeld recalled, “This inspired everyone to surround their work area with
barricades made out of cardboard, to provide cover during the game, making part of the
office look like a cardboard maze.”
The star of the team was a blond, cherubic, and psychologically intense self-taught
young engineer named Burrell Smith, who worshipped the code work of Wozniak and tried
to pull off similar dazzling feats. Atkinson discovered Smith working in Apple’s service
department and, amazed at his ability to improvise fixes, recommended him to Raskin.
Smith would later succumb to schizophrenia, but in the early 1980s he was able to channel
his manic intensity into weeklong binges of engineering brilliance.
Jobs was enthralled by Raskin’s vision, but not by his willingness to make compromises
to keep down the cost. At one point in the fall of 1979 Jobs told him instead to focus on
building what he repeatedly called an “insanely great” product. “Don’t worry about price,
just specify the computer’s abilities,” Jobs told him. Raskin responded with a sarcastic
memo. It spelled out everything you would want in the proposed computer: a high-
resolution color display, a printer that worked without a ribbon and could produce graphics
in color at a page per second, unlimited access to the ARPA net, and the capability to
recognize speech and synthesize music, “even simulate Caruso singing with the Mormon
tabernacle choir, with variable reverberation.” The memo concluded, “Starting with the
abilities desired is nonsense. We must start both with a price goal, and a set of abilities, and
keep an eye on today’s and the immediate future’s technology.” In other words, Raskin had
little patience for Jobs’s belief that you could distort reality if you had enough passion for
your product.
Thus they were destined to clash, especially after Jobs was ejected from the Lisa project
in September 1980 and began casting around for someplace else to make his mark. It was

inevitable that his gaze would fall on the Macintosh project. Raskin’s manifestos about an
inexpensive machine for the masses, with a simple graphic interface and clean design,
stirred his soul. And it was also inevitable that once Jobs set his sights on the Macintosh
project, Raskin’s days were numbered. “Steve started acting on what he thought we should
do, Jef started brooding, and it instantly was clear what the outcome would be,” recalled
Joanna Hoffman, a member of the Mac team.
The first conflict was over Raskin’s devotion to the underpowered Motorola 6809
microprocessor. Once again it was a clash between Raskin’s desire to keep the Mac’s price
under $1,000 and Jobs’s determination to build an insanely great machine. So Jobs began
pushing for the Mac to switch to the more powerful Motorola 68000, which is what the
Lisa was using. Just before Christmas 1980, he challenged Burrell Smith, without telling
Raskin, to make a redesigned prototype that used the more powerful chip. As his hero
Wozniak would have done, Smith threw himself into the task around the clock, working
nonstop for three weeks and employing all sorts of breathtaking programming leaps. When
he succeeded, Jobs was able to force the switch to the Motorola 68000, and Raskin had to
brood and recalculate the cost of the Mac.
There was something larger at stake. The cheaper microprocessor that Raskin wanted
would not have been able to accommodate all of the gee-whiz graphics—windows, menus,
mouse, and so on—that the team had seen on the Xerox PARC visits. Raskin had
convinced everyone to go to Xerox PARC, and he liked the idea of a bitmapped display and
windows, but he was not as charmed by all the cute graphics and icons, and he absolutely
detested the idea of using a point-and-click mouse rather than the keyboard. “Some of the
people on the project became enamored of the quest to do everything with the mouse,” he
later groused. “Another example is the absurd application of icons. An icon is a symbol
equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There’s a reason why humans invented
phonetic languages.”
Raskin’s former student Bill Atkinson sided with Jobs. They both wanted a powerful
processor that could support whizzier graphics and the use of a mouse. “Steve had to take
the project away from Jef,” Atkinson said. “Jef was pretty firm and stubborn, and Steve
was right to take it over. The world got a better result.”
The disagreements were more than just philosophical; they became clashes of
personality. “I think that he likes people to jump when he says jump,” Raskin once said. “I
felt that he was untrustworthy, and that he does not take kindly to being found wanting. He
doesn’t seem to like people who see him without a halo.” Jobs was equally dismissive of
Raskin. “Jef was really pompous,” he said. “He didn’t know much about interfaces. So I
decided to nab some of his people who were really good, like Atkinson, bring in some of
my own, take the thing over and build a less expensive Lisa, not some piece of junk.”
Some on the team found Jobs impossible to work with. “Jobs seems to introduce tension,
politics, and hassles rather than enjoying a buffer from those distractions,” one engineer
wrote in a memo to Raskin in December 1980. “I thoroughly enjoy talking with him, and I
admire his ideas, practical perspective, and energy. But I just don’t feel that he provides the
trusting, supportive, relaxed environment that I need.”

But many others realized that despite his temperamental failings, Jobs had the charisma
and corporate clout that would lead them to “make a dent in the universe.” Jobs told the
staff that Raskin was just a dreamer, whereas he was a doer and would get the Mac done in
a year. It was clear he wanted vindication for having been ousted from the Lisa group, and
he was energized by competition. He publicly bet John Couch $5,000 that the Mac would
ship before the Lisa. “We can make a computer that’s cheaper and better than the Lisa, and
get it out first,” he told the team.
Jobs asserted his control of the group by canceling a brown-bag lunch seminar that
Raskin was scheduled to give to the whole company in February 1981. Raskin happened to
go by the room anyway and discovered that there were a hundred people there waiting to
hear him; Jobs had not bothered to notify anyone else about his cancellation order. So
Raskin went ahead and gave a talk.
That incident led Raskin to write a blistering memo to Mike Scott, who once again found
himself in the difficult position of being a president trying to manage a company’s
temperamental cofounder and major stockholder. It was titled “Working for/with Steve
Jobs,” and in it Raskin asserted:
He is a dreadful manager. . . . I have always liked Steve, but I have found it impossible
to work for him. . . . Jobs regularly misses appointments. This is so well-known as to be
almost a running joke. . . . He acts without thinking and with bad judgment. . . . He does
not give credit where due. . . . Very often, when told of a new idea, he will immediately
attack it and say that it is worthless or even stupid, and tell you that it was a waste of time
to work on it. This alone is bad management, but if the idea is a good one he will soon be
telling people about it as though it was his own.

That afternoon Scott called in Jobs and Raskin for a showdown in front of Markkula.
Jobs started crying. He and Raskin agreed on only one thing: Neither could work for the
other one. On the Lisa project, Scott had sided with Couch. This time he decided it was
best to let Jobs win. After all, the Mac was a minor development project housed in a distant
building that could keep Jobs occupied away from the main campus. Raskin was told to
take a leave of absence. “They wanted to humor me and give me something to do, which
was fine,” Jobs recalled. “It was like going back to the garage for me. I had my own ragtag
team and I was in control.”
Raskin’s ouster may not have seemed fair, but it ended up being good for the Macintosh.
Raskin wanted an appliance with little memory, an anemic processor, a cassette tape, no
mouse, and minimal graphics. Unlike Jobs, he might have been able to keep the price down
to close to $1,000, and that may have helped Apple win market share. But he could not
have pulled off what Jobs did, which was to create and market a machine that would
transform personal computing. In fact we can see where the road not taken led. Raskin was
hired by Canon to build the machine he wanted. “It was the Canon Cat, and it was a total
flop,” Atkinson said. “Nobody wanted it. When Steve turned the Mac into a compact
version of the Lisa, it made it into a computing platform instead of a consumer electronic
device.”1

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:08

Texaco Towers

A few days after Raskin left, Jobs appeared at the cubicle of Andy Hertzfeld, a young
engineer on the Apple II team, who had a cherubic face and impish demeanor similar to his
pal Burrell Smith’s. Hertzfeld recalled that most of his colleagues were afraid of Jobs
“because of his spontaneous temper tantrums and his proclivity to tell everyone exactly
what he thought, which often wasn’t very favorable.” But Hertzfeld was excited by him.
“Are you any good?” Jobs asked the moment he walked in. “We only want really good
people working on the Mac, and I’m not sure you’re good enough.” Hertzfeld knew how to
answer. “I told him that yes, I thought that I was pretty good.”
Jobs left, and Hertzfeld went back to his work. Later that afternoon he looked up to see
Jobs peering over the wall of his cubicle. “I’ve got good news for you,” he said. “You’re
working on the Mac team now. Come with me.”
Hertzfeld replied that he needed a couple more days to finish the Apple II product he was
in the middle of. “What’s more important than working on the Macintosh?” Jobs
demanded. Hertzfeld explained that he needed to get his Apple II DOS program in good
enough shape to hand it over to someone. “You’re just wasting your time with that!” Jobs
replied. “Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. The
Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you’re going to start on it now!” With that, Jobs
yanked out the power cord to Hertzfeld’s Apple II, causing the code he was working on to
vanish. “Come with me,” Jobs said. “I’m going to take you to your new desk.” Jobs drove
Hertzfeld, computer and all, in his silver Mercedes to the Macintosh offices. “Here’s your
new desk,” he said, plopping him in a space next to Burrell Smith. “Welcome to the Mac
team!” The desk had been Raskin’s. In fact Raskin had left so hastily that some of the
drawers were still filled with his flotsam and jetsam, including model airplanes.
Jobs’s primary test for recruiting people in the spring of 1981 to be part of his merry
band of pirates was making sure they had a passion for the product. He would sometimes
bring candidates into a room where a prototype of the Mac was covered by a cloth,
dramatically unveil it, and watch. “If their eyes lit up, if they went right for the mouse and
started pointing and clicking, Steve would smile and hire them,” recalled Andrea
Cunningham. “He wanted them to say ‘Wow!’”
Bruce Horn was one of the programmers at Xerox PARC. When some of his friends,
such as Larry Tesler, decided to join the Macintosh group, Horn considered going there as
well. But he got a good offer, and a $15,000 signing bonus, to join another company. Jobs
called him on a Friday night. “You have to come into Apple tomorrow morning,” he said.
“I have a lot of stuff to show you.” Horn did, and Jobs hooked him. “Steve was so
passionate about building this amazing device that would change the world,” Horn recalled.
“By sheer force of his personality, he changed my mind.” Jobs showed Horn exactly how
the plastic would be molded and would fit together at perfect angles, and how good the
board was going to look inside. “He wanted me to see that this whole thing was going to
happen and it was thought out from end to end. Wow, I said, I don’t see that kind of passion
every day. So I signed up.”

Jobs even tried to reengage Wozniak. “I resented the fact that he had not been doing
much, but then I thought, hell, I wouldn’t be here without his brilliance,” Jobs later told me.
But as soon as Jobs was starting to get him interested in the Mac, Wozniak crashed his new
single-engine Beechcraft while attempting a takeoff near Santa Cruz. He barely survived
and ended up with partial amnesia. Jobs spent time at the hospital, but when Wozniak
recovered he decided it was time to take a break from Apple. Ten years after dropping out
of Berkeley, he decided to return there to finally get his degree, enrolling under the name of
Rocky Raccoon Clark.
In order to make the project his own, Jobs decided it should no longer be code-named
after Raskin’s favorite apple. In various interviews, Jobs had been referring to computers as
a bicycle for the mind; the ability of humans to create a bicycle allowed them to move more
efficiently than even a condor, and likewise the ability to create computers would multiply
the efficiency of their minds. So one day Jobs decreed that henceforth the Macintosh
should be known instead as the Bicycle. This did not go over well. “Burrell and I thought
this was the silliest thing we ever heard, and we simply refused to use the new name,”
recalled Hertzfeld. Within a month the idea was dropped.
By early 1981 the Mac team had grown to about twenty, and Jobs decided that they
should have bigger quarters. So he moved everyone to the second floor of a brown-
shingled, two-story building about three blocks from Apple’s main offices. It was next to a
Texaco station and thus became known as Texaco Towers. In order to make the office more
lively, he told the team to buy a stereo system. “Burrell and I ran out and bought a silver,
cassette-based boom box right away, before he could change his mind,” recalled Hertzfeld.
Jobs’s triumph was soon complete. A few weeks after winning his power struggle with
Raskin to run the Mac division, he helped push out Mike Scott as Apple’s president. Scotty
had become more and more erratic, alternately bullying and nurturing. He finally lost most
of his support among the employees when he surprised them by imposing a round of
layoffs that he handled with atypical ruthlessness. In addition, he had begun to suffer a
variety of afflictions, ranging from eye infections to narcolepsy. When Scott was on
vacation in Hawaii, Markkula called together the top managers to ask if he should be
replaced. Most of them, including Jobs and John Couch, said yes. So Markkula took over
as an interim and rather passive president, and Jobs found that he now had full rein to do
what he wanted with the Mac division.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD

Playing by His Own Set of Rules

The original Mac team in 1984: George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, and
Jerry Manock

When Andy Hertzfeld joined the Macintosh team, he got a briefing from Bud Tribble, the
other software designer, about the huge amount of work that still needed to be done. Jobs
wanted it finished by January 1982, less than a year away. “That’s crazy,” Hertzfeld said.
“There’s no way.” Tribble said that Jobs would not accept any contrary facts. “The best
way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek,” Tribble explained. “Steve has a
reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his
presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off
when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”
Tribble recalled that he adopted the phrase from the “Menagerie” episodes of Star Trek,
“in which the aliens create their own new world through sheer mental force.” He meant the
phrase to be a compliment as well as a caution: “It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s
distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.”
At first Hertzfeld thought that Tribble was exaggerating, but after two weeks of working
with Jobs, he became a keen observer of the phenomenon. “The reality distortion field was
a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to
bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,” he said.

There was little that could shield you from the force, Hertzfeld discovered. “Amazingly,
the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it. We
would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it, but after a while most of us gave
up, accepting it as a force of nature.” After Jobs decreed that the sodas in the office
refrigerator be replaced by Odwalla organic orange and carrot juices, someone on the team
had T-shirts made. “Reality Distortion Field,” they said on the front, and on the back, “It’s
in the juice!”
To some people, calling it a reality distortion field was just a clever way to say that Jobs
tended to lie. But it was in fact a more complex form of dissembling. He would assert
something—be it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a
meeting—without even considering the truth. It came from willfully defying reality, not
only to others but to himself. “He can deceive himself,” said Bill Atkinson. “It allowed him
to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and
internalized it.”
A lot of people distort reality, of course. When Jobs did so, it was often a tactic for
accomplishing something. Wozniak, who was as congenitally honest as Jobs was tactical,
marveled at how effective it could be. “His reality distortion is when he has an illogical
vision of the future, such as telling me that I could design the Breakout game in just a few
days. You realize that it can’t be true, but he somehow makes it true.”
When members of the Mac team got ensnared in his reality distortion field, they were
almost hypnotized. “He reminded me of Rasputin,” said Debi Coleman. “He laser-beamed
in on you and didn’t blink. It didn’t matter if he was serving purple Kool-Aid. You drank
it.” But like Wozniak, she believed that the reality distortion field was empowering: It
enabled Jobs to inspire his team to change the course of computer history with a fraction of
the resources of Xerox or IBM. “It was a self-fulfilling distortion,” she claimed. “You did
the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”
At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him.
He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to
his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the
sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. “He thinks there are a few
people who are special—people like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India—
and he’s one of them,” said Hertzfeld. “He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me
that he was enlightened. It’s almost like Nietzsche.” Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the
philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Überman came
naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “The spirit now wills his
own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.” If reality did not
comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter and
would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. Even in small everyday rebellions,
such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted
as if he were not subject to the strictures around him.
Another key aspect of Jobs’s worldview was his binary way of categorizing things.
People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either “the best” or

“totally shitty.” Bill Atkinson, the Mac designer who fell on the good side of these
dichotomies, described what it was like:
It was difficult working under Steve, because there was a great polarity between gods
and shitheads. If you were a god, you were up on a pedestal and could do no wrong. Those
of us who were considered to be gods, as I was, knew that we were actually mortal and
made bad engineering decisions and farted like any person, so we were always afraid that
we would get knocked off our pedestal. The ones who were shitheads, who were brilliant
engineers working very hard, felt there was no way they could get appreciated and rise
above their status.

But these categories were not immutable, for Jobs could rapidly reverse himself. When
briefing Hertzfeld about the reality distortion field, Tribble specifically warned him about
Jobs’s tendency to resemble high-voltage alternating current. “Just because he tells you that
something is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow,”
Tribble explained. “If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s
stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and
propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.”
The audacity of this pirouette technique would have dazzled Diaghilev. “If one line of
argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another,” Hertzfeld said.
“Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his
own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.” That happened repeatedly to
Bruce Horn, the programmer who, with Tesler, had been lured from Xerox PARC. “One
week I’d tell him about an idea that I had, and he would say it was crazy,” recalled Horn.
“The next week, he’d come and say, ‘Hey I have this great idea’—and it would be my idea!
You’d call him on it and say, ‘Steve, I told you that a week ago,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah,
yeah’ and just move right along.”
It was as if Jobs’s brain circuits were missing a device that would modulate the extreme
spikes of impulsive opinions that popped into his mind. So in dealing with him, the Mac
team adopted an audio concept called a “low pass filter.” In processing his input, they
learned to reduce the amplitude of his high-frequency signals. That served to smooth out
the data set and provide a less jittery moving average of his evolving attitudes. “After a few
cycles of him taking alternating extreme positions,” said Hertzfeld, “we would learn to low
pass filter his signals and not react to the extremes.”
Was Jobs’s unfiltered behavior caused by a lack of emotional sensitivity? No. Almost the
opposite. He was very emotionally attuned, able to read people and know their
psychological strengths and vulnerabilities. He could stun an unsuspecting victim with an
emotional towel-snap, perfectly aimed. He intuitively knew when someone was faking it or
truly knew something. This made him masterful at cajoling, stroking, persuading,
flattering, and intimidating people. “He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what
your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe,” Joanna
Hoffman said. “It’s a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to

manipulate people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for
his approval, so then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you.”
Ann Bowers became an expert at dealing with Jobs’s perfectionism, petulance, and
prickliness. She had been the human resources director at Intel, but had stepped aside after
she married its cofounder Bob Noyce. She joined Apple in 1980 and served as a calming
mother figure who would step in after one of Jobs’s tantrums. She would go to his office,
shut the door, and gently lecture him. “I know, I know,” he would say. “Well, then, please
stop doing it,” she would insist. Bowers recalled, “He would be good for a while, and then
a week or so later I would get a call again.” She realized that he could barely contain
himself. “He had these huge expectations, and if people didn’t deliver, he couldn’t stand it.
He couldn’t control himself. I could understand why Steve would get upset, and he was
usually right, but it had a hurtful effect. It created a fear factor. He was self-aware, but that
didn’t always modify his behavior.”
Jobs became close to Bowers and her husband, and he would drop in at their Los Gatos
Hills home unannounced. She would hear his motorcycle in the distance and say, “I guess
we have Steve for dinner again.” For a while she and Noyce were like a surrogate family.
“He was so bright and also so needy. He needed a grown-up, a father figure, which Bob
became, and I became like a mother figure.”
There were some upsides to Jobs’s demanding and wounding behavior. People who were
not crushed ended up being stronger. They did better work, out of both fear and an
eagerness to please. “His behavior can be emotionally draining, but if you survive, it
works,” Hoffman said. You could also push back—sometimes—and not only survive but
thrive. That didn’t always work; Raskin tried it, succeeded for a while, and then was
destroyed. But if you were calmly confident, if Jobs sized you up and decided that you
knew what you were doing, he would respect you. In both his personal and his professional
life over the years, his inner circle tended to include many more strong people than toadies.
The Mac team knew that. Every year, beginning in 1981, it gave out an award to the
person who did the best job of standing up to him. The award was partly a joke, but also
partly real, and Jobs knew about it and liked it. Joanna Hoffman won the first year. From an
Eastern European refugee family, she had a strong temper and will. One day, for example,
she discovered that Jobs had changed her marketing projections in a way she found totally
reality-distorting. Furious, she marched to his office. “As I’m climbing the stairs, I told his
assistant I am going to take a knife and stab it into his heart,” she recounted. Al Eisenstat,
the corporate counsel, came running out to restrain her. “But Steve heard me out and
backed down.”
Hoffman won the award again in 1982. “I remember being envious of Joanna, because
she would stand up to Steve and I didn’t have the nerve yet,” said Debi Coleman, who
joined the Mac team that year. “Then, in 1983, I got the award. I had learned you had to
stand up for what you believe, which Steve respected. I started getting promoted by him
after that.” Eventually she rose to become head of manufacturing.
One day Jobs barged into the cubicle of one of Atkinson’s engineers and uttered his usual
“This is shit.” As Atkinson recalled, “The guy said, ‘No it’s not, it’s actually the best way,’
and he explained to Steve the engineering trade-offs he’d made.” Jobs backed down.

Atkinson taught his team to put Jobs’s words through a translator. “We learned to interpret
‘This is shit’ to actually be a question that means, ‘Tell me why this is the best way to do
it.’” But the story had a coda, which Atkinson also found instructive. Eventually the
engineer found an even better way to perform the function that Jobs had criticized. “He did
it better because Steve had challenged him,” said Atkinson, “which shows you can push
back on him but should also listen, for he’s usually right.”
Jobs’s prickly behavior was partly driven by his perfectionism and his impatience with
those who made compromises in order to get a product out on time and on budget. “He
could not make trade-offs well,” said Atkinson. “If someone didn’t care to make their
product perfect, they were a bozo.” At the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1981, for
example, Adam Osborne released the first truly portable personal computer. It was not great
—it had a five-inch screen and not much memory—but it worked well enough. As Osborne
famously declared, “Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous.” Jobs found that
approach to be morally appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne. “This guy just
doesn’t get it,” Jobs repeatedly railed as he wandered the Apple corridors. “He’s not
making art, he’s making shit.”
One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on
the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up.
Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you
find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon allowed that he
probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million
people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to
three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the
equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed,
and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,”
Atkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.”
The result was that the Macintosh team came to share Jobs’s passion for making a great
product, not just a profitable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged
the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to
beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or
even a little greater.” He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the
Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis
Tiffany’s example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble,
“We said to ourselves, ‘Hey, if we’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well
make them beautiful.’”
Was all of his stormy and abusive behavior necessary? Probably not, nor was it justified.
There were other ways to have motivated his team. Even though the Macintosh would turn
out to be great, it was way behind schedule and way over budget because of Jobs’s
impetuous interventions. There was also a cost in brutalized human feelings, which caused
much of the team to burn out. “Steve’s contributions could have been made without so
many stories about him terrorizing folks,” Wozniak said. “I like being more patient and not
having so many conflicts. I think a company can be a good family. If the Macintosh project

had been run my way, things probably would have been a mess. But I think if it had been a
mix of both our styles, it would have been better than just the way Steve did it.”
But even though Jobs’s style could be demoralizing, it could also be oddly inspiring. It
infused Apple employees with an abiding passion to create groundbreaking products and a
belief that they could accomplish what seemed impossible. They had T-shirts made that
read “90 hours a week and loving it!” Out of a fear of Jobs mixed with an incredibly strong
urge to impress him, they exceeded their own expectations. “I’ve learned over the years
that when you have really good people you don’t have to baby them,” Jobs later explained.
“By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things. The original
Mac team taught me that A-plus players like to work together, and they don’t like it if you
tolerate B work. Ask any member of that Mac team. They will tell you it was worth the
pain.”
Most of them agree. “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything
right,’” Debi Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence. Yet I consider myself the
absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.”

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:09

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE DESIGN

Real Artists Simplify

A Bauhaus Aesthetic

Unlike most kids who grew up in Eichler homes, Jobs knew what they were and why they
were so wonderful. He liked the notion of simple and clean modernism produced for the
masses. He also loved listening to his father describe the styling intricacies of various cars.
So from the beginning at Apple, he believed that great industrial design—a colorfully
simple logo, a sleek case for the Apple II—would set the company apart and make its
products distinctive.

The company’s first office, after it moved out of his family garage, was in a small
building it shared with a Sony sales office. Sony was famous for its signature style and
memorable product designs, so Jobs would drop by to study the marketing material. “He
would come in looking scruffy and fondle the product brochures and point out design
features,” said Dan’l Lewin, who worked there. “Every now and then, he would ask, ‘Can I
take this brochure?’” By 1980, he had hired Lewin.
His fondness for the dark, industrial look of Sony receded around June 1981, when he
began attending the annual International Design Conference in Aspen. The meeting that
year focused on Italian style, and it featured the architect-designer Mario Bellini, the
filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, the car maker Sergio Pininfarina, and the Fiat heiress and
politician Susanna Agnelli. “I had come to revere the Italian designers, just like the kid in
Breaking Away reveres the Italian bikers,” recalled Jobs, “so it was an amazing
inspiration.”
In Aspen he was exposed to the spare and functional design philosophy of the Bauhaus
movement, which was enshrined by Herbert Bayer in the buildings, living suites, sans serif
font typography, and furniture on the Aspen Institute campus. Like his mentors Walter
Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Bayer believed that there should be no distinction
between fine art and applied industrial design. The modernist International Style
championed by the Bauhaus taught that design should be simple, yet have an expressive
spirit. It emphasized rationality and functionality by employing clean lines and forms.
Among the maxims preached by Mies and Gropius were “God is in the details” and “Less
is more.” As with Eichler homes, the artistic sensibility was combined with the capability
for mass production.
Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983
design conference, the theme of which was “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be.” He
predicted the passing of the Sony style in favor of Bauhaus simplicity. “The current wave
of industrial design is Sony’s high-tech look, which is gunmetal gray, maybe paint it black,
do weird stuff to it,” he said. “It’s easy to do that. But it’s not great.” He proposed an
alternative, born of the Bauhaus, that was more true to the function and nature of the
products. “What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to
package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a small
package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its
electronics.”
He repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s products would be clean and simple. “We will
make them bright and pure and honest about being high-tech, rather than a heavy industrial
look of black, black, black, black, like Sony,” he preached. “So that’s our approach. Very
simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re
running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s
make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its
first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Jobs felt that design simplicity should be linked to making products easy to use. Those
goals do not always go together. Sometimes a design can be so sleek and simple that a user
finds it intimidating or unfriendly to navigate. “The main thing in our design is that we

have to make things intuitively obvious,” Jobs told the crowd of design mavens. For
example, he extolled the desktop metaphor he was creating for the Macintosh. “People
know how to deal with a desktop intuitively. If you walk into an office, there are papers on
the desk. The one on the top is the most important. People know how to switch priority.
Part of the reason we model our computers on metaphors like the desktop is that we can
leverage this experience people already have.”
Speaking at the same time as Jobs that Wednesday afternoon, but in a smaller seminar
room, was Maya Lin, twenty-three, who had been catapulted into fame the previous
November when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. They
struck up a close friendship, and Jobs invited her to visit Apple. “I came to work with Steve
for a week,” Lin recalled. “I asked him, ‘Why do computers look like clunky TV sets? Why
don’t you make something thin? Why not a flat laptop?’” Jobs replied that this was indeed
his goal, as soon as the technology was ready.
At that time there was not much exciting happening in the realm of industrial design,
Jobs felt. He had a Richard Sapper lamp, which he admired, and he also liked the furniture
of Charles and Ray Eames and the Braun products of Dieter Rams. But there were no
towering figures energizing the world of industrial design the way that Raymond Loewy
and Herbert Bayer had done. “There really wasn’t much going on in industrial design,
particularly in Silicon Valley, and Steve was very eager to change that,” said Lin. “His
design sensibility is sleek but not slick, and it’s playful. He embraced minimalism, which
came from his Zen devotion to simplicity, but he avoided allowing that to make his
products cold. They stayed fun. He’s passionate and super-serious about design, but at the
same time there’s a sense of play.”
As Jobs’s design sensibilities evolved, he became particularly attracted to the Japanese
style and began hanging out with its stars, such as Issey Miyake and I. M. Pei. His Buddhist
training was a big influence. “I have always found Buddhism, Japanese Zen Buddhism in
particular, to be aesthetically sublime,” he said. “The most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are
the gardens around Kyoto. I’m deeply moved by what that culture has produced, and it’s
directly from Zen Buddhism.”

Like a Porsche

Jef Raskin’s vision for the Macintosh was that it would be like a boxy carry-on suitcase,
which would be closed by flipping up the keyboard over the front screen. When Jobs took
over the project, he decided to sacrifice portability for a distinctive design that wouldn’t
take up much space on a desk. He plopped down a phone book and declared, to the horror
of the engineers, that it shouldn’t have a footprint larger than that. So his design team of
Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama began working on ideas that had the screen above the
computer box, with a keyboard that was detachable.
One day in March 1981, Andy Hertzfeld came back to the office from dinner to find Jobs
hovering over their one Mac prototype in intense discussion with the creative services
director, James Ferris. “We need it to have a classic look that won’t go out of style, like the

Volkswagen Beetle,” Jobs said. From his father he had developed an appreciation for the
contours of classic cars.
“No, that’s not right,” Ferris replied. “The lines should be voluptuous, like a Ferrari.”
“Not a Ferrari, that’s not right either,” Jobs countered. “It should be more like a
Porsche!” Jobs owned a Porsche 928 at the time. When Bill Atkinson was over one
weekend, Jobs brought him outside to admire the car. “Great art stretches the taste, it
doesn’t follow tastes,” he told Atkinson. He also admired the design of the Mercedes.
“Over the years, they’ve made the lines softer but the details starker,” he said one day as he
walked around the parking lot. “That’s what we have to do with the Macintosh.”
Oyama drafted a preliminary design and had a plaster model made. The Mac team
gathered around for the unveiling and expressed their thoughts. Hertzfeld called it “cute.”
Others also seemed satisfied. Then Jobs let loose a blistering burst of criticism. “It’s way
too boxy, it’s got to be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger,
and I don’t like the size of the bevel.” With his new fluency in industrial design lingo, Jobs
was referring to the angular or curved edge connecting the sides of the computer. But then
he gave a resounding compliment. “It’s a start,” he said.
Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs’s
previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the
previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the
design’s evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been
ignored. “By the fourth model, I could barely distinguish it from the third one,” said
Hertzfeld, “but Steve was always critical and decisive, saying he loved or hated a detail that
I could barely perceive.”
One weekend Jobs went to Macy’s in Palo Alto and again spent time studying
appliances, especially the Cuisinart. He came bounding into the Mac office that Monday,
asked the design team to go buy one, and made a raft of new suggestions based on its lines,
curves, and bevels.
Jobs kept insisting that the machine should look friendly. As a result, it evolved to
resemble a human face. With the disk drive built in below the screen, the unit was taller and
narrower than most computers, suggesting a head. The recess near the base evoked a gentle
chin, and Jobs narrowed the strip of plastic at the top so that it avoided the Neanderthal
forehead that made the Lisa subtly unattractive. The patent for the design of the Apple case
was issued in the name of Steve Jobs as well as Manock and Oyama. “Even though Steve
didn’t draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is,” Oyama
later said. “To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until
Steve told us.”
Jobs obsessed with equal intensity about the look of what would appear on the screen.
One day Bill Atkinson burst into Texaco Towers all excited. He had just come up with a
brilliant algorithm that could draw circles and ovals onscreen quickly. The math for making
circles usually required calculating square roots, which the 68000 microprocessor didn’t
support. But Atkinson did a workaround based on the fact that the sum of a sequence of
odd numbers produces a sequence of perfect squares (for example, 1 + 3 = 4, 1 + 3 + 5 = 9,
etc.). Hertzfeld recalled that when Atkinson fired up his demo, everyone was impressed

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:09

except Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good,” he said, “but how about drawing rectangles
with rounded corners?”
“I don’t think we really need it,” said Atkinson, who explained that it would be almost
impossible to do. “I wanted to keep the graphics routines lean and limit them to the
primitives that truly needed to be done,” he recalled.
“Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!” Jobs said, jumping up and getting
more intense. “Just look around this room!” He pointed out the whiteboard and the tabletop
and other objects that were rectangular with rounded corners. “And look outside, there’s
even more, practically everywhere you look!” He dragged Atkinson out for a walk,
pointing out car windows and billboards and street signs. “Within three blocks, we found
seventeen examples,” said Jobs. “I started pointing them out everywhere until he was
completely convinced.”
“When he finally got to a No Parking sign, I said, ‘Okay, you’re right, I give up. We need
to have a rounded-corner rectangle as a primitive!’” Hertzfeld recalled, “Bill returned to
Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now
drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast.” The dialogue boxes
and windows on the Lisa and the Mac, and almost every other subsequent computer, ended
up being rendered with rounded corners.
At the calligraphy class he had audited at Reed, Jobs learned to love typefaces, with all
of their serif and sans serif variations, proportional spacing, and leading. “When we were
designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me,” he later said of that class.
Because the Mac was bitmapped, it was possible to devise an endless array of fonts,
ranging from the elegant to the wacky, and render them pixel by pixel on the screen.
To design these fonts, Hertzfeld recruited a high school friend from suburban
Philadelphia, Susan Kare. They named the fonts after the stops on Philadelphia’s Main Line
commuter train: Overbrook, Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont. Jobs found the process
fascinating. Late one afternoon he stopped by and started brooding about the font names.
They were “little cities that nobody’s ever heard of,” he complained. “They ought to be
world-class cities!” The fonts were renamed Chicago, New York, Geneva, London, San
Francisco, Toronto, and Venice.
Markkula and some others could never quite appreciate Jobs’s obsession with
typography. “His knowledge of fonts was remarkable, and he kept insisting on having great
ones,” Markkula recalled. “I kept saying, ‘Fonts?!? Don’t we have more important things to
do?’” In fact the delightful assortment of Macintosh fonts, when combined with laser-
writer printing and great graphics capabilities, would help launch the desktop publishing
industry and be a boon for Apple’s bottom line. It also introduced all sorts of regular folks,
ranging from high school journalists to moms who edited PTA newsletters, to the quirky
joy of knowing about fonts, which was once reserved for printers, grizzled editors, and
other ink-stained wretches.
Kare also developed the icons, such as the trash can for discarding files, that helped
define graphical interfaces. She and Jobs hit it off because they shared an instinct for
simplicity along with a desire to make the Mac whimsical. “He usually came in at the end
of every day,” she said. “He’d always want to know what was new, and he’s always had

good taste and a good sense for visual details.” Sometimes he came in on Sunday morning,
so Kare made it a point to be there working. Every now and then, she would run into a
problem. He rejected one of her renderings of a rabbit, an icon for speeding up the mouse-
click rate, saying that the furry creature looked “too gay.”
Jobs lavished similar attention on the title bars atop windows and documents. He had
Atkinson and Kare do them over and over again as he agonized over their look. He did not
like the ones on the Lisa because they were too black and harsh. He wanted the ones on the
Mac to be smoother, to have pinstripes. “We must have gone through twenty different title
bar designs before he was happy,” Atkinson recalled. At one point Kare and Atkinson
complained that he was making them spend too much time on tiny little tweaks to the title
bar when they had bigger things to do. Jobs erupted. “Can you imagine looking at that
every day?” he shouted. “It’s not just a little thing, it’s something we have to do right.”
Chris Espinosa found one way to satisfy Jobs’s design demands and control-freak
tendencies. One of Wozniak’s youthful acolytes from the days in the garage, Espinosa had
been convinced to drop out of Berkeley by Jobs, who argued that he would always have a
chance to study, but only one chance to work on the Mac. On his own, he decided to design
a calculator for the computer. “We all gathered around as Chris showed the calculator to
Steve and then held his breath, waiting for Steve’s reaction,” Hertzfeld recalled.
“Well, it’s a start,” Jobs said, “but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark,
some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.” Espinosa kept refining it
in response to Jobs’s critiques, day after day, but with each iteration came new criticisms.
So finally one afternoon, when Jobs came by, Espinosa unveiled his inspired solution: “The
Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set.” It allowed the user to tweak and
personalize the look of the calculator by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the
buttons, the shading, the background, and other attributes. Instead of just laughing, Jobs
plunged in and started to play around with the look to suit his tastes. After about ten
minutes he got it the way he liked. His design, not surprisingly, was the one that shipped on
the Mac and remained the standard for fifteen years.
Although his focus was on the Macintosh, Jobs wanted to create a consistent design
language for all Apple products. So he set up a contest to choose a world-class designer
who would be for Apple what Dieter Rams was for Braun. The project was code-named
Snow White, not because of his preference for the color but because the products to be
designed were code-named after the seven dwarfs. The winner was Hartmut Esslinger, a
German designer who was responsible for the look of Sony’s Trinitron televisions. Jobs
flew to the Black Forest region of Bavaria to meet him and was impressed not only with
Esslinger’s passion but also his spirited way of driving his Mercedes at more than one
hundred miles per hour.
Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a “born-in-
America gene for Apple’s DNA” that would produce a “California global” look, inspired
by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex appeal.” His guiding principle
was “Form follows emotion,” a play on the familiar maxim that form follows function. He
produced forty models of products to demonstrate the concept, and when Jobs saw them he
proclaimed, “Yes, this is it!” The Snow White look, which was adopted immediately for the

Apple IIc, featured white cases, tight rounded curves, and lines of thin grooves for both
ventilation and decoration. Jobs offered Esslinger a contract on the condition that he move
to California. They shook hands and, in Esslinger’s not-so-modest words, “that handshake
launched one of the most decisive collaborations in the history of industrial design.”
Esslinger’s firm, frogdesign,2 opened in Palo Alto in mid-1983 with a $1.2 million annual
contract to work for Apple, and from then on every Apple product has included the proud
declaration “Designed in California.”

From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark of passionate craftsmanship is making
sure that even the aspects that will remain hidden are done beautifully. One of the most
extreme—and telling—implementations of that philosophy came when he scrutinized the
printed circuit board that would hold the chips and other components deep inside the
Macintosh. No consumer would ever see it, but Jobs began critiquing it on aesthetic
grounds. “That part’s really pretty,” he said. “But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly.
The lines are too close together.”
One of the new engineers interrupted and asked why it mattered. “The only thing that’s
important is how well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”
Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box.
A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though
nobody’s going to see it.” In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out,
Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: “When you’re a carpenter making a
beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even
though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going
to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic,
the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
From Mike Markkula he had learned the importance of packaging and presentation.
People do judge a book by its cover, so for the box of the Macintosh, Jobs chose a full-
color design and kept trying to make it look better. “He got the guys to redo it fifty times,”
recalled Alain Rossmann, a member of the Mac team who married Joanna Hoffman. “It
was going to be thrown in the trash as soon as the consumer opened it, but he was obsessed
by how it looked.” To Rossmann, this showed a lack of balance; money was being spent on
expensive packaging while they were trying to save money on the memory chips. But for
Jobs, each detail was essential to making the Macintosh amazing.
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a
ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper
and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved
inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew
that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as
elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went
first. Jobs waited until last, after all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the
center of the sheet and signed his name in lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he
toasted them with champagne. “With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art,”
said Atkinson.

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:10

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

BUILDING THE MAC

The Journey Is the Reward

Competition

When IBM introduced its personal computer in August 1981, Jobs had his team buy one
and dissect it. Their consensus was that it sucked. Chris Espinosa called it “a half-assed,
hackneyed attempt,” and there was some truth to that. It used old-fashioned command-line
prompts and didn’t support bitmapped graphical displays. Apple became cocky, not
realizing that corporate technology managers might feel more comfortable buying from an
established company like IBM rather than one named after a piece of fruit. Bill Gates
happened to be visiting Apple headquarters for a meeting on the day the IBM PC was
announced. “They didn’t seem to care,” he said. “It took them a year to realize what had
happened.”
Reflecting its cheeky confidence, Apple took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street
Journal with the headline “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” It cleverly positioned the upcoming
computer battle as a two-way contest between the spunky and rebellious Apple and the
establishment Goliath IBM, conveniently relegating to irrelevance companies such as
Commodore, Tandy, and Osborne that were doing just as well as Apple.
Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against
evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was
his perfect foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere business competition,
but as a spiritual struggle. “If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM
wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for
about twenty years,” he told an interviewer. “Once IBM gains control of a market sector,
they almost always stop innovation.” Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the
competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: “IBM was essentially Microsoft at its worst.
They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for evil. They were like ATT or
Microsoft or Google is.”

Unfortunately for Apple, Jobs also took aim at another perceived competitor to his
Macintosh: the company’s own Lisa. Partly it was psychological. He had been ousted from
that group, and now he wanted to beat it. He also saw healthy rivalry as a way to motivate
his troops. That’s why he bet John Couch $5,000 that the Mac would ship before the Lisa.
The problem was that the rivalry became unhealthy. Jobs repeatedly portrayed his band of
engineers as the cool kids on the block, in contrast to the plodding HP engineer types
working on the Lisa.
More substantively, when he moved away from Jef Raskin’s plan for an inexpensive and
underpowered portable appliance and reconceived the Mac as a desktop machine with a
graphical user interface, it became a scaled-down version of the Lisa that would likely
undercut it in the marketplace.
Larry Tesler, who managed application software for the Lisa, realized that it would be
important to design both machines to use many of the same software programs. So to
broker peace, he arranged for Smith and Hertzfeld to come to the Lisa work space and
demonstrate the Mac prototype. Twenty-five engineers showed up and were listening
politely when, halfway into the presentation, the door burst open. It was Rich Page, a
volatile engineer who was responsible for much of the Lisa’s design. “The Macintosh is
going to destroy the Lisa!” he shouted. “The Macintosh is going to ruin Apple!” Neither
Smith nor Hertzfeld responded, so Page continued his rant. “Jobs wants to destroy Lisa
because we wouldn’t let him control it,” he said, looking as if he were about to cry.
“Nobody’s going to buy a Lisa because they know the Mac is coming! But you don’t care!”
He stormed out of the room and slammed the door, but a moment later he barged back in
briefly. “I know it’s not your fault,” he said to Smith and Hertzfeld. “Steve Jobs is the
problem. Tell Steve that he’s destroying Apple!”
Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one with
incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible
with the Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of keeping
Jobs in harness.

End-to-end Control

Jobs’s reluctance to make the Mac compatible with the architecture of the Lisa was
motivated by more than rivalry or revenge. There was a philosophical component, one that
was related to his penchant for control. He believed that for a computer to be truly great, its
hardware and its software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running
software that also worked on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some
functionality. The best products, he believed, were “whole widgets” that were designed
end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa. This is what
would distinguish the Macintosh, which had an operating system that worked only on its
own hardware, from the environment that Microsoft was creating, in which its operating
system could be used on hardware made by many different companies.
“Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn’t want his creations mutated
inauspiciously by unworthy programmers,” explained ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber. “It

would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or
changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.” In later years Jobs’s whole-widget approach would
distinguish the iPhone, iPod, and iPad from their competitors. It resulted in awesome
products. But it was not always the best strategy for dominating a market. “From the first
Mac to the latest iPhone, Jobs’s systems have always been sealed shut to prevent
consumers from meddling and modifying them,” noted Leander Kahney, author of Cult of
the Mac.
Jobs’s desire to control the user experience had been at the heart of his debate with
Wozniak over whether the Apple II would have slots that allow a user to plug expansion
cards into a computer’s motherboard and thus add some new functionality. Wozniak won
that argument: The Apple II had eight slots. But this time around it would be Jobs’s
machine, not Wozniak’s, and the Macintosh would have limited slots. You wouldn’t even
be able to open the case and get to the motherboard. For a hobbyist or hacker, that was
uncool. But for Jobs, the Macintosh was for the masses. He wanted to give them a
controlled experience.
“It reflects his personality, which is to want control,” said Berry Cash, who was hired by
Jobs in 1982 to be a market strategist at Texaco Towers. “Steve would talk about the Apple
II and complain, ‘We don’t have control, and look at all these crazy things people are trying
to do to it. That’s a mistake I’ll never make again.’” He went so far as to design special
tools so that the Macintosh case could not be opened with a regular screwdriver. “We’re
going to design this thing so nobody but Apple employees can get inside this box,” he told
Cash.
Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow keys on the Macintosh keyboard. The
only way to move the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing old-fashioned
users to adapt to point-and-click navigation, even if they didn’t want to. Unlike other
product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to
resist using a mouse, they were wrong.
There was one other advantage, he believed, to eliminating the cursor keys: It forced
outside software developers to write programs specially for the Mac operating system,
rather than merely writing generic software that could be ported to a variety of computers.
That made for the type of tight vertical integration between application software, operating
systems, and hardware devices that Jobs liked.
Jobs’s desire for end-to-end control also made him allergic to proposals that Apple
license the Macintosh operating system to other office equipment manufacturers and allow
them to make Macintosh clones. The new and energetic Macintosh marketing director
Mike Murray proposed a licensing program in a confidential memo to Jobs in May 1982.
“We would like the Macintosh user environment to become an industry standard,” he
wrote. “The hitch, of course, is that now one must buy Mac hardware in order to get this
user environment. Rarely (if ever) has one company been able to create and maintain an
industry-wide standard that cannot be shared with other manufacturers.” His proposal was
to license the Macintosh operating system to Tandy. Because Tandy’s Radio Shack stores
went after a different type of customer, Murray argued, it would not severely cannibalize
Apple sales. But Jobs was congenitally averse to such a plan. His approach meant that the

Macintosh remained a controlled environment that met his standards, but it also meant that,
as Murray feared, it would have trouble securing its place as an industry standard in a
world of IBM clones.

Machines of the Year

As 1982 drew to a close, Jobs came to believe that he was going to be Time’s Man of the
Year. He arrived at Texaco Towers one day with the magazine’s San Francisco bureau
chief, Michael Moritz, and encouraged colleagues to give Moritz interviews. But Jobs did
not end up on the cover. Instead the magazine chose “the Computer” as the topic for the
year-end issue and called it “the Machine of the Year.”
Accompanying the main story was a profile of Jobs, which was based on the reporting
done by Moritz and written by Jay Cocks, an editor who usually handled rock music for the
magazine. “With his smooth sales pitch and a blind faith that would have been the envy of
the early Christian martyrs, it is Steven Jobs, more than anyone, who kicked open the door
and let the personal computer move in,” the story proclaimed. It was a richly reported
piece, but also harsh at times—so harsh that Moritz (after he wrote a book about Apple and
went on to be a partner in the venture firm Sequoia Capital with Don Valentine) repudiated
it by complaining that his reporting had been “siphoned, filtered, and poisoned with
gossipy benzene by an editor in New York whose regular task was to chronicle the
wayward world of rock-and-roll music.” The article quoted Bud Tribble on Jobs’s “reality
distortion field” and noted that he “would occasionally burst into tears at meetings.”
Perhaps the best quote came from Jef Raskin. Jobs, he declared, “would have made an
excellent King of France.”
To Jobs’s dismay, the magazine made public the existence of the daughter he had
forsaken, Lisa Brennan. He knew that Kottke had been the one to tell the magazine about
Lisa, and he berated him in the Mac group work space in front of a half dozen people.
“When the Time reporter asked me if Steve had a daughter named Lisa, I said ‘Of course,’”
Kottke recalled. “Friends don’t let friends deny that they’re the father of a child. I’m not
going to let my friend be a jerk and deny paternity. He was really angry and felt violated
and told me in front of everyone that I had betrayed him.”
But what truly devastated Jobs was that he was not, after all, chosen as the Man of the
Year. As he later told me:
Time decided they were going to make me Man of the Year, and I was twenty-seven, so
I actually cared about stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool. They sent out Mike
Moritz to write a story. We’re the same age, and I had been very successful, and I could tell
he was jealous and there was an edge to him. He wrote this terrible hatchet job. So the
editors in New York get this story and say, “We can’t make this guy Man of the Year.” That
really hurt. But it was a good lesson. It taught me to never get too excited about things like
that, since the media is a circus anyway. They FedExed me the magazine, and I remember
opening the package, thoroughly expecting to see my mug on the cover, and it was this
computer sculpture thing. I thought, “Huh?” And then I read the article, and it was so awful
that I actually cried.

In fact there’s no reason to believe that Moritz was jealous or that he intended his
reporting to be unfair. Nor was Jobs ever slated to be Man of the Year, despite what he
thought. That year the top editors (I was then a junior editor there) decided early on to go
with the computer rather than a person, and they commissioned, months in advance, a piece
of art from the famous sculptor George Segal to be a gatefold cover image. Ray Cave was
then the magazine’s editor. “We never considered Jobs,” he said. “You couldn’t personify
the computer, so that was the first time we decided to go with an inanimate object. We
never searched around for a face to be put on the cover.”

Apple launched the Lisa in January 1983—a full year before the Mac was ready—and Jobs
paid his $5,000 wager to Couch. Even though he was not part of the Lisa team, Jobs went
to New York to do publicity for it in his role as Apple’s chairman and poster boy.
He had learned from his public relations consultant Regis McKenna how to dole out
exclusive interviews in a dramatic manner. Reporters from anointed publications were
ushered in sequentially for their hour with him in his Carlyle Hotel suite, where a Lisa
computer was set on a table and surrounded by cut flowers. The publicity plan called for
Jobs to focus on the Lisa and not mention the Macintosh, because speculation about it
could undermine the Lisa. But Jobs couldn’t help himself. In most of the stories based on
his interviews that day—in Time, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, and Fortune—the
Macintosh was mentioned. “Later this year Apple will introduce a less powerful, less
expensive version of Lisa, the Macintosh,” Fortune reported. “Jobs himself has directed
that project.” Business Week quoted him as saying, “When it comes out, Mac is going to be
the most incredible computer in the world.” He also admitted that the Mac and the Lisa
would not be compatible. It was like launching the Lisa with the kiss of death.
The Lisa did indeed die a slow death. Within two years it would be discontinued. “It was
too expensive, and we were trying to sell it to big companies when our expertise was
selling to consumers,” Jobs later said. But there was a silver lining for Jobs: Within months
of Lisa’s launch, it became clear that Apple had to pin its hopes on the Macintosh instead.

Let’s Be Pirates!

As the Macintosh team grew, it moved from Texaco Towers to the main Apple buildings on
Bandley Drive, finally settling in mid-1983 into Bandley 3. It had a modern atrium lobby
with video games, which Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld chose, and a Toshiba compact
disc stereo system with MartinLogan speakers and a hundred CDs. The software team was
visible from the lobby in a fishbowl-like glass enclosure, and the kitchen was stocked daily
with Odwalla juices. Over time the atrium attracted even more toys, most notably a
Bösendorfer piano and a BMW motorcycle that Jobs felt would inspire an obsession with
lapidary craftsmanship.
Jobs kept a tight rein on the hiring process. The goal was to get people who were
creative, wickedly smart, and slightly rebellious. The software team would make applicants

play Defender, Smith’s favorite video game. Jobs would ask his usual offbeat questions to
see how well the applicant could think in unexpected situations. One day he, Hertzfeld, and
Smith interviewed a candidate for software manager who, it became clear as soon as he
walked in the room, was too uptight and conventional to manage the wizards in the
fishbowl. Jobs began to toy with him mercilessly. “How old were you when you lost your
virginity?” he asked.
The candidate looked baffled. “What did you say?”
“Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat there flustered, so Jobs changed the
subject. “How many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled, “The poor guy was
turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straightforward
technical question.” But when the candidate droned on in his response, Jobs broke in.
“Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble,” he said, cracking up Smith and Hertzfeld.
“I guess I’m not the right guy,” the poor man said as he got up to leave.

For all of his obnoxious behavior, Jobs also had the ability to instill in his team an esprit de
corps. After tearing people down, he would find ways to lift them up and make them feel
that being part of the Macintosh project was an amazing mission. Every six months he
would take most of his team on a two-day retreat at a nearby resort.
The retreat in September 1982 was at the Pajaro Dunes near Monterey. Fifty or so
members of the Mac division sat in the lodge facing a fireplace. Jobs sat on top of a table in
front of them. He spoke quietly for a while, then walked to an easel and began posting his
thoughts.
The first was “Don’t compromise.” It was an injunction that would, over time, be both
helpful and harmful. Most technology teams made trade-offs. The Mac, on the other hand,
would end up being as “insanely great” as Jobs and his acolytes could possibly make it—
but it would not ship for another sixteen months, way behind schedule. After mentioning a
scheduled completion date, he told them, “It would be better to miss than to turn out the
wrong thing.” A different type of project manager, willing to make some trade-offs, might
try to lock in dates after which no changes could be made. Not Jobs. He displayed another
maxim: “It’s not done until it ships.”
Another chart contained a koōan-like phrase that he later told me was his favorite
maxim: “The journey is the reward.” The Mac team, he liked to emphasize, was a special
corps with an exalted mission. Someday they would all look back on their journey together
and, forgetting or laughing off the painful moments, would regard it as a magical high point
in their lives.
At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some
market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t
know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out a device that was about
the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it
turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and
screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in
the mid-to late eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the
future.

For the next two days there were presentations by various team leaders and the
influential computer industry analyst Ben Rosen, with a lot of time in the evenings for pool
parties and dancing. At the end, Jobs stood in front of the assemblage and gave a soliloquy.
“As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple
through the universe,” he said. “I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is
the most fun thing I’ve done in my life.” Years later most of those in the audience would be
able to laugh about the “little hard to get along with” episodes and agree with him that
creating that giant ripple was the most fun they had in their lives.
The next retreat was at the end of January 1983, the same month the Lisa launched, and
there was a shift in tone. Four months earlier Jobs had written on his flip chart: “Don’t
compromise.” This time one of the maxims was “Real artists ship.” Nerves were frayed.
Atkinson had been left out of the publicity interviews for the Lisa launch, and he marched
into Jobs’s hotel room and threatened to quit. Jobs tried to minimize the slight, but
Atkinson refused to be mollified. Jobs got annoyed. “I don’t have time to deal with this
now,” he said. “I have sixty other people out there who are pouring their hearts into the
Macintosh, and they’re waiting for me to start the meeting.” With that he brushed past
Atkinson to go address the faithful.
Jobs proceeded to give a rousing speech in which he claimed that he had resolved the
dispute with McIntosh audio labs to use the Macintosh name. (In fact the issue was still
being negotiated, but the moment called for a bit of the old reality distortion field.) He
pulled out a bottle of mineral water and symbolically christened the prototype onstage.
Down the hall, Atkinson heard the loud cheer, and with a sigh joined the group. The
ensuing party featured skinny-dipping in the pool, a bonfire on the beach, and loud music
that lasted all night, which caused the hotel, La Playa in Carmel, to ask them never to come
back.
Another of Jobs’s maxims at the retreat was “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the
navy.” He wanted to instill a rebel spirit in his team, to have them behave like
swashbucklers who were proud of their work but willing to commandeer from others. As
Susan Kare put it, “He meant, ‘Let’s have a renegade feeling to our group. We can move
fast. We can get things done.’” To celebrate Jobs’s birthday a few weeks later, the team paid
for a billboard on the road to Apple headquarters. It read: “Happy 28th Steve. The Journey
is the Reward.—The Pirates.”
One of the Mac team’s programmers, Steve Capps, decided this new spirit warranted
hoisting a Jolly Roger. He cut a patch of black cloth and had Kare paint a skull and
crossbones on it. The eye patch she put on the skull was an Apple logo. Late one Sunday
night Capps climbed to the roof of their newly built Bandley 3 building and hoisted the flag
on a scaffolding pole that the construction workers had left behind. It waved proudly for a
few weeks, until members of the Lisa team, in a late-night foray, stole the flag and sent
their Mac rivals a ransom note. Capps led a raid to recover it and was able to wrestle it
from a secretary who was guarding it for the Lisa team. Some of the grown-ups overseeing
Apple worried that Jobs’s buccaneer spirit was getting out of hand. “Flying that flag was
really stupid,” said Arthur Rock. “It was telling the rest of the company they were no
good.” But Jobs loved it, and he made sure it waved proudly all the way through to the

completion of the Mac project. “We were the renegades, and we wanted people to know it,”
he recalled.

Veterans of the Mac team had learned that they could stand up to Jobs. If they knew what
they were talking about, he would tolerate the pushback, even admire it. By 1983 those
most familiar with his reality distortion field had discovered something further: They could,
if necessary, just quietly disregard what he decreed. If they turned out to be right, he would
appreciate their renegade attitude and willingness to ignore authority. After all, that’s what
he did.
By far the most important example of this involved the choice of a disk drive for the
Macintosh. Apple had a corporate division that built mass-storage devices, and it had
developed a disk-drive system, code-named Twiggy, that could read and write onto those
thin, delicate 5¼-inch floppy disks that older readers (who also remember Twiggy the
model) will recall. But by the time the Lisa was ready to ship in the spring of 1983, it was
clear that the Twiggy was buggy. Because the Lisa also came with a hard-disk drive, this
was not a complete disaster. But the Mac had no hard disk, so it faced a crisis. “The Mac
team was beginning to panic,” said Hertzfeld. “We were using a single Twiggy drive, and
we didn’t have a hard disk to fall back on.”
The team discussed the problem at the January 1983 retreat, and Debi Coleman gave
Jobs data about the Twiggy failure rate. A few days later he drove to Apple’s factory in San
Jose to see the Twiggy being made. More than half were rejected. Jobs erupted. With his
face flushed, he began shouting and sputtering about firing everyone who worked there.
Bob Belleville, the head of the Mac engineering team, gently guided him to the parking lot,
where they could take a walk and talk about alternatives.
One possibility that Belleville had been exploring was to use a new 3½-inch disk drive
that Sony had developed. The disk was cased in sturdier plastic and could fit into a shirt
pocket. Another option was to have a clone of Sony’s 3½-inch disk drive manufactured by
a smaller Japanese supplier, the Alps Electronics Co., which had been supplying disk drives
for the Apple II. Alps had already licensed the technology from Sony, and if they could
build their own version in time it would be much cheaper.
Jobs and Belleville, along with Apple veteran Rod Holt (the guy Jobs enlisted to design
the first power supply for the Apple II), flew to Japan to figure out what to do. They took
the bullet train from Tokyo to visit the Alps facility. The engineers there didn’t even have a
working prototype, just a crude model. Jobs thought it was great, but Belleville was
appalled. There was no way, he thought, that Alps could have it ready for the Mac within a
year.
As they proceeded to visit other Japanese companies, Jobs was on his worst behavior. He
wore jeans and sneakers to meetings with Japanese managers in dark suits. When they
formally handed him little gifts, as was the custom, he often left them behind, and he never
reciprocated with gifts of his own. He would sneer when rows of engineers lined up to
greet him, bow, and politely offer their products for inspection. Jobs hated both the devices
and the obsequiousness. “What are you showing me this for?” he snapped at one stop.
“This is a piece of crap! Anybody could build a better drive than this.” Although most of his

hosts were appalled, some seemed amused. They had heard tales of his obnoxious style and
brash behavior, and now they were getting to see it in full display.
The final stop was the Sony factory, located in a drab suburb of Tokyo. To Jobs, it looked
messy and inelegant. A lot of the work was done by hand. He hated it. Back at the hotel,
Belleville argued for going with the Sony disk drive. It was ready to use. Jobs disagreed.
He decided that they would work with Alps to produce their own drive, and he ordered
Belleville to cease all work with Sony.
Belleville decided it was best to partially ignore Jobs, and he asked a Sony executive to
get its disk drive ready for use in the Macintosh. If and when it became clear that Alps
could not deliver on time, Apple would switch to Sony. So Sony sent over the engineer who
had developed the drive, Hidetoshi Komoto, a Purdue graduate who fortunately possessed a
good sense of humor about his clandestine task.
Whenever Jobs would come from his corporate office to visit the Mac team’s engineers
—which was almost every afternoon—they would hurriedly find somewhere for Komoto to
hide. At one point Jobs ran into him at a newsstand in Cupertino and recognized him from
the meeting in Japan, but he didn’t suspect anything. The closest call was when Jobs came
bustling onto the Mac work space unexpectedly one day while Komoto was sitting in one
of the cubicles. A Mac engineer grabbed him and pointed him to a janitorial closet. “Quick,
hide in this closet. Please! Now!” Komoto looked confused, Hertzfeld recalled, but he
jumped up and did as told. He had to stay in the closet for five minutes, until Jobs left. The
Mac engineers apologized. “No problem,” he replied. “But American business practices,
they are very strange. Very strange.”
Belleville’s prediction came true. In May 1983 the folks at Alps admitted it would take
them at least eighteen more months to get their clone of the Sony drive into production. At
a retreat in Pajaro Dunes, Markkula grilled Jobs on what he was going to do. Finally,
Belleville interrupted and said that he might have an alternative to the Alps drive ready
soon. Jobs looked baffled for just a moment, and then it became clear to him why he’d
glimpsed Sony’s top disk designer in Cupertino. “You son of a bitch!” Jobs said. But it was
not in anger. There was a big grin on his face. As soon as he realized what Belleville and
the other engineers had done behind his back, said Hertzfeld, “Steve swallowed his pride
and thanked them for disobeying him and doing the right thing.” It was, after all, what he
would have done in their situation.

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:11

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ENTER SCULLEY

The Pepsi Challenge

With John Sculley, 1984

The Courtship

Mike Markkula had never wanted to be Apple’s president. He liked designing his new
houses, flying his private plane, and living high off his stock options; he did not relish
adjudicating conflict or curating high-maintenance egos. He had stepped into the role
reluctantly, after he felt compelled to ease out Mike Scott, and he promised his wife the gig
would be temporary. By the end of 1982, after almost two years, she gave him an order:
Find a replacement right away.
Jobs knew that he was not ready to run the company himself, even though there was a
part of him that wanted to try. Despite his arrogance, he could be self-aware. Markkula
agreed; he told Jobs that he was still a bit too rough-edged and immature to be Apple’s
president. So they launched a search for someone from the outside.
The person they most wanted was Don Estridge, who had built IBM’s personal computer
division from scratch and launched a PC that, even though Jobs and his team disparaged it,
was now outselling Apple’s. Estridge had sheltered his division in Boca Raton, Florida,
safely removed from the corporate mentality of Armonk, New York. Like Jobs, he was
driven and inspiring, but unlike Jobs, he had the ability to allow others to think that his
brilliant ideas were their own. Jobs flew to Boca Raton with the offer of a $1 million salary
and a $1 million signing bonus, but Estridge turned him down. He was not the type who
would jump ship to join the enemy. He also enjoyed being part of the establishment, a
member of the Navy rather than a pirate. He was discomforted by Jobs’s tales of ripping off
the phone company. When asked where he worked, he loved to be able to answer “IBM.”
So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a gregarious corporate headhunter, to find
someone else. They decided not to focus on technology executives; what they needed was a

consumer marketer who knew advertising and had the corporate polish that would play
well on Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the hottest consumer marketing wizard of the
moment, John Sculley, president of the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, whose Pepsi
Challenge campaign had been an advertising and publicity triumph. When Jobs gave a talk
to Stanford business students, he heard good things about Sculley, who had spoken to the
class earlier. So he told Roche he would be happy to meet him.
Sculley’s background was very different from Jobs’s. His mother was an Upper East
Side Manhattan matron who wore white gloves when she went out, and his father was a
proper Wall Street lawyer. Sculley was sent off to St. Mark’s School, then got his
undergraduate degree from Brown and a business degree from Wharton. He had risen
through the ranks at PepsiCo as an innovative marketer and advertiser, with little passion
for product development or information technology.
Sculley flew to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his two teenage children from a
previous marriage. He took them to visit a computer store, where he was struck by how
poorly the products were marketed. When his kids asked why he was so interested, he said
he was planning to go up to Cupertino to meet Steve Jobs. They were totally blown away.
They had grown up among movie stars, but to them Jobs was a true celebrity. It made
Sculley take more seriously the prospect of being hired as his boss.
When he arrived at Apple headquarters, Sculley was startled by the unassuming offices
and casual atmosphere. “Most people were less formally dressed than PepsiCo’s
maintenance staff,” he noted. Over lunch Jobs picked quietly at his salad, but when Sculley
declared that most executives found computers more trouble than they were worth, Jobs
clicked into evangelical mode. “We want to change the way people use computers,” he
said.
On the flight home Sculley outlined his thoughts. The result was an eight-page memo on
marketing computers to consumers and business executives. It was a bit sophomoric in
parts, filled with underlined phrases, diagrams, and boxes, but it revealed his newfound
enthusiasm for figuring out ways to sell something more interesting than soda. Among his
recommendations: “Invest in in-store merchandizing that romances the consumer with
Apple’s potential to enrich their life!” He was still reluctant to leave Pepsi, but Jobs
intrigued him. “I was taken by this young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to
get to know him a little better,” he recalled.
So Sculley agreed to meet again when Jobs next came to New York, which happened to
be for the January 1983 Lisa introduction at the Carlyle Hotel. After the full day of press
sessions, the Apple team was surprised to see an unscheduled visitor come into the suite.
Jobs loosened his tie and introduced Sculley as the president of Pepsi and a potential big
corporate customer. As John Couch demonstrated the Lisa, Jobs chimed in with bursts of
commentary, sprinkled with his favorite words, “revolutionary” and “incredible,” claiming
it would change the nature of human interaction with computers.
They then headed off to the Four Seasons restaurant, a shimmering haven of elegance
and power. As Jobs ate a special vegan meal, Sculley described Pepsi’s marketing
successes. The Pepsi Generation campaign, he said, sold not a product but a lifestyle and an
optimistic outlook. “I think Apple’s got a chance to create an Apple Generation.” Jobs

enthusiastically agreed. The Pepsi Challenge campaign, in contrast, focused on the product;
it combined ads, events, and public relations to stir up buzz. The ability to turn the
introduction of a new product into a moment of national excitement was, Jobs noted, what
he and Regis McKenna wanted to do at Apple.
When they finished talking, it was close to midnight. “This has been one of the most
exciting evenings in my whole life,” Jobs said as Sculley walked him back to the Carlyle.
“I can’t tell you how much fun I’ve had.” When he finally got home to Greenwich,
Connecticut, that night, Sculley had trouble sleeping. Engaging with Jobs was a lot more
fun than negotiating with bottlers. “It stimulated me, roused my long-held desire to be an
architect of ideas,” he later noted. The next morning Roche called Sculley. “I don’t know
what you guys did last night, but let me tell you, Steve Jobs is ecstatic,” he said.
And so the courtship continued, with Sculley playing hard but not impossible to get. Jobs
flew east for a visit one Saturday in February and took a limo up to Greenwich. He found
Sculley’s newly built mansion ostentatious, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, but he
admired the three hundred-pound custom-made oak doors that were so carefully hung and
balanced that they swung open with the touch of a finger. “Steve was fascinated by that
because he is, as I am, a perfectionist,” Sculley recalled. Thus began the somewhat
unhealthy process of a star-struck Sculley perceiving in Jobs qualities that he fancied in
himself.
Sculley usually drove a Cadillac, but, sensing his guest’s taste, he borrowed his wife’s
Mercedes 450SL convertible to take Jobs to see Pepsi’s 144-acre corporate headquarters,
which was as lavish as Apple’s was austere. To Jobs, it epitomized the difference between
the feisty new digital economy and the Fortune 500 corporate establishment. A winding
drive led through manicured fields and a sculpture garden (including pieces by Rodin,
Moore, Calder, and Giacometti) to a concrete-and-glass building designed by Edward
Durell Stone. Sculley’s huge office had a Persian rug, nine windows, a small private
garden, a hideaway study, and its own bathroom. When Jobs saw the corporate fitness
center, he was astonished that executives had an area, with its own whirlpool, separate from
that of the regular employees. “That’s weird,” he said. Sculley hastened to agree. “As a
matter of fact, I was against it, and I go over and work out sometimes in the employees’
area,” he said.
Their next meeting was a few weeks later in Cupertino, when Sculley stopped on his
way back from a Pepsi bottlers’ convention in Hawaii. Mike Murray, the Macintosh
marketing manager, took charge of preparing the team for the visit, but he was not clued in
on the real agenda. “PepsiCo could end up purchasing literally thousands of Macs over the
next few years,” he exulted in a memo to the Macintosh staff. “During the past year, Mr.
Sculley and a certain Mr. Jobs have become friends. Mr. Sculley is considered to be one of
the best marketing heads in the big leagues; as such, let’s give him a good time here.”
Jobs wanted Sculley to share his excitement about the Macintosh. “This product means
more to me than anything I’ve done,” he said. “I want you to be the first person outside of
Apple to see it.” He dramatically pulled the prototype out of a vinyl bag and gave a
demonstration. Sculley found Jobs as memorable as his machine. “He seemed more a

showman than a businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to
create an occasion of the moment.”
Jobs had asked Hertzfeld and the gang to prepare a special screen display for Sculley’s
amusement. “He’s really smart,” Jobs said. “You wouldn’t believe how smart he is.” The
explanation that Sculley might buy a lot of Macintoshes for Pepsi “sounded a little bit fishy
to me,” Hertzfeld recalled, but he and Susan Kare created a screen of Pepsi caps and cans
that danced around with the Apple logo. Hertzfeld was so excited he began waving his
arms around during the demo, but Sculley seemed underwhelmed. “He asked a few
questions, but he didn’t seem all that interested,” Hertzfeld recalled. He never ended up
warming to Sculley. “He was incredibly phony, a complete poseur,” he later said. “He
pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn’t. He was a marketing guy, and that is
what marketing guys are: paid poseurs.”
Matters came to a head when Jobs visited New York in March 1983 and was able to
convert the courtship into a blind and blinding romance. “I really think you’re the guy,”
Jobs said as they walked through Central Park. “I want you to come and work with me. I
can learn so much from you.” Jobs, who had cultivated father figures in the past, knew just
how to play to Sculley’s ego and insecurities. It worked. “I was smitten by him,” Sculley
later admitted. “Steve was one of the brightest people I’d ever met. I shared with him a
passion for ideas.”
Sculley, who was interested in art history, steered them toward the Metropolitan Museum
for a little test of whether Jobs was really willing to learn from others. “I wanted to see how
well he could take coaching in a subject where he had no background,” he recalled. As they
strolled through the Greek and Roman antiquities, Sculley expounded on the difference
between the Archaic sculpture of the sixth century B.C. and the Periclean sculptures a
century later. Jobs, who loved to pick up historical nuggets he never learned in college,
seemed to soak it in. “I gained a sense that I could be a teacher to a brilliant student,”
Sculley recalled. Once again he indulged the conceit that they were alike: “I saw in him a
mirror image of my younger self. I, too, was impatient, stubborn, arrogant, impetuous. My
mind exploded with ideas, often to the exclusion of everything else. I, too, was intolerant of
those who couldn’t live up to my demands.”
As they continued their long walk, Sculley confided that on vacations he went to the Left
Bank in Paris to draw in his sketchbook; if he hadn’t become a businessman, he would be
an artist. Jobs replied that if he weren’t working with computers, he could see himself as a
poet in Paris. They continued down Broadway to Colony Records on Forty-ninth Street,
where Jobs showed Sculley the music he liked, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ella
Fitzgerald, and the Windham Hill jazz artists. Then they walked all the way back up to the
San Remo on Central Park West and Seventy-fourth, where Jobs was planning to buy a
two-story tower penthouse apartment.
The consummation occurred outside the penthouse on one of the terraces, with Sculley
sticking close to the wall because he was afraid of heights. First they discussed money. “I
told him I needed $1 million in salary, $1 million for a sign-up bonus,” said Sculley. Jobs
claimed that would be doable. “Even if I have to pay for it out of my own pocket,” he said.
“We’ll have to solve those problems, because you’re the best person I’ve ever met. I know

you’re perfect for Apple, and Apple deserves the best.” He added that never before had he
worked for someone he really respected, but he knew that Sculley was the person who
could teach him the most. Jobs gave him his unblinking stare.
Sculley uttered one last demurral, a token suggestion that maybe they should just be
friends and he could offer Jobs advice from the sidelines. “Any time you’re in New York,
I’d love to spend time with you.” He later recounted the climactic moment: “Steve’s head
dropped as he stared at his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a
challenge that would haunt me for days. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling
sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?’”
Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response possible
other than to acquiesce. “He had an uncanny ability to always get what he wanted, to size
up a person and know exactly what to say to reach a person,” Sculley recalled. “I realized
for the first time in four months that I couldn’t say no.” The winter sun was beginning to
set. They left the apartment and walked back across the park to the Carlyle.

The Honeymoon

Sculley arrived in California just in time for the May 1983 Apple management retreat at
Pajaro Dunes. Even though he had left all but one of his dark suits back in Greenwich, he
was still having trouble adjusting to the casual atmosphere. In the front of the meeting
room, Jobs sat on the floor in the lotus position absentmindedly playing with the toes of his
bare feet. Sculley tried to impose an agenda; he wanted to discuss how to differentiate their
products—the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, and Mac—and whether it made sense to organize
the company around product lines or markets or functions. But the discussion descended
into a free-for-all of random ideas, complaints, and debates.
At one point Jobs attacked the Lisa team for producing an unsuccessful product. “Well,”
someone shot back, “you haven’t delivered the Macintosh! Why don’t you wait until you
get a product out before you start being critical?” Sculley was astonished. At Pepsi no one
would have challenged the chairman like that. “Yet here, everyone began pig-piling on
Steve.” It reminded him of an old joke he had heard from one of the Apple ad salesmen:
“What’s the difference between Apple and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult
supervision.”
In the midst of the bickering, a small earthquake began to rumble the room. “Head for
the beach,” someone shouted. Everyone ran through the door to the water. Then someone
else shouted that the previous earthquake had produced a tidal wave, so they all turned and
ran the other way. “The indecision, the contradictory advice, the specter of natural disaster,
only foreshadowed what was to come,” Sculley later wrote.
One Saturday morning Jobs invited Sculley and his wife, Leezy, over for breakfast. He
was then living in a nice but unexceptional Tudor-style home in Los Gatos with his
girlfriend, Barbara Jasinski, a smart and reserved beauty who worked for Regis McKenna.
Leezy had brought a pan and made vegetarian omelets. (Jobs had edged away from his
strict vegan diet for the time being.) “I’m sorry I don’t have much furniture,” Jobs
apologized. “I just haven’t gotten around to it.” It was one of his enduring quirks: His

exacting standards of craftsmanship combined with a Spartan streak made him reluctant to
buy any furnishings that he wasn’t passionate about. He had a Tiffany lamp, an antique
dining table, and a laser disc video attached to a Sony Trinitron, but foam cushions on the
floor rather than sofas and chairs. Sculley smiled and mistakenly thought that it was similar
to his own “frantic and Spartan life in a cluttered New York City apartment” early in his
own career.
Jobs confided in Sculley that he believed he would die young, and therefore he needed to
accomplish things quickly so that he would make his mark on Silicon Valley history. “We
all have a short period of time on this earth,” he told the Sculleys as they sat around the
table that morning. “We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great
and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but
my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I’m young.”
Jobs and Sculley would talk dozens of times a day in the early months of their
relationship. “Steve and I became soul mates, near constant companions,” Sculley said.
“We tended to speak in half sentences and phrases.” Jobs flattered Sculley. When he
dropped by to hash something out, he would say something like “You’re the only one who
will understand.” They would tell each other repeatedly, indeed so often that it should have
been worrying, how happy they were to be with each other and working in tandem. And at
every opportunity Sculley would find similarities with Jobs and point them out:
We could complete each other’s sentences because we were on the same wavelength.
Steve would rouse me from sleep at 2 a.m. with a phone call to chat about an idea that
suddenly crossed his mind. “Hi! It’s me,” he’d harmlessly say to the dazed listener, totally
unaware of the time. I curiously had done the same in my Pepsi days. Steve would rip apart
a presentation he had to give the next morning, throwing out slides and text. So had I as I
struggled to turn public speaking into an important management tool during my early days
at Pepsi. As a young executive, I was always impatient to get things done and often felt I
could do them better myself. So did Steve. Sometimes I felt as if I was watching Steve
playing me in a movie. The similarities were uncanny, and they were behind the amazing
symbiosis we developed.

This was self-delusion, and it was a recipe for disaster. Jobs began to sense it early on.
“We had different ways of looking at the world, different views on people, different
values,” Jobs recalled. “I began to realize this a few months after he arrived. He didn’t
learn things very quickly, and the people he wanted to promote were usually bozos.”
Yet Jobs knew that he could manipulate Sculley by encouraging his belief that they were
so alike. And the more he manipulated Sculley, the more contemptuous of him he became.
Canny observers in the Mac group, such as Joanna Hoffman, soon realized what was
happening and knew that it would make the inevitable breakup more explosive. “Steve
made Sculley feel like he was exceptional,” she said. “Sculley had never felt that. Sculley
became infatuated, because Steve projected on him a whole bunch of attributes that he
didn’t really have. When it became clear that Sculley didn’t match all of these projections,
Steve’s distortion of reality had created an explosive situation.”

The ardor eventually began to cool on Sculley’s side as well. Part of his weakness in
trying to manage a dysfunctional company was his desire to please other people, one of
many traits that he did not share with Jobs. He was a polite person; this caused him to
recoil at Jobs’s rudeness to their fellow workers. “We would go to the Mac building at
eleven at night,” he recalled, “and they would bring him code to show. In some cases he
wouldn’t even look at it. He would just take it and throw it back at them. I’d say, ‘How can
you turn it down?’ And he would say, ‘I know they can do better.’” Sculley tried to coach
him. “You’ve got to learn to hold things back,” he told him at one point. Jobs would agree,
but it was not in his nature to filter his feelings through a gauze.
Sculley began to believe that Jobs’s mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people
were rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the reflection of a mild bipolarity.
There were big mood swings; sometimes he would be ecstatic, at other times he was
depressed. At times he would launch into brutal tirades without warning, and Sculley would
have to calm him down. “Twenty minutes later, I would get another call and be told to
come over because Steve is losing it again,” he said.
Their first substantive disagreement was over how to price the Macintosh. It had been
conceived as a $1,000 machine, but Jobs’s design changes had pushed up the cost so that
the plan was to sell it at $1,995. However, when Jobs and Sculley began making plans for a
huge launch and marketing push, Sculley decided that they needed to charge $500 more. To
him, the marketing costs were like any other production cost and needed to be factored into
the price. Jobs resisted, furiously. “It will destroy everything we stand for,” he said. “I want
to make this a revolution, not an effort to squeeze out profits.” Sculley said it was a simple
choice: He could have the $1,995 price or he could have the marketing budget for a big
launch, but not both.
“You’re not going to like this,” Jobs told Hertzfeld and the other engineers, “but Sculley
is insisting that we charge $2,495 for the Mac instead of $1,995.” Indeed the engineers
were horrified. Hertzfeld pointed out that they were designing the Mac for people like
themselves, and overpricing it would be a “betrayal” of what they stood for. So Jobs
promised them, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to let him get away with it!” But in the end,
Sculley prevailed. Even twenty-five years later Jobs seethed when recalling the decision:
“It’s the main reason the Macintosh sales slowed and Microsoft got to dominate the
market.” The decision made him feel that he was losing control of his product and
company, and this was as dangerous as making a tiger feel cornered.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE LAUNCH

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:13

A Dent in the Universe
The “1984” ad

Real Artists Ship

The high point of the October 1983 Apple sales conference in Hawaii was a skit based on a
TV show called The Dating Game. Jobs played emcee, and his three contestants, whom he
had convinced to fly to Hawaii, were Bill Gates and two other software executives, Mitch
Kapor and Fred Gibbons. As the show’s jingly theme song played, the three took their
stools. Gates, looking like a high school sophomore, got wild applause from the 750 Apple
salesmen when he said, “During 1984, Microsoft expects to get half of its revenues from
software for the Macintosh.” Jobs, clean-shaven and bouncy, gave a toothy smile and asked
if he thought that the Macintosh’s new operating system would become one of the
industry’s new standards. Gates answered, “To create a new standard takes not just making
something that’s a little bit different, it takes something that’s really new and captures
people’s imagination. And the Macintosh, of all the machines I’ve ever seen, is the only
one that meets that standard.”
But even as Gates was speaking, Microsoft was edging away from being primarily a
collaborator with Apple to being more of a competitor. It would continue to make
application software, like Microsoft Word, for Apple, but a rapidly increasing share of its
revenue would come from the operating system it had written for the IBM personal

computer. The year before, 279,000 Apple IIs were sold, compared to 240,000 IBM PCs
and its clones. But the figures for 1983 were coming in starkly different: 420,000 Apple IIs
versus 1.3 million IBMs and its clones. And both the Apple III and the Lisa were dead in
the water.
Just when the Apple sales force was arriving in Hawaii, this shift was hammered home
on the cover of Business Week. Its headline: “Personal Computers: And the Winner Is . . .
IBM.” The story inside detailed the rise of the IBM PC. “The battle for market supremacy
is already over,” the magazine declared. “In a stunning blitz, IBM has taken more than 26%
of the market in two years, and is expected to account for half the world market by 1985.
An additional 25% of the market will be turning out IBM-compatible machines.”
That put all the more pressure on the Macintosh, due out in January 1984, three months
away, to save the day against IBM. At the sales conference Jobs decided to play the
showdown to the hilt. He took the stage and chronicled all the missteps made by IBM since
1958, and then in ominous tones described how it was now trying to take over the market
for personal computers: “Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire
information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?” At that moment a screen came
down from the ceiling and showed a preview of an upcoming sixty-second television ad for
the Macintosh. In a few months it was destined to make advertising history, but in the
meantime it served its purpose of rallying Apple’s demoralized sales force. Jobs had always
been able to draw energy by imagining himself as a rebel pitted against the forces of
darkness. Now he was able to energize his troops with the same vision.
There was one more hurdle: Hertzfeld and the other wizards had to finish writing the
code for the Macintosh. It was due to start shipping on Monday, January 16. One week
before that, the engineers concluded they could not make that deadline.
Jobs was at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, preparing for the press previews, so a Sunday
morning conference call was scheduled. The software manager calmly explained the
situation to Jobs, while Hertzfeld and the others huddled around the speakerphone holding
their breath. All they needed was an extra two weeks. The initial shipments to the dealers
could have a version of the software labeled “demo,” and these could be replaced as soon
as the new code was finished at the end of the month. There was a pause. Jobs did not get
angry; instead he spoke in cold, somber tones. He told them they were really great. So
great, in fact, that he knew they could get this done. “There’s no way we’re slipping!” he
declared. There was a collective gasp in the Bandley building work space. “You guys have
been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks isn’t going to make that
much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. I’m going to ship the code a week
from Monday, with your names on it.”
“Well, we’ve got to finish it,” Steve Capps said. And so they did. Once again, Jobs’s
reality distortion field pushed them to do what they had thought impossible. On Friday
Randy Wigginton brought in a huge bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans for the final
three all-nighters. When Jobs arrived at work at 8:30 a.m. that Monday, he found Hertzfeld
sprawled nearly comatose on the couch. They talked for a few minutes about a remaining
tiny glitch, and Jobs decreed that it wasn’t a problem. Hertzfeld dragged himself to his blue
Volkswagen Rabbit (license plate: MACWIZ) and drove home to bed. A short while later

Apple’s Fremont factory began to roll out boxes emblazoned with the colorful line
drawings of the Macintosh. Real artists ship, Jobs had declared, and now the Macintosh
team had.

The “1984” Ad

In the spring of 1983, when Jobs had begun to plan for the Macintosh launch, he asked for
a commercial that was as revolutionary and astonishing as the product they had created. “I
want something that will stop people in their tracks,” he said. “I want a thunderclap.” The
task fell to the Chiat/Day advertising agency, which had acquired the Apple account when
it bought the advertising side of Regis McKenna’s business. The person put in charge was a
lanky beach bum with a bushy beard, wild hair, goofy grin, and twinkling eyes named Lee
Clow, who was the creative director of the agency’s office in the Venice Beach section of
Los Angeles. Clow was savvy and fun, in a laid-back yet focused way, and he forged a
bond with Jobs that would last three decades.
Clow and two of his team, the copywriter Steve Hayden and the art director Brent
Thomas, had been toying with a tagline that played off the George Orwell novel: “Why
1984 won’t be like 1984.” Jobs loved it, and asked them to develop it for the Macintosh
launch. So they put together a storyboard for a sixty-second ad that would look like a scene
from a sci-fi movie. It featured a rebellious young woman outrunning the Orwellian
thought police and throwing a sledgehammer into a screen showing a mind-controlling
speech by Big Brother.
The concept captured the zeitgeist of the personal computer revolution. Many young
people, especially those in the counterculture, had viewed computers as instruments that
could be used by Orwellian governments and giant corporations to sap individuality. But by
the end of the 1970s, they were also being seen as potential tools for personal
empowerment. The ad cast Macintosh as a warrior for the latter cause—a cool, rebellious,
and heroic company that was the only thing standing in the way of the big evil
corporation’s plan for world domination and total mind control.
Jobs liked that. Indeed the concept for the ad had a special resonance for him. He fancied
himself a rebel, and he liked to associate himself with the values of the ragtag band of
hackers and pirates he recruited to the Macintosh group. Even though he had left the apple
commune in Oregon to start the Apple corporation, he still wanted to be viewed as a
denizen of the counterculture rather than the corporate culture.
But he also realized, deep inside, that he had increasingly abandoned the hacker spirit.
Some might even accuse him of selling out. When Wozniak held true to the Homebrew
ethic by sharing his design for the Apple I for free, it was Jobs who insisted that they sell
the boards instead. He was also the one who, despite Wozniak’s reluctance, wanted to turn
Apple into a corporation and not freely distribute stock options to the friends who had been
in the garage with them. Now he was about to launch the Macintosh, a machine that
violated many of the principles of the hacker’s code: It was overpriced; it would have no
slots, which meant that hobbyists could not plug in their own expansion cards or jack into
the motherboard to add their own new functions; and it took special tools just to open the

plastic case. It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother
rather than by a hacker.
So the “1984” ad was a way of reaffirming, to himself and to the world, his desired self-
image. The heroine, with a drawing of a Macintosh emblazoned on her pure white tank top,
was a renegade out to foil the establishment. By hiring Ridley Scott, fresh off the success
of Blade Runner, as the director, Jobs could attach himself and Apple to the cyberpunk
ethos of the time. With the ad, Apple could identify itself with the rebels and hackers who
thought differently, and Jobs could reclaim his right to identify with them as well.
Sculley was initially skeptical when he saw the storyboards, but Jobs insisted that they
needed something revolutionary. He was able to get an unprecedented budget of $750,000
just to film the ad, which they planned to premiere during the Super Bowl. Ridley Scott
made it in London using dozens of real skinheads among the enthralled masses listening to
Big Brother on the screen. A female discus thrower was chosen to play the heroine. Using a
cold industrial setting dominated by metallic gray hues, Scott evoked the dystopian aura of
Blade Runner. Just at the moment when Big Brother announces “We shall prevail!” the
heroine’s hammer smashes the screen and it vaporizes in a flash of light and smoke.
When Jobs previewed the ad for the Apple sales force at the meeting in Hawaii, they
were thrilled. So he screened it for the board at its December 1983 meeting. When the
lights came back on in the boardroom, everyone was mute. Philip Schlein, the CEO of
Macy’s California, had his head on the table. Mike Markkula stared silently; at first it
seemed he was overwhelmed by the power of the ad. Then he spoke: “Who wants to move
to find a new agency?” Sculley recalled, “Most of them thought it was the worst
commercial they had ever seen.” Sculley himself got cold feet. He asked Chiat/Day to sell
off the two commercial spots—one sixty seconds, the other thirty—that they had
purchased.
Jobs was beside himself. One evening Wozniak, who had been floating into and out of
Apple for the previous two years, wandered into the Macintosh building. Jobs grabbed him
and said, “Come over here and look at this.” He pulled out a VCR and played the ad. “I
was astounded,” Woz recalled. “I thought it was the most incredible thing.” When Jobs said
the board had decided not to run it during the Super Bowl, Wozniak asked what the cost of
the time slot was. Jobs told him $800,000. With his usual impulsive goodness, Wozniak
immediately offered, “Well, I’ll pay half if you will.”
He ended up not needing to. The agency was able to sell off the thirty-second time slot,
but in an act of passive defiance it didn’t sell the longer one. “We told them that we
couldn’t sell the sixty-second slot, though in truth we didn’t try,” recalled Lee Clow.
Sculley, perhaps to avoid a showdown with either the board or Jobs, decided to let Bill
Campbell, the head of marketing, figure out what to do. Campbell, a former football coach,
decided to throw the long bomb. “I think we ought to go for it,” he told his team.
Early in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, the dominant Raiders scored a
touchdown against the Redskins and, instead of an instant replay, television screens across
the nation went black for an ominous two full seconds. Then an eerie black-and-white
image of drones marching to spooky music began to fill the screen. More than ninety-six
million people watched an ad that was unlike any they’d seen before. At its end, as the

drones watched in horror the vaporizing of Big Brother, an announcer calmly intoned, “On
January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t
be like ‘1984.’”
It was a sensation. That evening all three networks and fifty local stations aired news
stories about the ad, giving it a viral life unprecedented in the pre–YouTube era. It would
eventually be selected by both TV Guide and Advertising Age as the greatest commercial of
all time.

Publicity Blast

Over the years Steve Jobs would become the grand master of product launches. In the case
of the Macintosh, the astonishing Ridley Scott ad was just one of the ingredients. Another
part of the recipe was media coverage. Jobs found ways to ignite blasts of publicity that
were so powerful the frenzy would feed on itself, like a chain reaction. It was a
phenomenon that he would be able to replicate whenever there was a big product launch,
from the Macintosh in 1984 to the iPad in 2010. Like a conjurer, he could pull the trick off
over and over again, even after journalists had seen it happen a dozen times and knew how
it was done. Some of the moves he had learned from Regis McKenna, who was a pro at
cultivating and stroking prideful reporters. But Jobs had his own intuitive sense of how to
stoke the excitement, manipulate the competitive instincts of journalists, and trade
exclusive access for lavish treatment.
In December 1983 he took his elfin engineering wizards, Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell
Smith, to New York to visit Newsweek to pitch a story on “the kids who created the Mac.”
After giving a demo of the Macintosh, they were taken upstairs to meet Katharine Graham,
the legendary proprietor, who had an insatiable interest in whatever was new. Afterward the
magazine sent its technology columnist and a photographer to spend time in Palo Alto with
Hertzfeld and Smith. The result was a flattering and smart four-page profile of the two of
them, with pictures that made them look like cherubim of a new age. The article quoted
Smith saying what he wanted to do next: “I want to build the computer of the 90’s. Only I
want to do it tomorrow.” The article also described the mix of volatility and charisma
displayed by his boss: “Jobs sometimes defends his ideas with highly vocal displays of
temper that aren’t always bluster; rumor has it that he has threatened to fire employees for
insisting that his computers should have cursor keys, a feature that Jobs considers obsolete.
But when he is on his best behavior, Jobs is a curious blend of charm and impatience,
oscillating between shrewd reserve and his favorite expression of enthusiasm: ‘Insanely
great.’”
The technology writer Steven Levy, who was then working for Rolling Stone, came to
interview Jobs, who urged him to convince the magazine’s publisher to put the Macintosh
team on the cover of the magazine. “The chances of Jann Wenner agreeing to displace
Sting in favor of a bunch of computer nerds were approximately one in a googolplex,”
Levy thought, correctly. Jobs took Levy to a pizza joint and pressed the case: Rolling Stone
was “on the ropes, running crummy articles, looking desperately for new topics and new
audiences. The Mac could be its salvation!” Levy pushed back. Rolling Stone was actually

good, he said, and he asked Jobs if he had read it recently. Jobs said that he had, an article
about MTV that was “a piece of shit.” Levy replied that he had written that article. Jobs, to
his credit, didn’t back away from the assessment. Instead he turned philosophical as he
talked about the Macintosh. We are constantly benefiting from advances that went before
us and taking things that people before us developed, he said. “It’s a wonderful, ecstatic
feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and
knowledge.”
Levy’s story didn’t make it to the cover. But in the future, every major product launch
that Jobs was involved in—at NeXT, at Pixar, and years later when he returned to Apple—
would end up on the cover of either Time, Newsweek, or Business Week.

January 24, 1984

On the morning that he and his teammates completed the software for the Macintosh, Andy
Hertzfeld had gone home exhausted and expected to stay in bed for at least a day. But that
afternoon, after only six hours of sleep, he drove back to the office. He wanted to check in
to see if there had been any problems, and most of his colleagues had done the same. They
were lounging around, dazed but excited, when Jobs walked in. “Hey, pick yourselves up
off the floor, you’re not done yet!” he announced. “We need a demo for the intro!” His plan
was to dramatically unveil the Macintosh in front of a large audience and have it show off
some of its features to the inspirational theme from Chariots of Fire. “It needs to be done
by the weekend, to be ready for the rehearsals,” he added. They all groaned, Hertzfeld
recalled, “but as we talked we realized that it would be fun to cook up something
impressive.”
The launch event was scheduled for the Apple annual stockholders’ meeting on January
24—eight days away—at the Flint Auditorium of De Anza Community College. The
television ad and the frenzy of press preview stories were the first two components in what
would become the Steve Jobs playbook for making the introduction of a new product seem
like an epochal moment in world history. The third component was the public unveiling of
the product itself, amid fanfare and flourishes, in front of an audience of adoring faithful
mixed with journalists who were primed to be swept up in the excitement.
Hertzfeld pulled off the remarkable feat of writing a music player in two days so that the
computer could play the Chariots of Fire theme. But when Jobs heard it, he judged it lousy,
so they decided to use a recording instead. At the same time, Jobs was thrilled with a
speech generator that turned text into spoken words with a charming electronic accent, and
he decided to make it part of the demo. “I want the Macintosh to be the first computer to
introduce itself!” he insisted.
At the rehearsal the night before the launch, nothing was working well. Jobs hated the
way the animation scrolled across the Macintosh screen, and he kept ordering tweaks. He
also was dissatisfied with the stage lighting, and he directed Sculley to move from seat to
seat to give his opinion as various adjustments were made. Sculley had never thought much
about variations of stage lighting and gave the type of tentative answers a patient might
give an eye doctor when asked which lens made the letters clearer. The rehearsals and

changes went on for five hours, well into the night. “He was driving people insane, getting
mad at the stagehands for every glitch in the presentation,” Sculley recalled. “I thought
there was no way we were going to get it done for the show the next morning.”
Most of all, Jobs fretted about his presentation. Sculley fancied himself a good writer, so
he suggested changes in Jobs’s script. Jobs recalled being slightly annoyed, but their
relationship was still in the phase when he was lathering on flattery and stroking Sculley’s
ego. “I think of you just like Woz and Markkula,” he told Sculley. “You’re like one of the
founders of the company. They founded the company, but you and I are founding the
future.” Sculley lapped it up.
The next morning the 2,600-seat auditorium was mobbed. Jobs arrived in a double-
breasted blue blazer, a starched white shirt, and a pale green bow tie. “This is the most
important moment in my entire life,” he told Sculley as they waited backstage for the
program to begin. “I’m really nervous. You’re probably the only person who knows how I
feel about this.” Sculley grasped his hand, held it for a moment, and whispered “Good
luck.”
As chairman of the company, Jobs went onstage first to start the shareholders’ meeting.
He did so with his own form of an invocation. “I’d like to open the meeting,” he said, “with
a twenty-year-old poem by Dylan—that’s Bob Dylan.” He broke into a little smile, then
looked down to read from the second verse of “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” His
voice was high-pitched as he raced through the ten lines, ending with “For the loser now /
Will be later to win / For the times they are a-changin’.” That song was the anthem that
kept the multimillionaire board chairman in touch with his counterculture self-image. He
had a bootleg copy of his favorite version, which was from the live concert Dylan
performed, with Joan Baez, on Halloween 1964 at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall.
Sculley came onstage to report on the company’s earnings, and the audience started to
become restless as he droned on. Finally, he ended with a personal note. “The most
important thing that has happened to me in the last nine months at Apple has been a chance
to develop a friendship with Steve Jobs,” he said. “For me, the rapport we have developed
means an awful lot.”
The lights dimmed as Jobs reappeared onstage and launched into a dramatic version of
the battle cry he had delivered at the Hawaii sales conference. “It is 1958,” he began. “IBM
passes up a chance to buy a young fledgling company that has invented a new technology
called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves
ever since.” The crowd laughed. Hertzfeld had heard versions of the speech both in Hawaii
and elsewhere, but he was struck by how this time it was pulsing with more passion. After
recounting other IBM missteps, Jobs picked up the pace and the emotion as he built toward
the present:
It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope
to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, after initially welcoming IBM with open arms,
now fear an IBM-dominated and-controlled future and are turning back to Apple as the
only force who can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at
its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer
industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?

As he built to the climax, the audience went from murmuring to applauding to a frenzy
of cheering and chanting. But before they could answer the Orwell question, the auditorium
went black and the “1984” commercial appeared on the screen. When it was over, the entire
audience was on its feet cheering.
With a flair for the dramatic, Jobs walked across the dark stage to a small table with a
cloth bag on it. “Now I’d like to show you Macintosh in person,” he said. He took out the
computer, keyboard, and mouse, hooked them together deftly, then pulled one of the new
3½-inch floppies from his shirt pocket. The theme from Chariots of Fire began to play.
Jobs held his breath for a moment, because the demo had not worked well the night before.
But this time it ran flawlessly. The word “MACINTOSH” scrolled horizontally onscreen,
then underneath it the words “Insanely great” appeared in script, as if being slowly written
by hand. Not used to such beautiful graphic displays, the audience quieted for a moment. A
few gasps could be heard. And then, in rapid succession, came a series of screen shots: Bill
Atkinson’s QuickDraw graphics package followed by displays of different fonts,
documents, charts, drawings, a chess game, a spreadsheet, and a rendering of Steve Jobs
with a thought bubble containing a Macintosh.
When it was over, Jobs smiled and offered a treat. “We’ve done a lot of talking about
Macintosh recently,” he said. “But today, for the first time ever, I’d like to let Macintosh
speak for itself.” With that, he strolled back over to the computer, pressed the button on the
mouse, and in a vibrato but endearing electronic deep voice, Macintosh became the first
computer to introduce itself. “Hello. I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag,”
it began. The only thing it didn’t seem to know how to do was to wait for the wild cheering
and shrieks that erupted. Instead of basking for a moment, it barreled ahead.
“Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of
the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer you can’t lift.” Once again
the roar almost drowned out its final lines. “Obviously, I can talk. But right now I’d like to
sit back and listen. So it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who’s been like a
father to me, Steve Jobs.”
Pandemonium erupted, with people in the crowd jumping up and down and pumping
their fists in a frenzy. Jobs nodded slowly, a tight-lipped but broad smile on his face, then
looked down and started to choke up. The ovation continued for five minutes.
After the Macintosh team returned to Bandley 3 that afternoon, a truck pulled into the
parking lot and Jobs had them all gather next to it. Inside were a hundred new Macintosh
computers, each personalized with a plaque. “Steve presented them one at a time to each
team member, with a handshake and a smile, as the rest of us stood around cheering,”
Hertzfeld recalled. It had been a grueling ride, and many egos had been bruised by Jobs’s
obnoxious and rough management style. But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor
anyone else at the company could have pulled off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would
it likely have emerged from focus groups and committees. On the day he unveiled the
Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he

had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market
research before he invented the telephone?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

GATES AND JOBS

When Orbits Intersect

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:13

Jobs and Gates, 1991

The Macintosh Partnership

In astronomy, a binary system occurs when the orbits of two stars are linked because of
their gravitational interaction. There have been analogous situations in history, when an era
is shaped by the relationship and rivalry of two orbiting superstars: Albert Einstein and
Niels Bohr in twentieth-century physics, for example, or Thomas Jefferson and Alexander

Hamilton in early American governance. For the first thirty years of the personal computer
age, beginning in the late 1970s, the defining binary star system was composed of two
high-energy college dropouts both born in 1955.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, despite their similar ambitions at the confluence of technology
and business, had very different personalities and backgrounds. Gates’s father was a
prominent Seattle lawyer, his mother a civic leader on a variety of prestigious boards. He
became a tech geek at the area’s finest private school, Lakeside High, but he was never a
rebel, hippie, spiritual seeker, or member of the counterculture. Instead of a Blue Box to rip
off the phone company, Gates created for his school a program for scheduling classes,
which helped him get into ones with the right girls, and a car-counting program for local
traffic engineers. He went to Harvard, and when he decided to drop out it was not to find
enlightenment with an Indian guru but to start a computer software company.
Gates was good at computer coding, unlike Jobs, and his mind was more practical,
disciplined, and abundant in analytic processing power. Jobs was more intuitive and
romantic and had a greater instinct for making technology usable, design delightful, and
interfaces friendly. He had a passion for perfection, which made him fiercely demanding,
and he managed by charisma and scattershot intensity. Gates was more methodical; he held
tightly scheduled product review meetings where he would cut to the heart of issues with
lapidary skill. Both could be rude, but with Gates—who early in his career seemed to have
a typical geek’s flirtation with the fringes of the Asperger’s scale—the cutting behavior
tended to be less personal, based more on intellectual incisiveness than emotional
callousness. Jobs would stare at people with a burning, wounding intensity; Gates
sometimes had trouble making eye contact, but he was fundamentally humane.
“Each one thought he was smarter than the other one, but Steve generally treated Bill as
someone who was slightly inferior, especially in matters of taste and style,” said Andy
Hertzfeld. “Bill looked down on Steve because he couldn’t actually program.” From the
beginning of their relationship, Gates was fascinated by Jobs and slightly envious of his
mesmerizing effect on people. But he also found him “fundamentally odd” and “weirdly
flawed as a human being,” and he was put off by Jobs’s rudeness and his tendency to be
“either in the mode of saying you were shit or trying to seduce you.” For his part, Jobs
found Gates unnervingly narrow. “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or
gone off to an ashram when he was younger,” Jobs once declared.
Their differences in personality and character would lead them to opposite sides of what
would become the fundamental divide in the digital age. Jobs was a perfectionist who
craved control and indulged in the uncompromising temperament of an artist; he and Apple
became the exemplars of a digital strategy that tightly integrated hardware, software, and
content into a seamless package. Gates was a smart, calculating, and pragmatic analyst of
business and technology; he was open to licensing Microsoft’s operating system and
software to a variety of manufacturers.
After thirty years Gates would develop a grudging respect for Jobs. “He really never
knew much about technology, but he had an amazing instinct for what works,” he said. But
Jobs never reciprocated by fully appreciating Gates’s real strengths. “Bill is basically
unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more

comfortable now in philanthropy than technology,” Jobs said, unfairly. “He just
shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

When the Macintosh was first being developed, Jobs went up to visit Gates at his office
near Seattle. Microsoft had written some applications for the Apple II, including a
spreadsheet program called Multiplan, and Jobs wanted to excite Gates and Co. about
doing even more for the forthcoming Macintosh. Sitting in Gates’s conference room, Jobs
spun an enticing vision of a computer for the masses, with a friendly interface, which
would be churned out by the millions in an automated California factory. His description of
the dream factory sucking in the California silicon components and turning out finished
Macintoshes caused the Microsoft team to code-name the project “Sand.” They even
reverse-engineered it into an acronym, for “Steve’s amazing new device.”
Gates had launched Microsoft by writing a version of BASIC, a programming language,
for the Altair. Jobs wanted Microsoft to write a version of BASIC for the Macintosh,
because Wozniak—despite much prodding by Jobs—had never enhanced his version of the
Apple II’s BASIC to handle floating-point numbers. In addition, Jobs wanted Microsoft to
write application software—such as word processing and spreadsheet programs—for the
Macintosh. At the time, Jobs was a king and Gates still a courtier: In 1982 Apple’s annual
sales were $1 billion, while Microsoft’s were a mere $32 million. Gates signed on to do
graphical versions of a new spreadsheet called Excel, a word-processing program called
Word, and BASIC.
Gates frequently went to Cupertino for demonstrations of the Macintosh operating
system, and he was not very impressed. “I remember the first time we went down, Steve
had this app where it was just things bouncing around on the screen,” he said. “That was
the only app that ran.” Gates was also put off by Jobs’s attitude. “It was kind of a weird
seduction visit, where Steve was saying, ‘We don’t really need you and we’re doing this
great thing, and it’s under the cover.’ He’s in his Steve Jobs sales mode, but kind of the
sales mode that also says, ‘I don’t need you, but I might let you be involved.’”
The Macintosh pirates found Gates hard to take. “You could tell that Bill Gates was not a
very good listener. He couldn’t bear to have anyone explain how something worked to him
—he had to leap ahead instead and guess about how he thought it would work,” Hertzfeld
recalled. They showed him how the Macintosh’s cursor moved smoothly across the screen
without flickering. “What kind of hardware do you use to draw the cursor?” Gates asked.
Hertzfeld, who took great pride that they could achieve their functionality solely using
software, replied, “We don’t have any special hardware for it!” Gates insisted that it was
necessary to have special hardware to move the cursor that way. “So what do you say to
somebody like that?” Bruce Horn, one of the Macintosh engineers, later said. “It made it
clear to me that Gates was not the kind of person that would understand or appreciate the
elegance of a Macintosh.”
Despite their mutual wariness, both teams were excited by the prospect that Microsoft
would create graphical software for the Macintosh that would take personal computing into
a new realm, and they went to dinner at a fancy restaurant to celebrate. Microsoft soon
dedicated a large team to the task. “We had more people working on the Mac than he did,”

Gates said. “He had about fourteen or fifteen people. We had like twenty people. We really
bet our life on it.” And even though Jobs thought that they didn’t exhibit much taste, the
Microsoft programmers were persistent. “They came out with applications that were
terrible,” Jobs recalled, “but they kept at it and they made them better.” Eventually Jobs
became so enamored of Excel that he made a secret bargain with Gates: If Microsoft would
make Excel exclusively for the Macintosh for two years, and not make a version for IBM
PCs, then Jobs would shut down his team working on a version of BASIC for the
Macintosh and instead indefinitely license Microsoft’s BASIC. Gates smartly took the deal,
which infuriated the Apple team whose project got canceled and gave Microsoft a lever in
future negotiations.
For the time being, Gates and Jobs forged a bond. That summer they went to a
conference hosted by the industry analyst Ben Rosen at a Playboy Club retreat in Lake
Geneva, Wisconsin, where nobody knew about the graphical interfaces that Apple was
developing. “Everybody was acting like the IBM PC was everything, which was nice, but
Steve and I were kind of smiling that, hey, we’ve got something,” Gates recalled. “And he’s
kind of leaking, but nobody actually caught on.” Gates became a regular at Apple retreats.
“I went to every luau,” said Gates. “I was part of the crew.”
Gates enjoyed his frequent visits to Cupertino, where he got to watch Jobs interact
erratically with his employees and display his obsessions. “Steve was in his ultimate pied
piper mode, proclaiming how the Mac will change the world and overworking people like
mad, with incredible tensions and complex personal relationships.” Sometimes Jobs would
begin on a high, then lapse into sharing his fears with Gates. “We’d go down Friday night,
have dinner, and Steve would just be promoting that everything is great. Then the second
day, without fail, he’d be kind of, ‘Oh shit, is this thing going to sell, oh God, I have to
raise the price, I’m sorry I did that to you, and my team is a bunch of idiots.’”
Gates saw Jobs’s reality distortion field at play when the Xerox Star was launched. At a
joint team dinner one Friday night, Jobs asked Gates how many Stars had been sold thus
far. Gates said six hundred. The next day, in front of Gates and the whole team, Jobs said
that three hundred Stars had been sold, forgetting that Gates had just told everyone it was
actually six hundred. “So his whole team starts looking at me like, ‘Are you going to tell
him that he’s full of shit?’” Gates recalled. “And in that case I didn’t take the bait.” On
another occasion Jobs and his team were visiting Microsoft and having dinner at the Seattle
Tennis Club. Jobs launched into a sermon about how the Macintosh and its software would
be so easy to use that there would be no manuals. “It was like anybody who ever thought
that there would be a manual for any Mac application was the greatest idiot,” said Gates.
“And we were like, ‘Does he really mean it? Should we not tell him that we have people
who are actually working on manuals?’”
After a while the relationship became bumpier. The original plan was to have some of
the Microsoft applications—such as Excel, Chart, and File—carry the Apple logo and come
bundled with the purchase of a Macintosh. “We were going to get $10 per app, per
machine,” said Gates. But this arrangement upset competing software makers. In addition,
it seemed that some of Microsoft’s programs might be late. So Jobs invoked a provision in

his deal with Microsoft and decided not to bundle its software; Microsoft would have to
scramble to distribute its software as products sold directly to consumers.
Gates went along without much complaint. He was already getting used to the fact that,
as he put it, Jobs could “play fast and loose,” and he suspected that the unbundling would
actually help Microsoft. “We could make more money selling our software separately,”
Gates said. “It works better that way if you’re willing to think you’re going to have
reasonable market share.” Microsoft ended up making its software for various other
platforms, and it began to give priority to the IBM PC version of Microsoft Word rather
than the Macintosh version. In the end, Jobs’s decision to back out of the bundling deal hurt
Apple more than it did Microsoft.
When Excel for the Macintosh was released, Jobs and Gates unveiled it together at a
press dinner at New York’s Tavern on the Green. Asked if Microsoft would make a version
of it for IBM PCs, Gates did not reveal the bargain he had made with Jobs but merely
answered that “in time” that might happen. Jobs took the microphone. “I’m sure ‘in time’
we’ll all be dead,” he joked.

The Battle of the GUI

At that time, Microsoft was producing an operating system, known as DOS, which it
licensed to IBM and compatible computers. It was based on an old-fashioned command
line interface that confronted users with surly little prompts such as C:\>. As Jobs and his
team began to work closely with Microsoft, they grew worried that it would copy
Macintosh’s graphical user interface. Andy Hertzfeld noticed that his contact at Microsoft
was asking detailed questions about how the Macintosh operating system worked. “I told
Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac,” he recalled.
They were right to worry. Gates believed that graphical interfaces were the future, and
that Microsoft had just as much right as Apple did to copy what had been developed at
Xerox PARC. As he freely admitted later, “We sort of say, ‘Hey, we believe in graphics
interfaces, we saw the Xerox Alto too.’”
In their original deal, Jobs had convinced Gates to agree that Microsoft would not create
graphical software for anyone other than Apple until a year after the Macintosh shipped in
January 1983. Unfortunately for Apple, it did not provide for the possibility that the
Macintosh launch would be delayed for a year. So Gates was within his rights when, in
November 1983, he revealed that Microsoft planned to develop a new operating system for
IBM PCs featuring a graphical interface with windows, icons, and a mouse for point-and-
click navigation. It would be called Windows. Gates hosted a Jobs-like product
announcement, the most lavish thus far in Microsoft’s history, at the Helmsley Palace Hotel
in New York.
Jobs was furious. He knew there was little he could do about it—Microsoft’s deal with
Apple not to do competing graphical software was running out—but he lashed out
nonetheless. “Get Gates down here immediately,” he ordered Mike Boich, who was Apple’s
evangelist to other software companies. Gates arrived, alone and willing to discuss things
with Jobs. “He called me down to get pissed off at me,” Gates recalled. “I went down to

Cupertino, like a command performance. I told him, ‘We’re doing Windows.’ I said to him,
‘We’re betting our company on graphical interfaces.’”
They met in Jobs’s conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten
Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him. Jobs didn’t disappoint his
troops. “You’re ripping us off!” he shouted. “I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from
us!” Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking Steve in the eye, before
hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. “Well, Steve, I think
there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich
neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you
had already stolen it.”
Gates’s two-day visit provoked the full range of Jobs’s emotional responses and
manipulation techniques. It also made clear that the Apple-Microsoft symbiosis had
become a scorpion dance, with both sides circling warily, knowing that a sting by either
could cause problems for both. After the confrontation in the conference room, Gates
quietly gave Jobs a private demo of what was being planned for Windows. “Steve didn’t
know what to say,” Gates recalled. “He could either say, ‘Oh, this is a violation of
something,’ but he didn’t. He chose to say, ‘Oh, it’s actually really a piece of shit.’” Gates
was thrilled, because it gave him a chance to calm Jobs down for a moment. “I said, ‘Yes,
it’s a nice little piece of shit.’” So Jobs went through a gamut of other emotions. “During
the course of this meeting, he’s just ruder than shit,” Gates said. “And then there’s a part
where he’s almost crying, like, ‘Oh, just give me a chance to get this thing off.’” Gates
responded by becoming very calm. “I’m good at when people are emotional, I’m kind of
less emotional.”
As he often did when he wanted to have a serious conversation, Jobs suggested they go
on a long walk. They trekked the streets of Cupertino, back and forth to De Anza college,
stopping at a diner and then walking some more. “We had to take a walk, which is not one
of my management techniques,” Gates said. “That was when he began saying things like,
‘Okay, okay, but don’t make it too much like what we’re doing.’”
As it turned out, Microsoft wasn’t able to get Windows 1.0 ready for shipping until the
fall of 1985. Even then, it was a shoddy product. It lacked the elegance of the Macintosh
interface, and it had tiled windows rather than the magical clipping of overlapping
windows that Bill Atkinson had devised. Reviewers ridiculed it and consumers spurned it.
Nevertheless, as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence eventually made
Windows better and then dominant.
Jobs never got over his anger. “They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no
shame,” Jobs told me almost thirty years later. Upon hearing this, Gates responded, “If he
believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields.” In a legal
sense, Gates was right, as courts over the years have subsequently ruled. And on a practical
level, he had a strong case as well. Even though Apple made a deal for the right to use what
it saw at Xerox PARC, it was inevitable that other companies would develop similar
graphical interfaces. As Apple found out, the “look and feel” of a computer interface design
is a hard thing to protect.

And yet Jobs’s dismay was understandable. Apple had been more innovative,
imaginative, elegant in execution, and brilliant in design. But even though Microsoft
created a crudely copied series of products, it would end up winning the war of operating
systems. This exposed an aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked: The best and most
innovative products don’t always win. A decade later, this truism caused Jobs to let loose a
rant that was somewhat arrogant and over-the-top, but also had a whiff of truth to it. “The
only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste, they have absolutely no taste,” he
said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t
think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ICARUS

What Goes Up . . .

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:14

Flying High

The launch of the Macintosh in January 1984 propelled Jobs into an even higher orbit of
celebrity, as was evident during a trip to Manhattan he took at the time. He went to a party
that Yoko Ono threw for her son, Sean Lennon, and gave the nine-year-old a Macintosh.
The boy loved it. The artists Andy Warhol and Keith Haring were there, and they were so
enthralled by what they could create with the machine that the contemporary art world
almost took an ominous turn. “I drew a circle,” Warhol exclaimed proudly after using
QuickDraw. Warhol insisted that Jobs take a computer to Mick Jagger. When Jobs arrived
at the rock star’s townhouse, Jagger seemed baffled. He didn’t quite know who Jobs was.
Later Jobs told his team, “I think he was on drugs. Either that or he’s brain-damaged.”
Jagger’s daughter Jade, however, took to the computer immediately and started drawing
with MacPaint, so Jobs gave it to her instead.
He bought the top-floor duplex apartment that he’d shown Sculley in the San Remo on
Manhattan’s Central Park West and hired James Freed of I. M. Pei’s firm to renovate it, but
he never moved in. (He would later sell it to Bono for $15 million.) He also bought an old
Spanish colonial–style fourteen-bedroom mansion in Woodside, in the hills above Palo

Alto, that had been built by a copper baron, which he moved into but never got around to
furnishing.
At Apple his status revived. Instead of seeking ways to curtail Jobs’s authority, Sculley
gave him more: The Lisa and Macintosh divisions were folded together, with Jobs in
charge. He was flying high, but this did not serve to make him more mellow. Indeed there
was a memorable display of his brutal honesty when he stood in front of the combined Lisa
and Macintosh teams to describe how they would be merged. His Macintosh group leaders
would get all of the top positions, he said, and a quarter of the Lisa staff would be laid off.
“You guys failed,” he said, looking directly at those who had worked on the Lisa. “You’re a
B team. B players. Too many people here are B or C players, so today we are releasing
some of you to have the opportunity to work at our sister companies here in the valley.”
Bill Atkinson, who had worked on both teams, thought it was not only callous, but
unfair. “These people had worked really hard and were brilliant engineers,” he said. But
Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh
experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy,
as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players,
and soon you will even have some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience
taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t
indulge B players.”

For the time being, Jobs and Sculley were able to convince themselves that their friendship
was still strong. They professed their fondness so effusively and often that they sounded
like high school sweethearts at a Hallmark card display. The first anniversary of Sculley’s
arrival came in May 1984, and to celebrate Jobs lured him to a dinner party at Le Mouton
Noir, an elegant restaurant in the hills southwest of Cupertino. To Sculley’s surprise, Jobs
had gathered the Apple board, its top managers, and even some East Coast investors. As
they all congratulated him during cocktails, Sculley recalled, “a beaming Steve stood in the
background, nodding his head up and down and wearing a Cheshire Cat smile on his face.”
Jobs began the dinner with a fulsome toast. “The happiest two days for me were when
Macintosh shipped and when John Sculley agreed to join Apple,” he said. “This has been
the greatest year I’ve ever had in my whole life, because I’ve learned so much from John.”
He then presented Sculley with a montage of memorabilia from the year.
In response, Sculley effused about the joys of being Jobs’s partner for the past year, and
he concluded with a line that, for different reasons, everyone at the table found memorable.
“Apple has one leader,” he said, “Steve and me.” He looked across the room, caught Jobs’s
eye, and watched him smile. “It was as if we were communicating with each other,”
Sculley recalled. But he also noticed that Arthur Rock and some of the others were looking
quizzical, perhaps even skeptical. They were worried that Jobs was completely rolling him.
They had hired Sculley to control Jobs, and now it was clear that Jobs was the one in
control. “Sculley was so eager for Steve’s approval that he was unable to stand up to him,”
Rock recalled.
Keeping Jobs happy and deferring to his expertise may have seemed like a smart strategy
to Sculley. But he failed to realize that it was not in Jobs’s nature to share control.

Deference did not come naturally to him. He began to become more vocal about how he
thought the company should be run. At the 1984 business strategy meeting, for example, he
pushed to make the company’s centralized sales and marketing staffs bid on the right to
provide their services to the various product divisions. (This would have meant, for
example, that the Macintosh group could decide not to use Apple’s marketing team and
instead create one of its own.) No one else was in favor, but Jobs kept trying to ram it
through. “People were looking to me to take control, to get him to sit down and shut up, but
I didn’t,” Sculley recalled. As the meeting broke up, he heard someone whisper, “Why
doesn’t Sculley shut him up?”
When Jobs decided to build a state-of-the-art factory in Fremont to manufacture the
Macintosh, his aesthetic passions and controlling nature kicked into high gear. He wanted
the machinery to be painted in bright hues, like the Apple logo, but he spent so much time
going over paint chips that Apple’s manufacturing director, Matt Carter, finally just
installed them in their usual beige and gray. When Jobs took a tour, he ordered that the
machines be repainted in the bright colors he wanted. Carter objected; this was precision
equipment, and repainting the machines could cause problems. He turned out to be right.
One of the most expensive machines, which got painted bright blue, ended up not working
properly and was dubbed “Steve’s folly.” Finally Carter quit. “It took so much energy to
fight him, and it was usually over something so pointless that finally I had enough,” he
recalled.
Jobs tapped as a replacement Debi Coleman, the spunky but good-natured Macintosh
financial officer who had once won the team’s annual award for the person who best stood
up to Jobs. But she knew how to cater to his whims when necessary. When Apple’s art
director, Clement Mok, informed her that Jobs wanted the walls to be pure white, she
protested, “You can’t paint a factory pure white. There’s going to be dust and stuff all
over.” Mok replied, “There’s no white that’s too white for Steve.” She ended up going
along. With its pure white walls and its bright blue, yellow, and red machines, the factory
floor “looked like an Alexander Calder showcase,” said Coleman.
When asked about his obsessive concern over the look of the factory, Jobs said it was a
way to ensure a passion for perfection:
I’d go out to the factory, and I’d put on a white glove to check for dust. I’d find it
everywhere—on machines, on the tops of the racks, on the floor. And I’d ask Debi to get it
cleaned. I told her I thought we should be able to eat off the floor of the factory. Well, this
drove Debi up the wall. She didn’t understand why. And I couldn’t articulate it back then.
See, I’d been very influenced by what I’d seen in Japan. Part of what I greatly admired
there—and part of what we were lacking in our factory—was a sense of teamwork and
discipline. If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren’t
going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.

One Sunday morning Jobs brought his father to see the factory. Paul Jobs had always
been fastidious about making sure that his craftsmanship was exacting and his tools in
order, and his son was proud to show that he could do the same. Coleman came along to

give the tour. “Steve was, like, beaming,” she recalled. “He was so proud to show his father
this creation.” Jobs explained how everything worked, and his father seemed truly
admiring. “He kept looking at his father, who touched everything and loved how clean and
perfect everything looked.”
Things were not quite as sweet when Danielle Mitterrand toured the factory. The Cuba-
admiring wife of France’s socialist president François Mitterrand asked a lot of questions,
through her translator, about the working conditions, while Jobs, who had grabbed Alain
Rossmann to serve as his translator, kept trying to explain the advanced robotics and
technology. After Jobs talked about the just-in-time production schedules, she asked about
overtime pay. He was annoyed, so he described how automation helped him keep down
labor costs, a subject he knew would not delight her. “Is it hard work?” she asked. “How
much vacation time do they get?” Jobs couldn’t contain himself. “If she’s so interested in
their welfare,” he said to her translator, “tell her she can come work here any time.” The
translator turned pale and said nothing. After a moment Rossmann stepped in to say, in
French, “M. Jobs says he thanks you for your visit and your interest in the factory.” Neither
Jobs nor Madame Mitterrand knew what happened, Rossmann recalled, but her translator
looked very relieved.
Afterward, as he sped his Mercedes down the freeway toward Cupertino, Jobs fumed to
Rossmann about Madame Mitterrand’s attitude. At one point he was going just over 100
miles per hour when a policeman stopped him and began writing a ticket. After a few
minutes, as the officer scribbled away, Jobs honked. “Excuse me?” the policeman said.
Jobs replied, “I’m in a hurry.” Amazingly, the officer didn’t get mad. He simply finished
writing the ticket and warned that if Jobs was caught going over 55 again he would be sent
to jail. As soon as the policeman left, Jobs got back on the road and accelerated to 100. “He
absolutely believed that the normal rules didn’t apply to him,” Rossmann marveled.
His wife, Joanna Hoffman, saw the same thing when she accompanied Jobs to Europe a
few months after the Macintosh was launched. “He was just completely obnoxious and
thinking he could get away with anything,” she recalled. In Paris she had arranged a formal
dinner with French software developers, but Jobs suddenly decided he didn’t want to go.
Instead he shut the car door on Hoffman and told her he was going to see the poster artist
Folon instead. “The developers were so pissed off they wouldn’t shake our hands,” she
said.
In Italy, he took an instant dislike to Apple’s general manager, a soft rotund guy who had
come from a conventional business. Jobs told him bluntly that he was not impressed with
his team or his sales strategy. “You don’t deserve to be able to sell the Mac,” Jobs said
coldly. But that was mild compared to his reaction to the restaurant the hapless manager
had chosen. Jobs demanded a vegan meal, but the waiter very elaborately proceeded to dish
out a sauce filled with sour cream. Jobs got so nasty that Hoffman had to threaten him. She
whispered that if he didn’t calm down, she was going to pour her hot coffee on his lap.
The most substantive disagreements Jobs had on the European trip concerned sales
forecasts. Using his reality distortion field, Jobs was always pushing his team to come up
with higher projections. He kept threatening the European managers that he wouldn’t give
them any allocations unless they projected bigger forecasts. They insisted on being

realistic, and Hoffmann had to referee. “By the end of the trip, my whole body was shaking
uncontrollably,” Hoffman recalled.
It was on this trip that Jobs first got to know Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s manager in
France. Gassée was among the few to stand up successfully to Jobs on the trip. “He has his
own way with the truth,” Gassée later remarked. “The only way to deal with him was to
out-bully him.” When Jobs made his usual threat about cutting down on France’s
allocations if Gassée didn’t jack up sales projections, Gassée got angry. “I remember
grabbing his lapel and telling him to stop, and then he backed down. I used to be an angry
man myself. I am a recovering assaholic. So I could recognize that in Steve.”
Gassée was impressed, however, at how Jobs could turn on the charm when he wanted
to. François Mitterrand had been preaching the gospel of informatique pour tous—
computing for all—and various academic experts in technology, such as Marvin Minsky
and Nicholas Negroponte, came over to sing in the choir. Jobs gave a talk to the group at
the Hotel Bristol and painted a picture of how France could move ahead if it put computers
in all of its schools. Paris also brought out the romantic in him. Both Gassée and
Negroponte tell tales of him pining over women while there.

Falling

After the burst of excitement that accompanied the release of Macintosh, its sales began to
taper off in the second half of 1984. The problem was a fundamental one: It was a dazzling
but woefully slow and underpowered computer, and no amount of hoopla could mask that.
Its beauty was that its user interface looked like a sunny playroom rather than a somber
dark screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly command lines. But that led to its
greatest weakness: A character on a text-based display took less than a byte of code,
whereas when the Mac drew a letter, pixel by pixel in any elegant font you wanted, it
required twenty or thirty times more memory. The Lisa handled this by shipping with more
than 1,000K RAM, whereas the Macintosh made do with 128K.
Another problem was the lack of an internal hard disk drive. Jobs had called Joanna
Hoffman a “Xerox bigot” when she fought for such a storage device. He insisted that the
Macintosh have just one floppy disk drive. If you wanted to copy data, you could end up
with a new form of tennis elbow from having to swap floppy disks in and out of the single
drive. In addition, the Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs’s dogmatic
stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many
component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname “the beige toaster,” which did
not enhance its popularity. It was so seductive that it had sold well enough for the first few
months, but when people became more aware of its limitations, sales fell. As Hoffman later
lamented, “The reality distortion field can serve as a spur, but then reality itself hits.”
At the end of 1984, with Lisa sales virtually nonexistent and Macintosh sales falling
below ten thousand a month, Jobs made a shoddy, and atypical, decision out of desperation.
He decided to take the inventory of unsold Lisas, graft on a Macintosh-emulation program,
and sell them as a new product, the “Macintosh XL.” Since the Lisa had been discontinued
and would not be restarted, it was an unusual instance of Jobs producing something that he

did not believe in. “I was furious because the Mac XL wasn’t real,” said Hoffman. “It was
just to blow the excess Lisas out the door. It sold well, and then we had to discontinue the
horrible hoax, so I resigned.”
The dark mood was evident in the ad that was developed in January 1985, which was
supposed to reprise the anti-IBM sentiment of the resonant “1984” ad. Unfortunately there
was a fundamental difference: The first ad had ended on a heroic, optimistic note, but the
storyboards presented by Lee Clow and Jay Chiat for the new ad, titled “Lemmings,”
showed dark-suited, blindfolded corporate managers marching off a cliff to their death.
From the beginning both Jobs and Sculley were uneasy. It didn’t seem as if it would convey
a positive or glorious image of Apple, but instead would merely insult every manager who
had bought an IBM.
Jobs and Sculley asked for other ideas, but the agency folks pushed back. “You guys
didn’t want to run ‘1984’ last year,” one of them said. According to Sculley, Lee Clow
added, “I will put my whole reputation, everything, on this commercial.” When the filmed
version, done by Ridley Scott’s brother Tony, came in, the concept looked even worse. The
mindless managers marching off the cliff were singing a funeral-paced version of the Snow
White song “Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho,” and the dreary filmmaking made it even more
depressing than the storyboards portended. “I can’t believe you’re going to insult
businesspeople across America by running that,” Debi Coleman yelled at Jobs when she
saw the ad. At the marketing meetings, she stood up to make her point about how much she
hated it. “I literally put a resignation letter on his desk. I wrote it on my Mac. I thought it
was an affront to corporate managers. We were just beginning to get a toehold with desktop
publishing.”
Nevertheless Jobs and Sculley bent to the agency’s entreaties and ran the commercial
during the Super Bowl. They went to the game together at Stanford Stadium with Sculley’s
wife, Leezy (who couldn’t stand Jobs), and Jobs’s new girlfriend, Tina Redse. When the
commercial was shown near the end of the fourth quarter of a dreary game, the fans
watched on the overhead screen and had little reaction. Across the country, most of the
response was negative. “It insulted the very people Apple was trying to reach,” the
president of a market research firm told Fortune. Apple’s marketing manager suggested
afterward that the company might want to buy an ad in the Wall Street Journal apologizing.
Jay Chiat threatened that if Apple did that his agency would buy the facing page and
apologize for the apology.
Jobs’s discomfort, with both the ad and the situation at Apple in general, was on display
when he traveled to New York in January to do another round of one-on-one press
interviews. Andy Cunningham, from Regis McKenna’s firm, was in charge of hand-holding
and logistics at the Carlyle. When Jobs arrived, he told her that his suite needed to be
completely redone, even though it was 10 p.m. and the meetings were to begin the next
day. The piano was not in the right place; the strawberries were the wrong type. But his
biggest objection was that he didn’t like the flowers. He wanted calla lilies. “We got into a
big fight on what a calla lily is,” Cunningham recalled. “I know what they are, because I
had them at my wedding, but he insisted on having a different type of lily and said I was
‘stupid’ because I didn’t know what a real calla lily was.” So Cunningham went out and,

this being New York, was able to find a place open at midnight where she could get the
lilies he wanted. By the time they got the room rearranged, Jobs started objecting to what
she was wearing. “That suit’s disgusting,” he told her. Cunningham knew that at times he
just simmered with undirected anger, so she tried to calm him down. “Look, I know you’re
angry, and I know how you feel,” she said.
“You have no fucking idea how I feel,” he shot back, “no fucking idea what it’s like to be
me.”

Thirty Years Old

Turning thirty is a milestone for most people, especially those of the generation that
proclaimed it would never trust anyone over that age. To celebrate his own thirtieth, in
February 1985, Jobs threw a lavishly formal but also playful—black tie and tennis shoes—
party for one thousand in the ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The
invitation read, “There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life,
you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help
me celebrate mine.”
One table featured software moguls, including Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor. Another had
old friends such as Elizabeth Holmes, who brought as her date a woman dressed in a
tuxedo. Andy Hertzfeld and Burrell Smith had rented tuxes and wore floppy tennis shoes,
which made it all the more memorable when they danced to the Strauss waltzes played by
the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
Ella Fitzgerald provided the entertainment, as Bob Dylan had declined. She sang mainly
from her standard repertoire, though occasionally tailoring a song like “The Girl from
Ipanema” to be about the boy from Cupertino. When she asked for some requests, Jobs
called out a few. She concluded with a slow rendition of “Happy Birthday.”
Sculley came to the stage to propose a toast to “technology’s foremost visionary.”
Wozniak also came up and presented Jobs with a framed copy of the Zaltair hoax from the
1977 West Coast Computer Faire, where the Apple II had been introduced. The venture
capitalist Don Valentine marveled at the change in the decade since that time. “He went
from being a Ho Chi Minh look-alike, who said never trust anyone over thirty, to a person
who gives himself a fabulous thirtieth birthday with Ella Fitzgerald,” he said.
Many people had picked out special gifts for a person who was not easy to shop for.
Debi Coleman, for example, found a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon.
But Jobs, in an act that was odd yet not out of character, left all of the gifts in a hotel room.
Wozniak and some of the Apple veterans, who did not take to the goat cheese and salmon
mousse that was served, met after the party and went out to eat at a Denny’s.
“It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something
amazing,” Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published a long and intimate
interview in Playboy the month he turned thirty. “Of course, there are some people who are
innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.” The interview
touched on many subjects, but Jobs’s most poignant ruminations were about growing old
and facing the future:

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching
chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a
record, and they never get out of them.
I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the
thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry.
There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. . . .
If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too
much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and
throw them away.
The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue
to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going
crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they
re-emerge a little differently.

With each of those statements, Jobs seemed to have a premonition that his life would
soon be changing. Perhaps the thread of his life would indeed weave in and out of the
thread of Apple’s. Perhaps it was time to throw away some of what he had been. Perhaps it
was time to say “Bye, I have to go,” and then reemerge later, thinking differently.

Exodus

Andy Hertzfeld had taken a leave of absence after the Macintosh came out in 1984. He
needed to recharge his batteries and get away from his supervisor, Bob Belleville, whom he
didn’t like. One day he learned that Jobs had given out bonuses of up to $50,000 to
engineers on the Macintosh team. So he went to Jobs to ask for one. Jobs responded that
Belleville had decided not to give the bonuses to people who were on leave. Hertzfeld later
heard that the decision had actually been made by Jobs, so he confronted him. At first Jobs
equivocated, then he said, “Well, let’s assume what you are saying is true. How does that
change things?” Hertzfeld said that if Jobs was withholding the bonus as a reason for him
to come back, then he wouldn’t come back as a matter of principle. Jobs relented, but it left
Hertzfeld with a bad taste.
When his leave was coming to an end, Hertzfeld made an appointment to have dinner
with Jobs, and they walked from his office to an Italian restaurant a few blocks away. “I
really want to return,” he told Jobs. “But things seem really messed up right now.” Jobs
was vaguely annoyed and distracted, but Hertzfeld plunged ahead. “The software team is
completely demoralized and has hardly done a thing for months, and Burrell is so frustrated
that he won’t last to the end of the year.”
At that point Jobs cut him off. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” he said.
“The Macintosh team is doing great, and I’m having the best time of my life right now.
You’re just completely out of touch.” His stare was withering, but he also tried to look
amused at Hertzfeld’s assessment.
“If you really believe that, I don’t think there’s any way that I can come back,” Hertzfeld
replied glumly. “The Mac team that I want to come back to doesn’t even exist anymore.”

“The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you,” Jobs replied. “I want you to come back,
but if you don’t want to, that’s up to you. You don’t matter as much as you think you do,
anyway.”
Hertzfeld didn’t come back.
By early 1985 Burrell Smith was also ready to leave. He had worried that it would be
hard to quit if Jobs tried to talk him out of it; the reality distortion field was usually too
strong for him to resist. So he plotted with Hertzfeld how he could break free of it. “I’ve
got it!” he told Hertzfeld one day. “I know the perfect way to quit that will nullify the
reality distortion field. I’ll just walk into Steve’s office, pull down my pants, and urinate on
his desk. What could he say to that? It’s guaranteed to work.” The betting on the Mac team
was that even brave Burrell Smith would not have the gumption to do that. When he finally
decided he had to make his break, around the time of Jobs’s birthday bash, he made an
appointment to see Jobs. He was surprised to find Jobs smiling broadly when he walked in.
“Are you gonna do it? Are you really gonna do it?” Jobs asked. He had heard about the
plan.
Smith looked at him. “Do I have to? I’ll do it if I have to.” Jobs gave him a look, and
Smith decided it wasn’t necessary. So he resigned less dramatically and walked out on
good terms.
He was quickly followed by another of the great Macintosh engineers, Bruce Horn.
When Horn went in to say good-bye, Jobs told him, “Everything that’s wrong with the Mac
is your fault.”
Horn responded, “Well, actually, Steve, a lot of things that are right with the Mac are my
fault, and I had to fight like crazy to get those things in.”
“You’re right,” admitted Jobs. “I’ll give you 15,000 shares to stay.” When Horn declined
the offer, Jobs showed his warmer side. “Well, give me a hug,” he said. And so they
hugged.
But the biggest news that month was the departure from Apple, yet again, of its
cofounder, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was then quietly working as a midlevel engineer in the
Apple II division, serving as a humble mascot of the roots of the company and staying as
far away from management and corporate politics as he could. He felt, with justification,
that Jobs was not appreciative of the Apple II, which remained the cash cow of the
company and accounted for 70% of its sales at Christmas 1984. “People in the Apple II
group were being treated as very unimportant by the rest of the company,” he later said.
“This was despite the fact that the Apple II was by far the largest-selling product in our
company for ages, and would be for years to come.” He even roused himself to do
something out of character; he picked up the phone one day and called Sculley, berating
him for lavishing so much attention on Jobs and the Macintosh division.
Frustrated, Wozniak decided to leave quietly to start a new company that would make a
universal remote control device he had invented. It would control your television, stereo,
and other electronic devices with a simple set of buttons that you could easily program. He
informed the head of engineering at the Apple II division, but he didn’t feel he was
important enough to go out of channels and tell Jobs or Markkula. So Jobs first heard about
it when the news leaked in the Wall Street Journal. In his earnest way, Wozniak had openly

answered the reporter’s questions when he called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been
giving short shrift to the Apple II division. “Apple’s direction has been horrendously wrong
for five years,” he said.
Less than two weeks later Wozniak and Jobs traveled together to the White House, where
Ronald Reagan presented them with the first National Medal of Technology. The president
quoted what President Rutherford Hayes had said when first shown a telephone—“An
amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?”—and then quipped, “I thought at
the time that he might be mistaken.” Because of the awkward situation surrounding
Wozniak’s departure, Apple did not throw a celebratory dinner. So Jobs and Wozniak went
for a walk afterward and ate at a sandwich shop. They chatted amiably, Wozniak recalled,
and avoided any discussion of their disagreements.
Wozniak wanted to make the parting amicable. It was his style. So he agreed to stay on
as a part-time Apple employee at a $20,000 salary and represent the company at events and
trade shows. That could have been a graceful way to drift apart. But Jobs could not leave
well enough alone. One Saturday, a few weeks after they had visited Washington together,
Jobs went to the new Palo Alto studios of Hartmut Esslinger, whose company frogdesign
had moved there to handle its design work for Apple. There he happened to see sketches
that the firm had made for Wozniak’s new remote control device, and he flew into a rage.
Apple had a clause in its contract that gave it the right to bar frogdesign from working on
other computer-related projects, and Jobs invoked it. “I informed them,” he recalled, “that
working with Woz wouldn’t be acceptable to us.”
When the Wall Street Journal heard what happened, it got in touch with Wozniak, who,
as usual, was open and honest. He said that Jobs was punishing him. “Steve Jobs has a hate
for me, probably because of the things I said about Apple,” he told the reporter. Jobs’s
action was remarkably petty, but it was also partly caused by the fact that he understood, in
ways that others did not, that the look and style of a product served to brand it. A device
that had Wozniak’s name on it and used the same design language as Apple’s products
might be mistaken for something that Apple had produced. “It’s not personal,” Jobs told the
newspaper, explaining that he wanted to make sure that Wozniak’s remote wouldn’t look
like something made by Apple. “We don’t want to see our design language used on other
products. Woz has to find his own resources. He can’t leverage off Apple’s resources; we
can’t treat him specially.”
Jobs volunteered to pay for the work that frogdesign had already done for Wozniak, but
even so the executives at the firm were taken aback. When Jobs demanded that they send
him the drawings done for Wozniak or destroy them, they refused. Jobs had to send them a
letter invoking Apple’s contractual right. Herbert Pfeifer, the design director of the firm,
risked Jobs’s wrath by publicly dismissing his claim that the dispute with Wozniak was not
personal. “It’s a power play,” Pfeifer told the Journal. “They have personal problems
between them.”
Hertzfeld was outraged when he heard what Jobs had done. He lived about twelve blocks
from Jobs, who sometimes would drop by on his walks. “I got so furious about the
Wozniak remote episode that when Steve next came over, I wouldn’t let him in the house,”
Hertzfeld recalled. “He knew he was wrong, but he tried to rationalize, and maybe in his

distorted reality he was able to.” Wozniak, always a teddy bear even when annoyed, hired
another design firm and even agreed to stay on Apple’s retainer as a spokesman.

Showdown, Spring 1985

There were many reasons for the rift between Jobs and Sculley in the spring of 1985. Some
were merely business disagreements, such as Sculley’s attempt to maximize profits by
keeping the Macintosh price high when Jobs wanted to make it more affordable. Others
were weirdly psychological and stemmed from the torrid and unlikely infatuation they
initially had with each other. Sculley had painfully craved Jobs’s affection, Jobs had
eagerly sought a father figure and mentor, and when the ardor began to cool there was an
emotional backwash. But at its core, the growing breach had two fundamental causes, one
on each side.
For Jobs, the problem was that Sculley never became a product person. He didn’t make
the effort, or show the capacity, to understand the fine points of what they were making. On
the contrary, he found Jobs’s passion for tiny technical tweaks and design details to be
obsessive and counterproductive. He had spent his career selling sodas and snacks whose
recipes were largely irrelevant to him. He wasn’t naturally passionate about products,
which was among the most damning sins that Jobs could imagine. “I tried to educate him
about the details of engineering,” Jobs recalled, “but he had no idea how products are
created, and after a while it just turned into arguments. But I learned that my perspective
was right. Products are everything.” He came to see Sculley as clueless, and his contempt
was exacerbated by Sculley’s hunger for his affection and delusions that they were very
similar.
For Sculley, the problem was that Jobs, when he was no longer in courtship or
manipulative mode, was frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish, and nasty to other people. He
found Jobs’s boorish behavior as despicable as Jobs found Sculley’s lack of passion for
product details. Sculley was kind, caring, and polite to a fault. At one point they were
planning to meet with Xerox’s vice chair Bill Glavin, and Sculley begged Jobs to behave.
But as soon as they sat down, Jobs told Glavin, “You guys don’t have any clue what you’re
doing,” and the meeting broke up. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help myself,” Jobs told
Sculley. It was one of many such cases. As Atari’s Al Alcorn later observed, “Sculley
believed in keeping people happy and worrying about relationships. Steve didn’t give a shit
about that. But he did care about the product in a way that Sculley never could, and he was
able to avoid having too many bozos working at Apple by insulting anyone who wasn’t an
A player.”
The board became increasingly alarmed at the turmoil, and in early 1985 Arthur Rock
and some other disgruntled directors delivered a stern lecture to both. They told Sculley
that he was supposed to be running the company, and he should start doing so with more
authority and less eagerness to be pals with Jobs. They told Jobs that he was supposed to be
fixing the mess at the Macintosh division and not telling other divisions how to do their
job. Afterward Jobs retreated to his office and typed on his Macintosh, “I will not criticize
the rest of the organization, I will not criticize the rest of the organization . . .”

As the Macintosh continued to disappoint—sales in March 1985 were only 10% of the
budget forecast—Jobs holed up in his office fuming or wandered the halls berating
everyone else for the problems. His mood swings became worse, and so did his abuse of
those around him. Middle-level managers began to rise up against him. The marketing
chief Mike Murray sought a private meeting with Sculley at an industry conference. As
they were going up to Sculley’s hotel room, Jobs spotted them and asked to come along.
Murray asked him not to. He told Sculley that Jobs was wreaking havoc and had to be
removed from managing the Macintosh division. Sculley replied that he was not yet
resigned to having a showdown with Jobs. Murray later sent a memo directly to Jobs
criticizing the way he treated colleagues and denouncing “management by character
assassination.”
For a few weeks it seemed as if there might be a solution to the turmoil. Jobs became
fascinated by a flat-screen technology developed by a firm near Palo Alto called Woodside
Design, run by an eccentric engineer named Steve Kitchen. He also was impressed by
another startup that made a touchscreen display that could be controlled by your finger, so
you didn’t need a mouse. Together these might help fulfill Jobs’s vision of creating a “Mac
in a book.” On a walk with Kitchen, Jobs spotted a building in nearby Menlo Park and
declared that they should open a skunkworks facility to work on these ideas. It could be
called AppleLabs and Jobs could run it, going back to the joy of having a small team and
developing a great new product.
Sculley was thrilled by the possibility. It would solve most of his management issues,
moving Jobs back to what he did best and getting rid of his disruptive presence in
Cupertino. Sculley also had a candidate to replace Jobs as manager of the Macintosh
division: Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s chief in France, who had suffered through Jobs’s visit
there. Gassée flew to Cupertino and said he would take the job if he got a guarantee that he
would run the division rather than work under Jobs. One of the board members, Phil
Schlein of Macy’s, tried to convince Jobs that he would be better off thinking up new
products and inspiring a passionate little team.
But after some reflection, Jobs decided that was not the path he wanted. He declined to
cede control to Gassée, who wisely went back to Paris to avoid the power clash that was
becoming inevitable. For the rest of the spring, Jobs vacillated. There were times when he
wanted to assert himself as a corporate manager, even writing a memo urging cost savings
by eliminating free beverages and first-class air travel, and other times when he agreed with
those who were encouraging him to go off and run a new AppleLabs R&D group.
In March Murray let loose with another memo that he marked “Do not circulate” but
gave to multiple colleagues. “In my three years at Apple, I’ve never observed so much
confusion, fear, and dysfunction as in the past 90 days,” he began. “We are perceived by
the rank and file as a boat without a rudder, drifting away into foggy oblivion.” Murray had
been on both sides of the fence; at times he conspired with Jobs to undermine Sculley, but
in this memo he laid the blame on Jobs. “Whether the cause of or because of the
dysfunction, Steve Jobs now controls a seemingly impenetrable power base.”
At the end of that month, Sculley finally worked up the nerve to tell Jobs that he should
give up running the Macintosh division. He walked over to Jobs’s office one evening and

brought the human resources manager, Jay Elliot, to make the confrontation more formal.
“There is no one who admires your brilliance and vision more than I do,” Sculley began.
He had uttered such flatteries before, but this time it was clear that there would be a brutal
“but” punctuating the thought. And there was. “But this is really not going to work,” he
declared. The flatteries punctured by “buts” continued. “We have developed a great
friendship with each other,” he said, “but I have lost confidence in your ability to run the
Macintosh division.” He also berated Jobs for badmouthing him as a bozo behind his back.
Jobs looked stunned and countered with an odd challenge, that Sculley should help and
coach him more: “You’ve got to spend more time with me.” Then he lashed back. He told
Sculley he knew nothing about computers, was doing a terrible job running the company,
and had disappointed Jobs ever since coming to Apple. Then he began to cry. Sculley sat
there biting his fingernails.
“I’m going to bring this up with the board,” Sculley declared. “I’m going to recommend
that you step down from your operating position of running the Macintosh division. I want
you to know that.” He urged Jobs not to resist and to agree instead to work on developing
new technologies and products.
Jobs jumped from his seat and turned his intense stare on Sculley. “I don’t believe you’re
going to do that,” he said. “If you do that, you’re going to destroy the company.”
Over the next few weeks Jobs’s behavior fluctuated wildly. At one moment he would be
talking about going off to run AppleLabs, but in the next moment he would be enlisting
support to have Sculley ousted. He would reach out to Sculley, then lash out at him behind
his back, sometimes on the same night. One night at 9 he called Apple’s general counsel Al
Eisenstat to say he was losing confidence in Sculley and needed his help convincing the
board to fire him; at 11 the same night, he phoned Sculley to say, “You’re terrific, and I just
want you to know I love working with you.”
At the board meeting on April 11, Sculley officially reported that he wanted to ask Jobs
to step down as the head of the Macintosh division and focus instead on new product
development. Arthur Rock, the most crusty and independent of the board members, then
spoke. He was fed up with both of them: with Sculley for not having the guts to take
command over the past year, and with Jobs for “acting like a petulant brat.” The board
needed to get this dispute behind them, and to do so it should meet privately with each of
them.
Sculley left the room so that Jobs could present first. Jobs insisted that Sculley was the
problem because he had no understanding of computers. Rock responded by berating Jobs.
In his growling voice, he said that Jobs had been behaving foolishly for a year and had no
right to be managing a division. Even Jobs’s strongest supporter, Phil Schlein, tried to talk
him into stepping aside gracefully to run a research lab for the company.
When it was Sculley’s turn to meet privately with the board, he gave an ultimatum: “You
can back me, and then I take responsibility for running the company, or we can do nothing,
and you’re going to have to find yourselves a new CEO.” If given the authority, he said, he
would not move abruptly, but would ease Jobs into the new role over the next few months.
The board unanimously sided with Sculley. He was given the authority to remove Jobs

whenever he felt the timing was right. As Jobs waited outside the boardroom, knowing full
well that he was losing, he saw Del Yocam, a longtime colleague, and hugged him.
After the board made its decision, Sculley tried to be conciliatory. Jobs asked that the
transition occur slowly, over the next few months, and Sculley agreed. Later that evening
Sculley’s executive assistant, Nanette Buckhout, called Jobs to see how he was doing. He
was still in his office, shell-shocked. Sculley had already left, and Jobs came over to talk to
her. Once again he began oscillating wildly in his attitude toward Sculley. “Why did John
do this to me?” he said. “He betrayed me.” Then he swung the other way. Perhaps he
should take some time away to work on restoring his relationship with Sculley, he said.
“John’s friendship is more important than anything else, and I think maybe that’s what I
should do, concentrate on our friendship.”

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:17

Plotting a Coup

Jobs was not good at taking no for an answer. He went to Sculley’s office in early May
1985 and asked for more time to show that he could manage the Macintosh division. He
would prove himself as an operations guy, he promised. Sculley didn’t back down. Jobs
next tried a direct challenge: He asked Sculley to resign. “I think you really lost your
stride,” Jobs told him. “You were really great the first year, and everything went wonderful.
But something happened.” Sculley, who generally was even-tempered, lashed back,
pointing out that Jobs had been unable to get Macintosh software developed, come up with
new models, or win customers. The meeting degenerated into a shouting match about who
was the worse manager. After Jobs stalked out, Sculley turned away from the glass wall of
his office, where others had been looking in on the meeting, and wept.
Matters began to come to a head on Tuesday, May 14, when the Macintosh team made
its quarterly review presentation to Sculley and other Apple corporate leaders. Jobs still had
not relinquished control of the division, and he was defiant when he arrived in the
corporate boardroom with his team. He and Sculley began by clashing over what the
division’s mission was. Jobs said it was to sell more Macintosh machines. Sculley said it
was to serve the interests of the Apple company as a whole. As usual there was little
cooperation among the divisions; for one thing, the Macintosh team was planning new disk
drives that were different from those being developed by the Apple II division. The debate,
according to the minutes, took a full hour.
Jobs then described the projects under way: a more powerful Mac, which would take the
place of the discontinued Lisa; and software called FileServer, which would allow
Macintosh users to share files on a network. Sculley learned for the first time that these
projects were going to be late. He gave a cold critique of Murray’s marketing record,
Belleville’s missed engineering deadlines, and Jobs’s overall management. Despite all this,
Jobs ended the meeting with a plea to Sculley, in front of all the others there, to be given
one more chance to prove he could run a division. Sculley refused.
That night Jobs took his Macintosh team out to dinner at Nina’s Café in Woodside. Jean-
Louis Gassée was in town because Sculley wanted him to prepare to take over the
Macintosh division, and Jobs invited him to join them. Belleville proposed a toast “to those

of us who really understand what the world according to Steve Jobs is all about.” That
phrase—“the world according to Steve”—had been used dismissively by others at Apple
who belittled the reality warp he created. After the others left, Belleville sat with Jobs in his
Mercedes and urged him to organize a battle to the death with Sculley.
Months earlier, Apple had gotten the right to export computers to China, and Jobs had
been invited to sign a deal in the Great Hall of the People over the 1985 Memorial Day
weekend. He had told Sculley, who decided he wanted to go himself, which was just fine
with Jobs. Jobs decided to use Sculley’s absence to execute his coup. Throughout the week
leading up to Memorial Day, he took a lot of people on walks to share his plans. “I’m going
to launch a coup while John is in China,” he told Mike Murray.

Seven Days in May

Thursday, May 23: At his regular Thursday meeting with his top lieutenants in the
Macintosh division, Jobs told his inner circle about his plan to oust Sculley. He also
confided in the corporate human resources director, Jay Elliot, who told him bluntly that
the proposed rebellion wouldn’t work. Elliot had talked to some board members and urged
them to stand up for Jobs, but he discovered that most of the board was with Sculley, as
were most members of Apple’s senior staff. Yet Jobs barreled ahead. He even revealed his
plans to Gassée on a walk around the parking lot, despite the fact that Gassée had come
from Paris to take his job. “I made the mistake of telling Gassée,” Jobs wryly conceded
years later.
That evening Apple’s general counsel Al Eisenstat had a small barbecue at his home for
Sculley, Gassée, and their wives. When Gassée told Eisenstat what Jobs was plotting, he
recommended that Gassée inform Sculley. “Steve was trying to raise a cabal and have a
coup to get rid of John,” Gassée recalled. “In the den of Al Eisenstat’s house, I put my
index finger lightly on John’s breastbone and said, ‘If you leave tomorrow for China, you
could be ousted. Steve’s plotting to get rid of you.’”

Friday, May 24: Sculley canceled his trip and decided to confront Jobs at the executive
staff meeting on Friday morning. Jobs arrived late, and he saw that his usual seat next to
Sculley, who sat at the head of the table, was taken. He sat instead at the far end. He was
dressed in a well-tailored suit and looked energized. Sculley looked pale. He announced
that he was dispensing with the agenda to confront the issue on everyone’s mind. “It’s
come to my attention that you’d like to throw me out of the company,” he said, looking
directly at Jobs. “I’d like to ask you if that’s true.”
Jobs was not expecting this. But he was never shy about indulging in brutal honesty. His
eyes narrowed, and he fixed Sculley with his unblinking stare. “I think you’re bad for
Apple, and I think you’re the wrong person to run the company,” he replied, coldly and
slowly. “You really should leave this company. You don’t know how to operate and never
have.” He accused Sculley of not understanding the product development process, and then
he added a self-centered swipe: “I wanted you here to help me grow, and you’ve been
ineffective in helping me.”

As the rest of the room sat frozen, Sculley finally lost his temper. A childhood stutter that
had not afflicted him for twenty years started to return. “I don’t trust you, and I won’t
tolerate a lack of trust,” he stammered. When Jobs claimed that he would be better than
Sculley at running the company, Sculley took a gamble. He decided to poll the room on
that question. “He pulled off this clever maneuver,” Jobs recalled, still smarting thirty-five
years later. “It was at the executive committee meeting, and he said, ‘It’s me or Steve, who
do you vote for?’ He set the whole thing up so that you’d kind of have to be an idiot to vote
for me.”
Suddenly the frozen onlookers began to squirm. Del Yocam had to go first. He said he
loved Jobs, wanted him to continue to play some role in the company, but he worked up the
nerve to conclude, with Jobs staring at him, that he “respected” Sculley and would support
him to run the company. Eisenstat faced Jobs directly and said much the same thing: He
liked Jobs but was supporting Sculley. Regis McKenna, who sat in on senior staff meetings
as an outside consultant, was more direct. He looked at Jobs and told him he was not yet
ready to run the company, something he had told him before. Others sided with Sculley as
well. For Bill Campbell, it was particularly tough. He was fond of Jobs and didn’t
particularly like Sculley. His voice quavered a bit as he told Jobs he had decided to support
Sculley, and he urged the two of them to work it out and find some role for Jobs to play in
the company. “You can’t let Steve leave this company,” he told Sculley.
Jobs looked shattered. “I guess I know where things stand,” he said, and bolted out of the
room. No one followed.
He went back to his office, gathered his longtime loyalists on the Macintosh staff, and
started to cry. He would have to leave Apple, he said. As he started to walk out the door,
Debi Coleman restrained him. She and the others urged him to settle down and not do
anything hasty. He should take the weekend to regroup. Perhaps there was a way to prevent
the company from being torn apart.
Sculley was devastated by his victory. Like a wounded warrior, he retreated to
Eisenstat’s office and asked the corporate counsel to go for a ride. When they got into
Eisenstat’s Porsche, Sculley lamented, “I don’t know whether I can go through with this.”
When Eisenstat asked what he meant, Sculley responded, “I think I’m going to resign.”
“You can’t,” Eisenstat protested. “Apple will fall apart.”
“I’m going to resign,” Sculley declared. “I don’t think I’m right for the company.”
“I think you’re copping out,” Eisenstat replied. “You’ve got to stand up to him.” Then he
drove Sculley home.
Sculley’s wife was surprised to see him back in the middle of the day. “I’ve failed,” he
said to her forlornly. She was a volatile woman who had never liked Jobs or appreciated her
husband’s infatuation with him. So when she heard what had happened, she jumped into
her car and sped over to Jobs’s office. Informed that he had gone to the Good Earth
restaurant, she marched over there and confronted him in the parking lot as he was coming
out with loyalists on his Macintosh team.
“Steve, can I talk to you?” she said. His jaw dropped. “Do you have any idea what a
privilege it has been even to know someone as fine as John Sculley?” she demanded. He
averted his gaze. “Can’t you look me in the eyes when I’m talking to you?” she asked. But

when Jobs did so—giving her his practiced, unblinking stare—she recoiled. “Never mind,
don’t look at me,” she said. “When I look into most people’s eyes, I see a soul. When I look
into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone.” Then she walked away.

Saturday, May 25: Mike Murray drove to Jobs’s house in Woodside to offer some advice:
He should consider accepting the role of being a new product visionary, starting
AppleLabs, and getting away from headquarters. Jobs seemed willing to consider it. But
first he would have to restore peace with Sculley. So he picked up the telephone and
surprised Sculley with an olive branch. Could they meet the following afternoon, Jobs
asked, and take a walk together in the hills above Stanford University. They had walked
there in the past, in happier times, and maybe on such a walk they could work things out.
Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn’t
matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the
day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.
If Jobs was prepping for conciliation, it didn’t show in the choice of movie he wanted to
see with Murray that night. He picked Patton, the epic of the never-surrender general. But
he had lent his copy of the tape to his father, who had once ferried troops for the general, so
he drove to his childhood home with Murray to retrieve it. His parents weren’t there, and
he didn’t have a key. They walked around the back, checked for unlocked doors or
windows, and finally gave up. The video store didn’t have a copy of Patton in stock, so in
the end he had to settle for watching the 1983 film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal.

Sunday, May 26: As planned, Jobs and Sculley met in back of the Stanford campus on
Sunday afternoon and walked for several hours amid the rolling hills and horse pastures.
Jobs reiterated his plea that he should have an operational role at Apple. This time Sculley
stood firm. It won’t work, he kept saying. Sculley urged him to take the role of being a
product visionary with a lab of his own, but Jobs rejected this as making him into a mere
“figurehead.” Defying all connection to reality, he countered with the proposal that Sculley
give up control of the entire company to him. “Why don’t you become chairman and I’ll
become president and chief executive officer?” he suggested. Sculley was struck by how
earnest he seemed.
“Steve, that doesn’t make any sense,” Sculley replied. Jobs then proposed that they split
the duties of running the company, with him handling the product side and Sculley
handling marketing and business. But the board had not only emboldened Sculley, it had
ordered him to bring Jobs to heel. “One person has got to run the company,” he replied.
“I’ve got the support and you don’t.”
On his way home, Jobs stopped at Mike Markkula’s house. He wasn’t there, so Jobs left
a message asking him to come to dinner the following evening. He would also invite the
core of loyalists from his Macintosh team. He hoped that they could persuade Markkula of
the folly of siding with Sculley.

Monday, May 27: Memorial Day was sunny and warm. The Macintosh team loyalists—
Debi Coleman, Mike Murray, Susan Barnes, and Bob Belleville—got to Jobs’s Woodside

home an hour before the scheduled dinner so they could plot strategy. Sitting on the patio
as the sun set, Coleman told Jobs that he should accept Sculley’s offer to be a product
visionary and help start up AppleLabs. Of all the inner circle, Coleman was the most
willing to be realistic. In the new organization plan, Sculley had tapped her to run the
manufacturing division because he knew that her loyalty was to Apple and not just to Jobs.
Some of the others were more hawkish. They wanted to urge Markkula to support a
reorganization plan that put Jobs in charge.
When Markkula showed up, he agreed to listen with one proviso: Jobs had to keep quiet.
“I seriously wanted to hear the thoughts of the Macintosh team, not watch Jobs enlist them
in a rebellion,” he recalled. As it turned cooler, they went inside the sparsely furnished
mansion and sat by a fireplace. Instead of letting it turn into a gripe session, Markkula
made them focus on very specific management issues, such as what had caused the
problem in producing the FileServer software and why the Macintosh distribution system
had not responded well to the change in demand. When they were finished, Markkula
bluntly declined to back Jobs. “I said I wouldn’t support his plan, and that was the end of
that,” Markkula recalled. “Sculley was the boss. They were mad and emotional and putting
together a revolt, but that’s not how you do things.”

Tuesday, May 28: His ire stoked by hearing from Markkula that Jobs had spent the previous
evening trying to subvert him, Sculley walked over to Jobs’s office on Tuesday morning.
He had talked to the board, he said, and he had its support. He wanted Jobs out. Then he
drove to Markkula’s house, where he gave a presentation of his reorganization plans.
Markkula asked detailed questions, and at the end he gave Sculley his blessing. When he
got back to his office, Sculley called the other members of the board, just to make sure he
still had their backing. He did.
At that point he called Jobs to make sure he understood. The board had given final
approval of his reorganization plan, which would proceed that week. Gassée would take
over control of Jobs’s beloved Macintosh as well as other products, and there was no other
division for Jobs to run. Sculley was still somewhat conciliatory. He told Jobs that he could
stay on with the title of board chairman and be a product visionary with no operational
duties. But by this point, even the idea of starting a skunkworks such as AppleLabs was no
longer on the table.
It finally sank in. Jobs realized there was no appeal, no way to warp the reality. He broke
down in tears and started making phone calls—to Bill Campbell, Jay Elliot, Mike Murray,
and others. Murray’s wife, Joyce, was on an overseas call when Jobs phoned, and the
operator broke in saying it was an emergency. It better be important, she told the operator.
“It is,” she heard Jobs say. When her husband got on the phone, Jobs was crying. “It’s
over,” he said. Then he hung up.
Murray was worried that Jobs was so despondent he might do something rash, so he
called back. There was no answer, so he drove to Woodside. No one came to the door when
he knocked, so he went around back and climbed up some exterior steps and looked in the
bedroom. Jobs was lying there on a mattress in his unfurnished room. He let Murray in and
they talked until almost dawn.

Wednesday, May 29: Jobs finally got hold of a tape of Patton, which he watched
Wednesday evening, but Murray prevented him from getting stoked up for another battle.
Instead he urged Jobs to come in on Friday for Sculley’s announcement of the
reorganization plan. There was no option left other than to play the good soldier rather than
the renegade commander.

Like a Rolling Stone

Jobs slipped quietly into the back row of the auditorium to listen to Sculley explain to the
troops the new order of battle. There were a lot of sideways glances, but few people
acknowledged him and none came over to provide public displays of affection. He stared
without blinking at Sculley, who would remember “Steve’s look of contempt” years later.
“It’s unyielding,” Sculley recalled, “like an X-ray boring inside your bones, down to where
you’re soft and destructibly mortal.” For a moment, standing onstage while pretending not
to notice Jobs, Sculley thought back to a friendly trip they had taken a year earlier to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit Jobs’s hero, Edwin Land. He had been dethroned from
the company he created, Polaroid, and Jobs had said to Sculley in disgust, “All he did was
blow a lousy few million and they took his company away from him.” Now, Sculley
reflected, he was taking Jobs’s company away from him.
As Sculley went over the organizational chart, he introduced Gassée as the new head of a
combined Macintosh and Apple II product group. On the chart was a small box labeled
“chairman” with no lines connecting to it, not to Sculley or to anyone else. Sculley briefly
noted that in that role, Jobs would play the part of “global visionary.” But he didn’t
acknowledge Jobs’s presence. There was a smattering of awkward applause.
Jobs stayed home for the next few days, blinds drawn, his answering machine on, seeing
only his girlfriend, Tina Redse. For hours on end he sat there playing his Bob Dylan tapes,
especially “The Times They Are a-Changin.’” He had recited the second verse the day he
unveiled the Macintosh to the Apple shareholders sixteen months earlier. That verse ended
nicely: “For the loser now / Will be later to win. . . .”
A rescue squad from his former Macintosh posse arrived to dispel the gloom on Sunday
night, led by Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. Jobs took a while to answer their knock,
and then he led them to a room next to the kitchen that was one of the few places with any
furniture. With Redse’s help, he served some vegetarian food he had ordered. “So what
really happened?” Hertzfeld asked. “Is it really as bad as it looks?”
“No, it’s worse.” Jobs grimaced. “It’s much worse than you can imagine.” He blamed
Sculley for betraying him, and said that Apple would not be able to manage without him.
His role as chairman, he complained, was completely ceremonial. He was being ejected
from his Bandley 3 office to a small and almost empty building he nicknamed “Siberia.”
Hertzfeld turned the topic to happier days, and they began to reminisce about the past.
Earlier that week, Dylan had released a new album, Empire Burlesque, and Hertzfeld
brought a copy that they played on Jobs’s high-tech turntable. The most notable track,
“When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” with its apocalyptic message, seemed
appropriate for the evening, but Jobs didn’t like it. It sounded almost disco, and he

gloomily argued that Dylan had been going downhill since Blood on the Tracks. So
Hertzfeld moved the needle to the last song on the album, “Dark Eyes,” which was a
simple acoustic number featuring Dylan alone on guitar and harmonica. It was slow and
mournful and, Hertzfeld hoped, would remind Jobs of the earlier Dylan tracks he so loved.
But Jobs didn’t like that song either and had no desire to hear the rest of the album.
Jobs’s overwrought reaction was understandable. Sculley had once been a father figure
to him. So had Mike Markkula. So had Arthur Rock. That week all three had abandoned
him. “It gets back to the deep feeling of being rejected at an early age,” his friend and
lawyer George Riley later said. “It’s a deep part of his own mythology, and it defines to
himself who he is.” Jobs recalled years later, “I felt like I’d been punched, the air knocked
out of me and I couldn’t breathe.”
Losing the support of Arthur Rock was especially painful. “Arthur had been like a father
to me,” Jobs said. “He took me under his wing.” Rock had taught him about opera, and he
and his wife, Toni, had been his hosts in San Francisco and Aspen. “I remember driving
into San Francisco one time, and I said to him, ‘God, that Bank of America building is
ugly,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s the best,’ and he proceeded to lecture me, and he was right of
course.” Years later Jobs’s eyes welled with tears as he recounted the story: “He chose
Sculley over me. That really threw me for a loop. I never thought he would abandon me.”
Making matters worse was that his beloved company was now in the hands of a man he
considered a bozo. “The board felt that I couldn’t run a company, and that was their
decision to make,” he said. “But they made one mistake. They should have separated the
decision of what to do with me and what to do with Sculley. They should have fired
Sculley, even if they didn’t think I was ready to run Apple.” Even as his personal gloom
slowly lifted, his anger at Sculley, his feeling of betrayal, deepened.
The situation worsened when Sculley told a group of analysts that he considered Jobs
irrelevant to the company, despite his title as chairman. “From an operations standpoint,
there is no role either today or in the future for Steve Jobs,” he said. “I don’t know what
he’ll do.” The blunt comment shocked the group, and a gasp went through the auditorium.
Perhaps getting away to Europe would help, Jobs thought. So in June he went to Paris,
where he spoke at an Apple event and went to a dinner honoring Vice President George H.
W. Bush. From there he went to Italy, where he drove the hills of Tuscany with Redse and
bought a bike so he could spend time riding by himself. In Florence he soaked in the
architecture of the city and the texture of the building materials. Particularly memorable
were the paving stones, which came from Il Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of
Firenzuola. They were a calming bluish gray. Twenty years later he would decide that the
floors of most major Apple stores would be made of this sandstone.
The Apple II was just going on sale in Russia, so Jobs headed off to Moscow, where he
met up with Al Eisenstat. Because there was a problem getting Washington’s approval for
some of the required export licenses, they visited the commercial attaché at the American
embassy in Moscow, Mike Merwin. He warned them that there were strict laws against
sharing technology with the Soviets. Jobs was annoyed. At the Paris trade show, Vice
President Bush had encouraged him to get computers into Russia in order to “foment
revolution from below.” Over dinner at a Georgian restaurant that specialized in shish

kebab, Jobs continued his rant. “How could you suggest this violates American law when it
so obviously benefits our interests?” he asked Merwin. “By putting Macs in the hands of
Russians, they could print all their newspapers.”
Jobs also showed his feisty side in Moscow by insisting on talking about Trotsky, the
charismatic revolutionary who fell out of favor and was ordered assassinated by Stalin. At
one point the KGB agent assigned to him suggested he tone down his fervor. “You don’t
want to talk about Trotsky,” he said. “Our historians have studied the situation, and we
don’t believe he’s a great man anymore.” That didn’t help. When they got to the state
university in Moscow to speak to computer students, Jobs began his speech by praising
Trotsky. He was a revolutionary Jobs could identify with.
Jobs and Eisenstat attended the July Fourth party at the American embassy, and in his
thank-you letter to Ambassador Arthur Hartman, Eisenstat noted that Jobs planned to
pursue Apple’s ventures in Russia more vigorously in the coming year. “We are tentatively
planning on returning to Moscow in September.” For a moment it looked as if Sculley’s
hope that Jobs would turn into a “global visionary” for the company might come to pass.
But it was not to be. Something much different was in store for September.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

NeXT

Prometheus Unbound

The Pirates Abandon Ship

Upon his return from Europe in August 1985, while he was casting about for what to do
next, Jobs called the Stanford biochemist Paul Berg to discuss the advances that were being
made in gene splicing and recombinant DNA. Berg described how difficult it was to do
experiments in a biology lab, where it could take weeks to nurture an experiment and get a
result. “Why don’t you simulate them on a computer?” Jobs asked. Berg replied that
computers with such capacities were too expensive for university labs. “Suddenly, he was
excited about the possibilities,” Berg recalled. “He had it in his mind to start a new
company. He was young and rich, and had to find something to do with the rest of his life.”

Jobs had already been canvassing academics to ask what their workstation needs were. It
was something he had been interested in since 1983, when he had visited the computer
science department at Brown to show off the Macintosh, only to be told that it would take a
far more powerful machine to do anything useful in a university lab. The dream of
academic researchers was to have a workstation that was both powerful and personal. As
head of the Macintosh division, Jobs had launched a project to build such a machine, which
was dubbed the Big Mac. It would have a UNIX operating system but with the friendly
Macintosh interface. But after Jobs was ousted from the Macintosh division, his
replacement, Jean-Louis Gassée, canceled the Big Mac.
When that happened, Jobs got a distressed call from Rich Page, who had been
engineering the Big Mac’s chip set. It was the latest in a series of conversations that Jobs
was having with disgruntled Apple employees urging him to start a new company and
rescue them. Plans to do so began to jell over Labor Day weekend, when Jobs spoke to Bud
Tribble, the original Macintosh software chief, and floated the idea of starting a company to
build a powerful but personal workstation. He also enlisted two other Macintosh division
employees who had been talking about leaving, the engineer George Crow and the
controller Susan Barnes.
That left one key vacancy on the team: a person who could market the new product to
universities. The obvious candidate was Dan’l Lewin, who at Apple had organized a
consortium of universities to buy Macintosh computers in bulk. Besides missing two letters
in his first name, Lewin had the chiseled good looks of Clark Kent and a Princetonian’s
polish. He and Jobs shared a bond: Lewin had written a Princeton thesis on Bob Dylan and
charismatic leadership, and Jobs knew something about both of those topics.
Lewin’s university consortium had been a godsend to the Macintosh group, but he had
become frustrated after Jobs left and Bill Campbell had reorganized marketing in a way
that reduced the role of direct sales to universities. He had been meaning to call Jobs when,
that Labor Day weekend, Jobs called first. He drove to Jobs’s unfurnished mansion, and
they walked the grounds while discussing the possibility of creating a new company. Lewin
was excited, but not ready to commit. He was going to Austin with Campbell the following
week, and he wanted to wait until then to decide. Upon his return, he gave his answer: He
was in. The news came just in time for the September 13 Apple board meeting.
Although Jobs was still nominally the board’s chairman, he had not been to any meetings
since he lost power. He called Sculley, said he was going to attend, and asked that an item
be added to the end of the agenda for a “chairman’s report.” He didn’t say what it was
about, and Sculley assumed it would be a criticism of the latest reorganization. Instead,
when his turn came to speak, Jobs described to the board his plans to start a new company.
“I’ve been thinking a lot, and it’s time for me to get on with my life,” he began. “It’s
obvious that I’ve got to do something. I’m thirty years old.” Then he referred to some
prepared notes to describe his plan to create a computer for the higher education market.
The new company would not be competitive with Apple, he promised, and he would take
with him only a handful of non-key personnel. He offered to resign as chairman of Apple,
but he expressed hope that they could work together. Perhaps Apple would want to buy the
distribution rights to his product, he suggested, or license Macintosh software to it.

Mike Markkula rankled at the possibility that Jobs would hire anyone from Apple. “Why
would you take anyone at all?” he asked.
“Don’t get upset,” Jobs assured him and the rest of the board. “These are very low-level
people that you won’t miss, and they will be leaving anyway.”
The board initially seemed disposed to wish Jobs well in his venture. After a private
discussion, the directors even proposed that Apple take a 10% stake in the new company
and that Jobs remain on the board.
That night Jobs and his five renegades met again at his house for dinner. He was in favor
of taking the Apple investment, but the others convinced him it was unwise. They also
agreed that it would be best if they resigned all at once, right away. Then they could make a
clean break.
So Jobs wrote a formal letter telling Sculley the names of the five who would be leaving,
signed it in his spidery lowercase signature, and drove to Apple the next morning to hand it
to him before his 7:30 staff meeting.
“Steve, these are not low-level people,” Sculley said.
“Well, these people were going to resign anyway,” Jobs replied. “They are going to be
handing in their resignations by nine this morning.”
From Jobs’s perspective, he had been honest. The five were not division managers or
members of Sculley’s top team. They had all felt diminished, in fact, by the company’s new
organization. But from Sculley’s perspective, these were important players; Page was an
Apple Fellow, and Lewin was a key to the higher education market. In addition, they knew
about the plans for Big Mac; even though it had been shelved, this was still proprietary
information. Nevertheless Sculley was sanguine. Instead of pushing the point, he asked
Jobs to remain on the board. Jobs replied that he would think about it.
But when Sculley walked into his 7:30 staff meeting and told his top lieutenants who
was leaving, there was an uproar. Most of them felt that Jobs had breached his duties as
chairman and displayed stunning disloyalty to the company. “We should expose him for the
fraud that he is so that people here stop regarding him as a messiah,” Campbell shouted,
according to Sculley.
Campbell admitted that, although he later became a great Jobs defender and supportive
board member, he was ballistic that morning. “I was fucking furious, especially about him
taking Dan’l Lewin,” he recalled. “Dan’l had built the relationships with the universities.
He was always muttering about how hard it was to work with Steve, and then he left.”
Campbell was so angry that he walked out of the meeting to call Lewin at home. When his
wife said he was in the shower, Campbell said, “I’ll wait.” A few minutes later, when she
said he was still in the shower, Campbell again said, “I’ll wait.” When Lewin finally came
on the phone, Campbell asked him if it was true. Lewin acknowledged it was. Campbell
hung up without saying another word.
After hearing the fury of his senior staff, Sculley surveyed the members of the board.
They likewise felt that Jobs had misled them with his pledge that he would not raid
important employees. Arthur Rock was especially angry. Even though he had sided with
Sculley during the Memorial Day showdown, he had been able to repair his paternal
relationship with Jobs. Just the week before, he had invited Jobs to bring his girlfriend up

to San Francisco so that he and his wife could meet her, and the four had a nice dinner in
Rock’s Pacific Heights home. Jobs had not mentioned the new company he was forming,
so Rock felt betrayed when he heard about it from Sculley. “He came to the board and lied
to us,” Rock growled later. “He told us he was thinking of forming a company when in fact
he had already formed it. He said he was going to take a few middle-level people. It turned
out to be five senior people.” Markkula, in his subdued way, was also offended. “He took
some top executives he had secretly lined up before he left. That’s not the way you do
things. It was ungentlemanly.”
Over the weekend both the board and the executive staff convinced Sculley that Apple
would have to declare war on its cofounder. Markkula issued a formal statement accusing
Jobs of acting “in direct contradiction to his statements that he wouldn’t recruit any key
Apple personnel for his company.” He added ominously, “We are evaluating what possible
actions should be taken.” Campbell was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying he
“was stunned and shocked” by Jobs’s behavior.
Jobs had left his meeting with Sculley thinking that things might proceed smoothly, so he
had kept quiet. But after reading the newspapers, he felt that he had to respond. He phoned
a few favored reporters and invited them to his home for private briefings the next day.
Then he called Andy Cunningham, who had handled his publicity at Regis McKenna. “I
went over to his unfurnished mansiony place in Woodside,” she recalled, “and I found him
huddled in the kitchen with his five colleagues and a few reporters hanging outside on the
lawn.” Jobs told her that he was going to do a full-fledged press conference and started
spewing some of the derogatory things he was going to say. Cunningham was appalled.
“This is going to reflect badly on you,” she told him. Finally he backed down. He decided
that he would give the reporters a copy of the resignation letter and limit any on-the-record
comments to a few bland statements.
Jobs had considered just mailing in his letter of resignation, but Susan Barnes convinced
him that this would be too contemptuous. Instead he drove it to Markkula’s house, where
he also found Al Eisenstat. There was a tense conversation for about fifteen minutes; then
Barnes, who had been waiting outside, came to the door to retrieve him before he said
anything he would regret. He left behind the letter, which he had composed on a Macintosh
and printed on the new LaserWriter:
September 17, 1985

Dear Mike:
This morning’s papers carried suggestions that Apple is considering removing me as
Chairman. I don’t know the source of these reports but they are both misleading to the
public and unfair to me.
You will recall that at last Thursday’s Board meeting I stated I had decided to start a
new venture and I tendered my resignation as Chairman.
The Board declined to accept my resignation and asked me to defer it for a week. I
agreed to do so in light of the encouragement the Board offered with regard to the
proposed new venture and the indications that Apple would invest in it. On Friday, after I

told John Sculley who would be joining me, he confirmed Apple’s willingness to discuss
areas of possible collaboration between Apple and my new venture.
Subsequently the Company appears to be adopting a hostile posture toward me and the
new venture. Accordingly, I must insist upon the immediate acceptance of my
resignation. . . .
As you know, the company’s recent reorganization left me with no work to do and no
access even to regular management reports. I am but 30 and want still to contribute and
achieve.
After what we have accomplished together, I would wish our parting to be both amicable
and dignified.

Yours sincerely, steven p. jobs

When a guy from the facilities team went to Jobs’s office to pack up his belongings, he saw
a picture frame on the floor. It contained a photograph of Jobs and Sculley in warm
conversation, with an inscription from seven months earlier: “Here’s to Great Ideas, Great
Experiences, and a Great Friendship! John.” The glass frame was shattered. Jobs had
hurled it across the room before leaving. From that day, he never spoke to Sculley again.

Apple’s stock went up a full point, or almost 7%, when Jobs’s resignation was announced.
“East Coast stockholders always worried about California flakes running the company,”
explained the editor of a tech stock newsletter. “Now with both Wozniak and Jobs out,
those shareholders are relieved.” But Nolan Bushnell, the Atari founder who had been an
amused mentor ten years earlier, told Time that Jobs would be badly missed. “Where is
Apple’s inspiration going to come from? Is Apple going to have all the romance of a new
brand of Pepsi?”
After a few days of failed efforts to reach a settlement with Jobs, Sculley and the Apple
board decided to sue him “for breaches of fiduciary obligations.” The suit spelled out his
alleged transgressions:
Notwithstanding his fiduciary obligations to Apple, Jobs, while serving as the Chairman of
Apple’s Board of Directors and an officer of Apple and pretending loyalty to the interests
of Apple . . .
(a) secretly planned the formation of an enterprise to compete with Apple;
(b) secretly schemed that his competing enterprise would wrongfully take advantage of
and utilize Apple’s plan to design, develop and market the Next Generation Product . . .
(c) secretly lured away key employees of Apple.

At the time, Jobs owned 6.5 million shares of Apple stock, 11% of the company, worth
more than $100 million. He began to sell his shares, and within five months had dumped
them all, retaining only one share so he could attend shareholder meetings if he wanted. He
was furious, and that was reflected in his passion to start what was, no matter how he spun
it, a rival company. “He was angry at Apple,” said Joanna Hoffman, who briefly went to

work for the new company. “Aiming at the educational market, where Apple was strong,
was simply Steve being vengeful. He was doing it for revenge.”
Jobs, of course, didn’t see it that way. “I haven’t got any sort of odd chip on my
shoulder,” he told Newsweek. Once again he invited his favorite reporters over to his
Woodside home, and this time he did not have Andy Cunningham there urging him to be
circumspect. He dismissed the allegation that he had improperly lured the five colleagues
from Apple. “These people all called me,” he told the gaggle of journalists who were
milling around in his unfurnished living room. “They were thinking of leaving the
company. Apple has a way of neglecting people.”
He decided to cooperate with a Newsweek cover in order to get his version of the story
out, and the interview he gave was revealing. “What I’m best at doing is finding a group of
talented people and making things with them,” he told the magazine. He said that he would
always harbor affection for Apple. “I’ll always remember Apple like any man remembers
the first woman he’s fallen in love with.” But he was also willing to fight with its
management if need be. “When someone calls you a thief in public, you have to respond.”
Apple’s threat to sue him was outrageous. It was also sad. It showed that Apple was no
longer a confident, rebellious company. “It’s hard to think that a $2 billion company with
4,300 employees couldn’t compete with six people in blue jeans.”
To try to counter Jobs’s spin, Sculley called Wozniak and urged him to speak out. “Steve
can be an insulting and hurtful guy,” he told Time that week. He revealed that Jobs had
asked him to join his new firm—it would have been a sly way to land another blow against
Apple’s current management—but he wanted no part of such games and had not returned
Jobs’s phone call. To the San Francisco Chronicle, he recounted how Jobs had blocked
frogdesign from working on his remote control under the pretense that it might compete
with Apple products. “I look forward to a great product and I wish him success, but his
integrity I cannot trust,” Wozniak said.

To Be on Your Own

“The best thing ever to happen to Steve is when we fired him, told him to get lost,” Arthur
Rock later said. The theory, shared by many, is that the tough love made him wiser and
more mature. But it’s not that simple. At the company he founded after being ousted from
Apple, Jobs was able to indulge all of his instincts, both good and bad. He was unbound.
The result was a series of spectacular products that were dazzling market flops. This was
the true learning experience. What prepared him for the great success he would have in Act
III was not his ouster from his Act I at Apple but his brilliant failures in Act II.
The first instinct that he indulged was his passion for design. The name he chose for his
new company was rather straightforward: Next. In order to make it more distinctive, he
decided he needed a world-class logo. So he courted the dean of corporate logos, Paul
Rand. At seventy-one, the Brooklyn-born graphic designer had already created some of the
best-known logos in business, including those of Esquire, IBM, Westinghouse, ABC, and
UPS. He was under contract to IBM, and his supervisors there said that it would obviously
be a conflict for him to create a logo for another computer company. So Jobs picked up the

phone and called IBM’s CEO, John Akers. Akers was out of town, but Jobs was so
persistent that he was finally put through to Vice Chairman Paul Rizzo. After two days,
Rizzo concluded that it was futile to resist Jobs, and he gave permission for Rand to do the
work.
Rand flew out to Palo Alto and spent time walking with Jobs and listening to his vision.
The computer would be a cube, Jobs pronounced. He loved that shape. It was perfect and
simple. So Rand decided that the logo should be a cube as well, one that was tilted at a 28°
angle. When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not
create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he
told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way
you will pay me.”
Jobs admired that kind of thinking, so he made what was quite a gamble. The company
would pay an astonishing $100,000 flat fee to get one design. “There was a clarity in our
relationship,” Jobs said. “He had a purity as an artist, but he was astute at solving business
problems. He had a tough exterior, and had perfected the image of a curmudgeon, but he
was a teddy bear inside.” It was one of Jobs’s highest praises: purity as an artist.
It took Rand just two weeks. He flew back to deliver the result to Jobs at his Woodside
house. First they had dinner, then Rand handed him an elegant and vibrant booklet that
described his thought process. On the final spread, Rand presented the logo he had chosen.
“In its design, color arrangement, and orientation, the logo is a study in contrasts,” his
booklet proclaimed. “Tipped at a jaunty angle, it brims with the informality, friendliness,
and spontaneity of a Christmas seal and the authority of a rubber stamp.” The word “next”
was split into two lines to fill the square face of the cube, with only the “e” in lowercase.
That letter stood out, Rand’s booklet explained, to connote “education, excellence . . . e =
mc2.”
It was often hard to predict how Jobs would react to a presentation. He could label it
shitty or brilliant; one never knew which way he might go. But with a legendary designer
such as Rand, the chances were that Jobs would embrace the proposal. He stared at the
final spread, looked up at Rand, and then hugged him. They had one minor disagreement:
Rand had used a dark yellow for the “e” in the logo, and Jobs wanted him to change it to a
brighter and more traditional yellow. Rand banged his fist on the table and declared, “I’ve
been doing this for fifty years, and I know what I’m doing.” Jobs relented.
The company had not only a new logo, but a new name. No longer was it Next. It was
NeXT. Others might not have understood the need to obsess over a logo, much less pay
$100,000 for one. But for Jobs it meant that NeXT was starting life with a world-class feel
and identity, even if it hadn’t yet designed its first product. As Markkula had taught him, a
great company must be able to impute its values from the first impression it makes.
As a bonus, Rand agreed to design a personal calling card for Jobs. He came up with a
colorful type treatment, which Jobs liked, but they ended up having a lengthy and heated
disagreement about the placement of the period after the “P” in Steven P. Jobs. Rand had
placed the period to the right of the “P.”, as it would appear if set in lead type. Steve
preferred the period to be nudged to the left, under the curve of the “P.”, as is possible with

digital typography. “It was a fairly large argument about something relatively small,” Susan
Kare recalled. On this one Jobs prevailed.
In order to translate the NeXT logo into the look of real products, Jobs needed an
industrial designer he trusted. He talked to a few possibilities, but none of them impressed
him as much as the wild Bavarian he had imported to Apple: Hartmut Esslinger, whose
frogdesign had set up shop in Silicon Valley and who, thanks to Jobs, had a lucrative
contract with Apple. Getting IBM to permit Paul Rand to do work for NeXT was a small
miracle willed into existence by Jobs’s belief that reality can be distorted. But that was a
snap compared to the likelihood that he could convince Apple to permit Esslinger to work
for NeXT.
This did not keep Jobs from trying. At the beginning of November 1985, just five weeks
after Apple filed suit against him, Jobs wrote to Eisenstat and asked for a dispensation. “I
spoke with Hartmut Esslinger this weekend and he suggested I write you a note expressing
why I wish to work with him and frogdesign on the new products for NeXT,” he said.
Astonishingly, Jobs’s argument was that he did not know what Apple had in the works, but
Esslinger did. “NeXT has no knowledge as to the current or future directions of Apple’s
product designs, nor do other design firms we might deal with, so it is possible to
inadvertently design similar looking products. It is in both Apple’s and NeXT’s best interest
to rely on Hartmut’s professionalism to make sure this does not occur.” Eisenstat recalled
being flabbergasted by Jobs’s audacity, and he replied curtly. “I have previously expressed
my concern on behalf of Apple that you are engaged in a business course which involves
your utilization of Apple’s confidential business information,” he wrote. “Your letter does
not alleviate my concern in any way. In fact it heightens my concern because it states that
you have ‘no knowledge as to the current or future directions of Apple’s product designs,’ a
statement which is not true.” What made the request all the more astonishing to Eisenstat
was that it was Jobs who, just a year earlier, had forced frogdesign to abandon its work on
Wozniak’s remote control device.
Jobs realized that in order to work with Esslinger (and for a variety of other reasons), it
would be necessary to resolve the lawsuit that Apple had filed. Fortunately Sculley was
willing. In January 1986 they reached an out-of-court agreement involving no financial
damages. In return for Apple’s dropping its suit, NeXT agreed to a variety of restrictions:
Its product would be marketed as a high-end workstation, it would be sold directly to
colleges and universities, and it would not ship before March 1987. Apple also insisted that
the NeXT machine “not use an operating system compatible with the Macintosh,” though it
could be argued that Apple would have been better served by insisting on just the opposite.
After the settlement Jobs continued to court Esslinger until the designer decided to wind
down his contract with Apple. That allowed frogdesign to work with NeXT at the end of
1986. Esslinger insisted on having free rein, just as Paul Rand had. “Sometimes you have
to use a big stick with Steve,” he said. Like Rand, Esslinger was an artist, so Jobs was
willing to grant him indulgences he denied other mortals.
Jobs decreed that the computer should be an absolutely perfect cube, with each side
exactly a foot long and every angle precisely 90 degrees. He liked cubes. They had gravitas
but also the slight whiff of a toy. But the NeXT cube was a Jobsian example of design

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:18

desires trumping engineering considerations. The circuit boards, which fitted nicely into the
traditional pizza-box shape, had to be reconfigured and stacked in order to nestle into a
cube.
Even worse, the perfection of the cube made it hard to manufacture. Most parts that are
cast in molds have angles that are slightly greater than pure 90 degrees, so that it’s easier to
get them out of the mold (just as it is easier to get a cake out of a pan that has angles
slightly greater than 90 degrees). But Esslinger dictated, and Jobs enthusiastically agreed,
that there would be no such “draft angles” that would ruin the purity and perfection of the
cube. So the sides had to be produced separately, using molds that cost $650,000, at a
specialty machine shop in Chicago. Jobs’s passion for perfection was out of control. When
he noticed a tiny line in the chassis caused by the molds, something that any other
computer maker would accept as unavoidable, he flew to Chicago and convinced the die
caster to start over and do it perfectly. “Not a lot of die casters expect a celebrity to fly in,”
noted one of the engineers. Jobs also had the company buy a $150,000 sanding machine to
remove all lines where the mold faces met and insisted that the magnesium case be a matte
black, which made it more susceptible to showing blemishes.
Jobs had always indulged his obsession that the unseen parts of a product should be
crafted as beautifully as its façade, just as his father had taught him when they were
building a fence. This too he took to extremes when he found himself unfettered at NeXT.
He made sure that the screws inside the machine had expensive plating. He even insisted
that the matte black finish be coated onto the inside of the cube’s case, even though only
repairmen would see it.
Joe Nocera, then writing for Esquire, captured Jobs’s intensity at a NeXT staff meeting:
It’s not quite right to say that he is sitting through this staff meeting, because Jobs
doesn’t sit through much of anything; one of the ways he dominates is through sheer
movement. One moment he’s kneeling in his chair; the next minute he’s slouching in it; the
next he has leaped out of his chair entirely and is scribbling on the blackboard directly
behind him. He is full of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with unnerving
earnestness at whoever is speaking. His hands, which are slightly and inexplicably yellow,
are in constant motion.

What particularly struck Nocera was Jobs’s “almost willful lack of tact.” It was more than
just an inability to hide his opinions when others said something he thought dumb; it was a
conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, show
he was smarter. When Dan’l Lewin handed out an organization chart, for example, Jobs
rolled his eyes. “These charts are bullshit,” he interjected. Yet his moods still swung wildly,
as at Apple. A finance person came into the meeting and Jobs lavished praise on him for a
“really, really great job on this”; the previous day Jobs had told him, “This deal is crap.”
One of NeXT’s first ten employees was an interior designer for the company’s first
headquarters, in Palo Alto. Even though Jobs had leased a building that was new and nicely
designed, he had it completely gutted and rebuilt. Walls were replaced by glass, the carpets

were replaced by light hardwood flooring. The process was repeated when NeXT moved to
a bigger space in Redwood City in 1989. Even though the building was brand-new, Jobs
insisted that the elevators be moved so that the entrance lobby would be more dramatic. As
a centerpiece, Jobs commissioned I. M. Pei to design a grand staircase that seemed to float
in the air. The contractor said it couldn’t be built. Jobs said it could, and it was. Years later
Jobs would make such staircases a feature at Apple’s signature stores.

The Computer

During the early months of NeXT, Jobs and Dan’l Lewin went on the road, often
accompanied by a few colleagues, to visit campuses and solicit opinions. At Harvard they
met with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of Lotus software, over dinner at Harvest restaurant.
When Kapor began slathering butter on his bread, Jobs asked him, “Have you ever heard of
serum cholesterol?” Kapor responded, “I’ll make you a deal. You stay away from
commenting on my dietary habits, and I will stay away from the subject of your
personality.” It was meant humorously, but as Kapor later commented, “Human
relationships were not his strong suit.” Lotus agreed to write a spreadsheet program for the
NeXT operating system.
Jobs wanted to bundle useful content with the machine, so Michael Hawley, one of the
engineers, developed a digital dictionary. He learned that a friend of his at Oxford
University Press had been involved in the typesetting of a new edition of Shakespeare’s
works. That meant that there was probably a computer tape he could get his hands on and,
if so, incorporate it into the NeXT’s memory. “So I called up Steve, and he said that would
be awesome, and we flew over to Oxford together.” On a beautiful spring day in 1986, they
met in the publishing house’s grand building in the heart of Oxford, where Jobs made an
offer of $2,000 plus 74 cents for every computer sold in order to have the rights to Oxford’s
edition of Shakespeare. “It will be all gravy to you,” he argued. “You will be ahead of the
parade. It’s never been done before.” They agreed in principle and then went out to play
skittles over beer at a nearby pub where Lord Byron used to drink. By the time it launched,
the NeXT would also include a dictionary, a thesaurus, and the Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations, making it one of the pioneers of the concept of searchable electronic books.
Instead of using off-the-shelf chips for the NeXT, Jobs had his engineers design custom
ones that integrated a variety of functions on one chip. That would have been hard enough,
but Jobs made it almost impossible by continually revising the functions he wanted it to do.
After a year it became clear that this would be a major source of delay.
He also insisted on building his own fully automated and futuristic factory, just as he had
for the Macintosh; he had not been chastened by that experience. This time too he made the
same mistakes, only more excessively. Machines and robots were painted and repainted as
he compulsively revised his color scheme. The walls were museum white, as they had been
at the Macintosh factory, and there were $20,000 black leather chairs and a custom-made
staircase, just as in the corporate headquarters. He insisted that the machinery on the 165-
foot assembly line be configured to move the circuit boards from right to left as they got
built, so that the process would look better to visitors who watched from the viewing

gallery. Empty circuit boards were fed in at one end and twenty minutes later, untouched by
humans, came out the other end as completed boards. The process followed the Japanese
principle known as kanban, in which each machine performs its task only when the next
machine is ready to receive another part.
Jobs had not tempered his way of dealing with employees. “He applied charm or public
humiliation in a way that in most cases proved to be pretty effective,” Tribble recalled. But
sometimes it wasn’t. One engineer, David Paulsen, put in ninety-hour weeks for the first
ten months at NeXT. He quit when “Steve walked in one Friday afternoon and told us how
unimpressed he was with what we were doing.” When Business Week asked him why he
treated employees so harshly, Jobs said it made the company better. “Part of my
responsibility is to be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment
where excellence is expected.” But he still had his spirit and charisma. There were plenty
of field trips, visits by akido masters, and off-site retreats. And he still exuded the pirate
flag spunkiness. When Apple fired Chiat/Day, the ad firm that had done the “1984” ad and
taken out the newspaper ad saying “Welcome IBM—seriously,” Jobs took out a full-page
ad in the Wall Street Journal proclaiming, “Congratulations Chiat/Day—Seriously . . .
Because I can guarantee you: there is life after Apple.”
Perhaps the greatest similarity to his days at Apple was that Jobs brought with him his
reality distortion field. It was on display at the company’s first retreat at Pebble Beach in
late 1985. There Jobs pronounced that the first NeXT computer would be shipped in just
eighteen months. It was already clear that this date was impossible, but he blew off a
suggestion from one engineer that they be realistic and plan on shipping in 1988. “If we do
that, the world isn’t standing still, the technology window passes us by, and all the work
we’ve done we have to throw down the toilet,” he argued.
Joanna Hoffman, the veteran of the Macintosh team who was among those willing to
challenge Jobs, did so. “Reality distortion has motivational value, and I think that’s fine,”
she said as Jobs stood at a whiteboard. “However, when it comes to setting a date in a way
that affects the design of the product, then we get into real deep shit.” Jobs didn’t agree: “I
think we have to drive a stake in the ground somewhere, and I think if we miss this
window, then our credibility starts to erode.” What he did not say, even though it was
suspected by all, was that if their targets slipped they might run out of money. Jobs had
pledged $7 million of his own funds, but at their current burn rate that would run out in
eighteen months if they didn’t start getting some revenue from shipped products.
Three months later, when they returned to Pebble Beach for their next retreat, Jobs began
his list of maxims with “The honeymoon is over.” By the time of the third retreat, in
Sonoma in September 1986, the timetable was gone, and it looked as though the company
would hit a financial wall.

Perot to the Rescue

In late 1986 Jobs sent out a proposal to venture capital firms offering a 10% stake in NeXT
for $3 million. That put a valuation on the entire company of $30 million, a number that
Jobs had pulled out of thin air. Less than $7 million had gone into the company thus far,

and there was little to show for it other than a neat logo and some snazzy offices. It had no
revenue or products, nor any on the horizon. Not surprisingly, the venture capitalists all
passed on the offer to invest.
There was, however, one cowboy who was dazzled. Ross Perot, the bantam Texan who
had founded Electronic Data Systems, then sold it to General Motors for $2.4 billion,
happened to watch a PBS documentary, The Entrepreneurs, which had a segment on Jobs
and NeXT in November 1986. He instantly identified with Jobs and his gang, so much so
that, as he watched them on television, he said, “I was finishing their sentences for them.”
It was a line eerily similar to one Sculley had often used. Perot called Jobs the next day and
offered, “If you ever need an investor, call me.”
Jobs did indeed need one, badly. But he was careful not to show it. He waited a week
before calling back. Perot sent some of his analysts to size up NeXT, but Jobs took care to
deal directly with Perot. One of his great regrets in life, Perot later said, was that he had not
bought Microsoft, or a large stake in it, when a very young Bill Gates had come to visit him
in Dallas in 1979. By the time Perot called Jobs, Microsoft had just gone public with a $1
billion valuation. Perot had missed out on the opportunity to make a lot of money and have
a fun adventure. He was eager not to make that mistake again.
Jobs made an offer to Perot that was three times more costly than had quietly been
offered to venture capitalists a few months earlier. For $20 million, Perot would get 16% of
the equity in the company, after Jobs put in another $5 million. That meant the company
would be valued at about $126 million. But money was not a major consideration for Perot.
After a meeting with Jobs, he declared that he was in. “I pick the jockeys, and the jockeys
pick the horses and ride them,” he told Jobs. “You guys are the ones I’m betting on, so you
figure it out.”
Perot brought to NeXT something that was almost as valuable as his $20 million lifeline:
He was a quotable, spirited cheerleader for the company, who could lend it an air of
credibility among grown-ups. “In terms of a startup company, it’s one that carries the least
risk of any I’ve seen in 25 years in the computer industry,” he told the New York Times.
“We’ve had some sophisticated people see the hardware—it blew them away. Steve and his
whole NeXT team are the darnedest bunch of perfectionists I’ve ever seen.”
Perot also traveled in rarefied social and business circles that complemented Jobs’s own.
He took Jobs to a black-tie dinner dance in San Francisco that Gordon and Ann Getty gave
for King Juan Carlos I of Spain. When the king asked Perot whom he should meet, Perot
immediately produced Jobs. They were soon engaged in what Perot later described as
“electric conversation,” with Jobs animatedly describing the next wave in computing. At
the end the king scribbled a note and handed it to Jobs. “What happened?” Perot asked.
Jobs answered, “I sold him a computer.”
These and other stories were incorporated into the mythologized story of Jobs that Perot
told wherever he went. At a briefing at the National Press Club in Washington, he spun
Jobs’s life story into a Texas-size yarn about a young man
so poor he couldn’t afford to go to college, working in his garage at night, playing with
computer chips, which was his hobby, and his dad—who looks like a character out of a
Norman Rockwell painting—comes in one day and said, “Steve, either make something

you can sell or go get a job.” Sixty days later, in a wooden box that his dad made for him,
the first Apple computer was created. And this high school graduate literally changed the
world.

The one phrase that was true was the one about Paul Jobs’s looking like someone in a
Rockwell painting. And perhaps the last phrase, the one about Jobs changing the world.
Certainly Perot believed that. Like Sculley, he saw himself in Jobs. “Steve’s like me,” Perot
told the Washington Post’s David Remnick. “We’re weird in the same way. We’re soul
mates.”

Gates and NeXT

Bill Gates was not a soul mate. Jobs had convinced him to produce software applications
for the Macintosh, which had turned out to be hugely profitable for Microsoft. But Gates
was one person who was resistant to Jobs’s reality distortion field, and as a result he
decided not to create software tailored for the NeXT platform. Gates went to California to
get periodic demonstrations, but each time he came away unimpressed. “The Macintosh
was truly unique, but I personally don’t understand what is so unique about Steve’s new
computer,” he told Fortune.
Part of the problem was that the rival titans were congenitally unable to be deferential to
each other. When Gates made his first visit to NeXT’s Palo Alto headquarters, in the
summer of 1987, Jobs kept him waiting for a half hour in the lobby, even though Gates
could see through the glass walls that Jobs was walking around having casual
conversations. “I’d gone down to NeXT and I had the Odwalla, the most expensive carrot
juice, and I’d never seen tech offices so lavish,” Gates recalled, shaking his head with just a
hint of a smile. “And Steve comes a half hour late to the meeting.”
Jobs’s sales pitch, according to Gates, was simple. “We did the Mac together,” Jobs said.
“How did that work for you? Very well. Now, we’re going to do this together and this is
going to be great.”
But Gates was brutal to Jobs, just as Jobs could be to others. “This machine is crap,” he
said. “The optical disk has too low latency, the fucking case is too expensive. This thing is
ridiculous.” He decided then, and reaffirmed on each subsequent visit, that it made no sense
for Microsoft to divert resources from other projects to develop applications for NeXT.
Worse yet, he repeatedly said so publicly, which made others less likely to spend time
developing for NeXT. “Develop for it? I’ll piss on it,” he told InfoWorld.
When they happened to meet in the hallway at a conference, Jobs started berating Gates
for his refusal to do software for NeXT. “When you get a market, I will consider it,” Gates
replied. Jobs got angry. “It was a screaming battle, right in front of everybody,” recalled
Adele Goldberg, the Xerox PARC engineer. Jobs insisted that NeXT was the next wave of
computing. Gates, as he often did, got more expressionless as Jobs got more heated. He
finally just shook his head and walked away.

Beneath their personal rivalry—and occasional grudging respect—was their basic
philosophical difference. Jobs believed in an end-to-end integration of hardware and
software, which led him to build a machine that was not compatible with others. Gates
believed in, and profited from, a world in which different companies made machines that
were compatible with one another; their hardware ran a standard operating system
(Microsoft’s Windows) and could all use the same software apps (such as Microsoft’s Word
and Excel). “His product comes with an interesting feature called incompatibility,” Gates
told the Washington Post. “It doesn’t run any of the existing software. It’s a super-nice
computer. I don’t think if I went out to design an incompatible computer I would have done
as well as he did.”
At a forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1989, Jobs and Gates appeared sequentially,
laying out their competing worldviews. Jobs spoke about how new waves come along in
the computer industry every few years. Macintosh had launched a revolutionary new
approach with the graphical interface; now NeXT was doing it with object-oriented
programming tied to a powerful new machine based on an optical disk. Every major
software vendor realized they had to be part of this new wave, he said, “except Microsoft.”
When Gates came up, he reiterated his belief that Jobs’s end-to-end control of the software
and the hardware was destined for failure, just as Apple had failed in competing against the
Microsoft Windows standard. “The hardware market and the software market are separate,”
he said. When asked about the great design that could come from Jobs’s approach, Gates
gestured to the NeXT prototype that was still sitting onstage and sneered, “If you want
black, I’ll get you a can of paint.”

IBM

Jobs came up with a brilliant jujitsu maneuver against Gates, one that could have changed
the balance of power in the computer industry forever. It required Jobs to do two things that
were against his nature: licensing out his software to another hardware maker and getting
into bed with IBM. He had a pragmatic streak, albeit a tiny one, so he was able to
overcome his reluctance. But his heart was never fully in it, which is why the alliance
would turn out to be short-lived.
It began at a party, a truly memorable one, for the seventieth birthday of the Washington
Post publisher Katharine Graham in June 1987 in Washington. Six hundred guests
attended, including President Ronald Reagan. Jobs flew in from California and IBM’s
chairman John Akers from New York. It was the first time they had met. Jobs took the
opportunity to bad-mouth Microsoft and attempt to wean IBM from using its Windows
operating system. “I couldn’t resist telling him I thought IBM was taking a giant gamble
betting its entire software strategy on Microsoft, because I didn’t think its software was
very good,” Jobs recalled.
To Jobs’s delight, Akers replied, “How would you like to help us?” Within a few weeks
Jobs showed up at IBM’s Armonk, New York, headquarters with his software engineer Bud
Tribble. They put on a demo of NeXT, which impressed the IBM engineers. Of particular
significance was NeXTSTEP, the machine’s object-oriented operating system. “NeXTSTEP

took care of a lot of trivial programming chores that slow down the software development
process,” said Andrew Heller, the general manager of IBM’s workstation unit, who was so
impressed by Jobs that he named his newborn son Steve.
The negotiations lasted into 1988, with Jobs becoming prickly over tiny details. He
would stalk out of meetings over disagreements about colors or design, only to be calmed
down by Tribble or Lewin. He didn’t seem to know which frightened him more, IBM or
Microsoft. In April Perot decided to play host for a mediating session at his Dallas
headquarters, and a deal was struck: IBM would license the current version of the
NeXTSTEP software, and if the managers liked it, they would use it on some of their
workstations. IBM sent to Palo Alto a 125-page contract. Jobs tossed it down without
reading it. “You don’t get it,” he said as he walked out of the room. He demanded a simpler
contract of only a few pages, which he got within a week.
Jobs wanted to keep the arrangement secret from Bill Gates until the big unveiling of the
NeXT computer, scheduled for October. But IBM insisted on being forthcoming. Gates was
furious. He realized this could wean IBM off its dependence on Microsoft operating
systems. “NeXTSTEP isn’t compatible with anything,” he raged to IBM executives.
At first Jobs seemed to have pulled off Gates’s worst nightmare. Other computer makers
that were beholden to Microsoft’s operating systems, most notably Compaq and Dell, came
to ask Jobs for the right to clone NeXT and license NeXTSTEP. There were even offers to
pay a lot more if NeXT would get out of the hardware business altogether.
That was too much for Jobs, at least for the time being. He cut off the clone discussions.
And he began to cool toward IBM. The chill became reciprocal. When the person who
made the deal at IBM moved on, Jobs went to Armonk to meet his replacement, Jim
Cannavino. They cleared the room and talked one-on-one. Jobs demanded more money to
keep the relationship going and to license newer versions of NeXTSTEP to IBM.
Cannavino made no commitments, and he subsequently stopped returning Jobs’s phone
calls. The deal lapsed. NeXT got a bit of money for a licensing fee, but it never got the
chance to change the world.

The Launch, October 1988

Jobs had perfected the art of turning product launches into theatrical productions, and for
the world premiere of the NeXT computer—on October 12, 1988, in San Francisco’s
Symphony Hall—he wanted to outdo himself. He needed to blow away the doubters. In the
weeks leading up to the event, he drove up to San Francisco almost every day to hole up in
the Victorian house of Susan Kare, NeXT’s graphic designer, who had done the original
fonts and icons for the Macintosh. She helped prepare each of the slides as Jobs fretted over
everything from the wording to the right hue of green to serve as the background color. “I
like that green,” he said proudly as they were doing a trial run in front of some staffers.
“Great green, great green,” they all murmured in assent.
No detail was too small. Jobs went over the invitation list and even the lunch menu
(mineral water, croissants, cream cheese, bean sprouts). He picked out a video projection
company and paid it $60,000 for help. And he hired the postmodernist theater producer

George Coates to stage the show. Coates and Jobs decided, not surprisingly, on an austere
and radically simple stage look. The unveiling of the black perfect cube would occur on a
starkly minimalist stage setting with a black background, a table covered by a black cloth, a
black veil draped over the computer, and a simple vase of flowers. Because neither the
hardware nor the operating system was actually ready, Jobs was urged to do a simulation.
But he refused. Knowing it would be like walking a tightrope without a net, he decided to
do the demonstration live.
More than three thousand people showed up at the event, lining up two hours before
curtain time. They were not disappointed, at least by the show. Jobs was onstage for three
hours, and he again proved to be, in the words of Andrew Pollack of the New York Times,
“the Andrew Lloyd Webber of product introductions, a master of stage flair and special
effects.” Wes Smith of the Chicago Tribune said the launch was “to product demonstrations
what Vatican II was to church meetings.”
Jobs had the audience cheering from his opening line: “It’s great to be back.” He began
by recounting the history of personal computer architecture, and he promised that they
would now witness an event “that occurs only once or twice in a decade—a time when a
new architecture is rolled out that is going to change the face of computing.” The NeXT
software and hardware were designed, he said, after three years of consulting with
universities across the country. “What we realized was that higher ed wants a personal
mainframe.”
As usual there were superlatives. The product was “incredible,” he said, “the best thing
we could have imagined.” He praised the beauty of even the parts unseen. Balancing on his
fingertips the foot-square circuit board that would be nestled in the foot-cube box, he
enthused, “I hope you get a chance to look at this a little later. It’s the most beautiful
printed circuit board I’ve ever seen in my life.” He then showed how the computer could
play speeches—he featured King’s “I Have a Dream” and Kennedy’s “Ask Not”—and send
email with audio attachments. He leaned into the microphone on the computer to record
one of his own. “Hi, this is Steve, sending a message on a pretty historic day.” Then he
asked those in the audience to add “a round of applause” to the message, and they did.
One of Jobs’s management philosophies was that it is crucial, every now and then, to roll
the dice and “bet the company” on some new idea or technology. At the NeXT launch, he
boasted of an example that, as it turned out, would not be a wise gamble: having a high-
capacity (but slow) optical read/write disk and no floppy disk as a backup. “Two years ago
we made a decision,” he said. “We saw some new technology and we made a decision to
risk our company.”
Then he turned to a feature that would prove more prescient. “What we’ve done is made
the first real digital books,” he said, noting the inclusion of the Oxford edition of
Shakespeare and other tomes. “There has not been an advancement in the state of the art of
printed book technology since Gutenberg.”
At times he could be amusingly aware of his own foibles, and he used the electronic
book demonstration to poke fun at himself. “A word that’s sometimes used to describe me
is ‘mercurial,’” he said, then paused. The audience laughed knowingly, especially those in
the front rows, which were filled with NeXT employees and former members of the

Macintosh team. Then he pulled up the word in the computer’s dictionary and read the first
definition: “Of or relating to, or born under the planet Mercury.” Scrolling down, he said, “I
think the third one is the one they mean: ‘Characterized by unpredictable changeableness of
mood.’” There was a bit more laughter. “If we scroll down the thesaurus, though, we see
that the antonym is ‘saturnine.’ Well what’s that? By simply double-clicking on it, we
immediately look that up in the dictionary, and here it is: ‘Cold and steady in moods. Slow
to act or change. Of a gloomy or surly disposition.’” A little smile came across his face as
he waited for the ripple of laughter. “Well,” he concluded, “I don’t think ‘mercurial’ is so
bad after all.” After the applause, he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point,
about his reality distortion field. The quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll’s Through the
Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no matter how hard she tries she can’t believe
impossible things, the White Queen retorts, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six
impossible things before breakfast.” Especially from the front rows, there was a roar of
knowing laughter.
All of the good cheer served to sugarcoat, or distract attention from, the bad news. When
it came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in
product demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being “worth thousands and
thousands of dollars,” and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be.
Then he announced what he hoped would seem like a low price: “We’re going to be
charging higher education a single price of $6,500.” From the faithful, there was scattered
applause. But his panel of academic advisors had long pushed to keep the price to between
$2,000 and $3,000, and they thought that Jobs had promised to do so. Some of them were
appalled. This was especially true once they discovered that the optional printer would cost
another $2,000, and the slowness of the optical disk would make the purchase of a $2,500
external hard disk advisable.
There was another disappointment that he tried to downplay: “Early next year, we will
have our 0.9 release, which is for software developers and aggressive end users.” There
was a bit of nervous laughter. What he was saying was that the real release of the machine
and its software, known as the 1.0 release, would not actually be happening in early 1989.
In fact he didn’t set a hard date. He merely suggested it would be sometime in the second
quarter of that year. At the first NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had refused to budge,
despite Joanna Hoffman’s pushback, from his commitment to have the machine finished in
early 1987. Now it was clear it would be more than two years later.
The event ended on a more upbeat note, literally. Jobs brought onstage a violinist from
the San Francisco Symphony who played Bach’s A Minor Violin Concerto in a duet with
the NeXT computer onstage. People erupted in jubilant applause. The price and the delayed
release were forgotten in the frenzy. When one reporter asked him immediately afterward
why the machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years ahead of
its time.”
As would become his standard practice, Jobs offered to provide “exclusive” interviews
to anointed publications in return for their promising to put the story on the cover. This
time he went one “exclusive” too far, though it didn’t really hurt. He agreed to a request
from Business Week’s Katie Hafner for exclusive access to him before the launch, but he

also made a similar deal with Newsweek and then with Fortune. What he didn’t consider
was that one of Fortune’s top editors, Susan Fraker, was married to Newsweek’s editor
Maynard Parker. At the Fortune story conference, when they were talking excitedly about
their exclusive, Fraker mentioned that she happened to know that Newsweek had also been
promised an exclusive, and it would be coming out a few days before Fortune. So Jobs
ended up that week on only two magazine covers. Newsweek used the cover line “Mr.
Chips” and showed him leaning on a beautiful NeXT, which it proclaimed to be “the most
exciting machine in years.” Business Week showed him looking angelic in a dark suit,
fingertips pressed together like a preacher or professor. But Hafner pointedly reported on
the manipulation that surrounded her exclusive. “NeXT carefully parceled out interviews
with its staff and suppliers, monitoring them with a censor’s eye,” she wrote. “That strategy
worked, but at a price: Such maneuvering—self-serving and relentless—displayed the side
of Steve Jobs that so hurt him at Apple. The trait that most stands out is Jobs’s need to
control events.”
When the hype died down, the reaction to the NeXT computer was muted, especially
since it was not yet commercially available. Bill Joy, the brilliant and wry chief scientist at
rival Sun Microsystems, called it “the first Yuppie workstation,” which was not an
unalloyed compliment. Bill Gates, as might be expected, continued to be publicly
dismissive. “Frankly, I’m disappointed,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Back in 1981, we
were truly excited by the Macintosh when Steve showed it to us, because when you put it
side-by-side with another computer, it was unlike anything anybody had ever seen before.”
The NeXT machine was not like that. “In the grand scope of things, most of these features
are truly trivial.” He said that Microsoft would continue its plans not to write software for
the NeXT. Right after the announcement event, Gates wrote a parody email to his staff.
“All reality has been completely suspended,” it began. Looking back at it, Gates laughs that
it may have been “the best email I ever wrote.”
When the NeXT computer finally went on sale in mid-1989, the factory was primed to
churn out ten thousand units a month. As it turned out, sales were about four hundred a
month. The beautiful factory robots, so nicely painted, remained mostly idle, and NeXT
continued to hemorrhage cash.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PIXAR

Technology Meets Art

科夫维奇斯基 · 发表于 2011-11-8 20:19

Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, and John Lasseter, 1999

Lucasfilm’s Computer Division

When Jobs was losing his footing at Apple in the summer of 1985, he went for a walk with
Alan Kay, who had been at Xerox PARC and was then an Apple Fellow. Kay knew that
Jobs was interested in the intersection of creativity and technology, so he suggested they go
see a friend of his, Ed Catmull, who was running the computer division of George Lucas’s
film studio. They rented a limo and rode up to Marin County to the edge of Lucas’s
Skywalker Ranch, where Catmull and his little computer division were based. “I was blown
away, and I came back and tried to convince Sculley to buy it for Apple,” Jobs recalled.
“But the folks running Apple weren’t interested, and they were busy kicking me out
anyway.”
The Lucasfilm computer division made hardware and software for rendering digital
images, and it also had a group of computer animators making shorts, which was led by a
talented cartoon-loving executive named John Lasseter. Lucas, who had completed his first
Star Wars trilogy, was embroiled in a contentious divorce, and he needed to sell off the
division. He told Catmull to find a buyer as soon as possible.
After a few potential purchasers balked in the fall of 1985, Catmull and his colleague
Alvy Ray Smith decided to seek investors so that they could buy the division themselves.
So they called Jobs, arranged another meeting, and drove down to his Woodside house.
After railing for a while about the perfidies and idiocies of Sculley, Jobs proposed that he
buy their Lucasfilm division outright. Catmull and Smith demurred: They wanted an
investor, not a new owner. But it soon became clear that there was a middle ground: Jobs

could buy a majority of the division and serve as chairman but allow Catmull and Smith to
run it.
“I wanted to buy it because I was really into computer graphics,” Jobs recalled. “I
realized they were way ahead of others in combining art and technology, which is what I’ve
always been interested in.” He offered to pay Lucas $5 million plus invest another $5
million to capitalize the division as a stand-alone company. That was far less than Lucas
had been asking, but the timing was right. They decided to negotiate a deal.
The chief financial officer at Lucasfilm found Jobs arrogant and prickly, so when it came
time to hold a meeting of all the players, he told Catmull, “We have to establish the right
pecking order.” The plan was to gather everyone in a room with Jobs, and then the CFO
would come in a few minutes late to establish that he was the person running the meeting.
“But a funny thing happened,” Catmull recalled. “Steve started the meeting on time without
the CFO, and by the time the CFO walked in Steve was already in control of the meeting.”
Jobs met only once with George Lucas, who warned him that the people in the division
cared more about making animated movies than they did about making computers. “You
know, these guys are hell-bent on animation,” Lucas told him. Lucas later recalled, “I did
warn him that was basically Ed and John’s agenda. I think in his heart he bought the
company because that was his agenda too.”
The final agreement was reached in January 1986. It provided that, for his $10 million
investment, Jobs would own 70% of the company, with the rest of the stock distributed to
Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and the thirty-eight other founding employees, down to the
receptionist. The division’s most important piece of hardware was called the Pixar Image
Computer, and from it the new company took its name.
For a while Jobs let Catmull and Smith run Pixar without much interference. Every
month or so they would gather for a board meeting, usually at NeXT headquarters, where
Jobs would focus on the finances and strategy. Nevertheless, by dint of his personality and
controlling instincts, Jobs was soon playing a stronger role. He spewed out a stream of
ideas—some reasonable, others wacky—about what Pixar’s hardware and software could
become. And on his occasional visits to the Pixar offices, he was an inspiring presence. “I
grew up a Southern Baptist, and we had revival meetings with mesmerizing but corrupt
preachers,” recounted Alvy Ray Smith. “Steve’s got it: the power of the tongue and the web
of words that catches people up. We were aware of this when we had board meetings, so
we developed signals—nose scratching or ear tugs—for when someone had been caught up
in Steve’s distortion field and he needed to be tugged back to reality.”
Jobs had always appreciated the virtue of integrating hardware and software, which is
what Pixar did with its Image Computer and rendering software. It also produced creative
content, such as animated films and graphics. All three elements benefited from Jobs’s
combination of artistic creativity and technological geekiness. “Silicon Valley folks don’t
really respect Hollywood creative types, and the Hollywood folks think that tech folks are
people you hire and never have to meet,” Jobs later said. “Pixar was one place where both
cultures were respected.”
Initially the revenue was supposed to come from the hardware side. The Pixar Image
Computer sold for $125,000. The primary customers were animators and graphic designers,

but the machine also soon found specialized markets in the medical industry (CAT scan
data could be rendered in three-dimensional graphics) and intelligence fields (for rendering
information from reconnaissance flights and satellites). Because of the sales to the National
Security Agency, Jobs had to get a security clearance, which must have been fun for the
FBI agent assigned to vet him. At one point, a Pixar executive recalled, Jobs was called by
the investigator to go over the drug use questions, which he answered unabashedly. “The
last time I used that . . . ,” he would say, or on occasion he would answer that no, he had
actually never tried that particular drug.
Jobs pushed Pixar to build a lower-cost version of the computer that would sell for
around $30,000. He insisted that Hartmut Esslinger design it, despite protests by Catmull
and Smith about his fees. It ended up looking like the original Pixar Image Computer,
which was a cube with a round dimple in the middle, but it had Esslinger’s signature thin
grooves.
Jobs wanted to sell Pixar’s computers to a mass market, so he had the Pixar folks open
up sales offices—for which he approved the design—in major cities, on the theory that
creative people would soon come up with all sorts of ways to use the machine. “My view is
that people are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the
inventor never imagined,” he later said. “I thought that would happen with the Pixar
computer, just as it did with the Mac.” But the machine never took hold with regular
consumers. It cost too much, and there were not many software programs for it.
On the software side, Pixar had a rendering program, known as Reyes (Renders
everything you ever saw), for making 3-D graphics and images. After Jobs became
chairman, the company created a new language and interface, named RenderMan, that it
hoped would become a standard for 3-D graphics rendering, just as Adobe’s PostScript was
for laser printing.
As he had with the hardware, Jobs decided that they should try to find a mass market,
rather than just a specialized one, for the software they made. He was never content to aim
only at the corporate or high-end specialized markets. “He would have these great visions
of how RenderMan could be for everyman,” recalled Pam Kerwin, Pixar’s marketing
director. “He kept coming up with ideas about how ordinary people would use it to make
amazing 3-D graphics and photorealistic images.” The Pixar team would try to dissuade
him by saying that RenderMan was not as easy to use as, say, Excel or Adobe Illustrator.
Then Jobs would go to a whiteboard and show them how to make it simpler and more user-
friendly. “We would be nodding our heads and getting excited and say, ‘Yes, yes, this will
be great!’” Kerwin recalled. “And then he would leave and we would consider it for a
moment and then say, ‘What the heck was he thinking!’ He was so weirdly charismatic that
you almost had to get deprogrammed after you talked to him.” As it turned out, average
consumers were not craving expensive software that would let them render realistic images.
RenderMan didn’t take off.
There was, however, one company that was eager to automate the rendering of
animators’ drawings into color images for film. When Roy Disney led a board revolution at
the company that his uncle Walt had founded, the new CEO, Michael Eisner, asked what
role he wanted. Disney said that he would like to revive the company’s venerable but

fading animation department. One of his first initiatives was to look at ways to computerize
the process, and Pixar won the contract. It created a package of customized hardware and
software known as CAPS, Computer Animation Production System. It was first used in
1988 for the final scene of The Little Mermaid, in which King Triton waves good-bye to
Ariel. Disney bought dozens of Pixar Image Computers as CAPS became an integral part
of its production.

Animation

The digital animation business at Pixar—the group that made little animated films—was
originally just a sideline, its main purpose being to show off the hardware and software of
the company. It was run by John Lasseter, a man whose childlike face and demeanor
masked an artistic perfectionism that rivaled that of Jobs. Born in Hollywood, Lasseter
grew up loving Saturday morning cartoon shows. In ninth grade, he wrote a report on the
history of Disney Studios, and he decided then how he wished to spend his life.
When he graduated from high school, Lasseter enrolled in the animation program at the
California Institute of the Arts, founded by Walt Disney. In his summers and spare time, he
researched the Disney archives and worked as a guide on the Jungle Cruise ride at
Disneyland. The latter experience taught him the value of timing and pacing in telling a
story, an important but difficult concept to master when creating, frame by frame, animated
footage. He won the Student Academy Award for the short he made in his junior year, Lady
and the Lamp, which showed his debt to Disney films and foreshadowed his signature
talent for infusing inanimate objects such as lamps with human personalities. After
graduation he took the job for which he was destined: as an animator at Disney Studios.
Except it didn’t work out. “Some of us younger guys wanted to bring Star Wars–level
quality to the art of animation, but we were held in check,” Lasseter recalled. “I got
disillusioned, then I got caught in a feud between two bosses, and the head animation guy
fired me.” So in 1984 Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith were able to recruit him to work
where Star Wars–level quality was being defined, Lucasfilm. It was not certain that George
Lucas, already worried about the cost of his computer division, would really approve of
hiring a full-time animator, so Lasseter was given the title “interface designer.”
After Jobs came onto the scene, he and Lasseter began to share their passion for graphic
design. “I was the only guy at Pixar who was an artist, so I bonded with Steve over his
design sense,” Lasseter said. He was a gregarious, playful, and huggable man who wore
flowery Hawaiian shirts, kept his office cluttered with vintage toys, and loved
cheeseburgers. Jobs was a prickly, whip-thin vegetarian who favored austere and
uncluttered surroundings. But they were actually well-suited for each other. Lasseter was
an artist, so Jobs treated him deferentially, and Lasseter viewed Jobs, correctly, as a patron
who could appreciate artistry and knew how it could be interwoven with technology and
commerce.
Jobs and Catmull decided that, in order to show off their hardware and software,
Lasseter should produce another short animated film in 1986 for SIGGRAPH, the annual
computer graphics conference. At the time, Lasseter was using the Luxo lamp on his desk

as a model for graphic rendering, and he decided to turn Luxo into a lifelike character. A
friend’s young child inspired him to add Luxo Jr., and he showed a few test frames to
another animator, who urged him to make sure he told a story. Lasseter said he was making
only a short, but the animator reminded him that a story can be told even in a few seconds.
Lasseter took the lesson to heart. Luxo Jr. ended up being just over two minutes; it told the
tale of a parent lamp and a child lamp pushing a ball back and forth until the ball bursts, to
the child’s dismay.
Jobs was so excited that he took time off from the pressures at NeXT to fly down with
Lasseter to SIGGRAPH, which was being held in Dallas that August. “It was so hot and
muggy that when we’d walk outside the air hit us like a tennis racket,” Lasseter recalled.
There were ten thousand people at the trade show, and Jobs loved it. Artistic creativity
energized him, especially when it was connected to technology.
There was a long line to get into the auditorium where the films were being screened, so
Jobs, not one to wait his turn, fast-talked their way in first. Luxo Jr. got a prolonged
standing ovation and was named the best film. “Oh, wow!” Jobs exclaimed at the end. “I
really get this, I get what it’s all about.” As he later explained, “Our film was the only one
that had art to it, not just good technology. Pixar was about making that combination, just
as the Macintosh had been.”
Luxo Jr. was nominated for an Academy Award, and Jobs flew down to Los Angeles to
be there for the ceremony. It didn’t win, but Jobs became committed to making new
animated shorts each year, even though there was not much of a business rationale for
doing so. As times got tough at Pixar, he would sit through brutal budget-cutting meetings
showing no mercy. Then Lasseter would ask that the money they had just saved be used for
his next film, and Jobs would agree.

Tin Toy

Not all of Jobs’s relationships at Pixar were as good. His worst clash came with Catmull’s
cofounder, Alvy Ray Smith. From a Baptist background in rural north Texas, Smith became
a free-spirited hippie computer imaging engineer with a big build, big laugh, and big
personality—and occasionally an ego to match. “Alvy just glows, with a high color,
friendly laugh, and a whole bunch of groupies at conferences,” said Pam Kerwin. “A
personality like Alvy’s was likely to ruffle Steve. They are both visionaries and high energy
and high ego. Alvy is not as willing to make peace and overlook things as Ed was.”
Smith saw Jobs as someone whose charisma and ego led him to abuse power. “He was
like a televangelist,” Smith said. “He wanted to control people, but I would not be a slave
to him, which is why we clashed. Ed was much more able to go with the flow.” Jobs would
sometimes assert his dominance at a meeting by saying something outrageous or untrue.
Smith took great joy in calling him on it, and he would do so with a large laugh and a
smirk. This did not endear him to Jobs.
One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar executives
for the delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image
Computer. At the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own computer boards,

and Smith pointed that out: “Hey, you’re even later with your NeXT boards, so quit
jumping on us.” Jobs went ballistic, or in Smith’s phrase, “totally nonlinear.” When Smith
was feeling attacked or confrontational, he tended to lapse into his southwestern accent.
Jobs started parodying it in his sarcastic style. “It was a bully tactic, and I exploded with
everything I had,” Smith recalled. “Before I knew it, we were in each other’s faces—about
three inches apart—screaming at each other.”
Jobs was very possessive about control of the whiteboard during a meeting, so the burly
Smith pushed past him and started writing on it. “You can’t do that!” Jobs shouted.
“What?” responded Smith, “I can’t write on your whiteboard? Bullshit.” At that point
Jobs stormed out.
Smith eventually resigned to form a new company to make software for digital drawing
and image editing. Jobs refused him permission to use some code he had created while at
Pixar, which further inflamed their enmity. “Alvy eventually got what he needed,” said
Catmull, “but he was very stressed for a year and developed a lung infection.” In the end it
worked out well enough; Microsoft eventually bought Smith’s company, giving him the
distinction of being a founder of one company that was sold to Jobs and another that was
sold to Gates.
Ornery in the best of times, Jobs became particularly so when it became clear that all
three Pixar endeavors—hardware, software, and animated content—were losing money.
“I’d get these plans, and in the end I kept having to put in more money,” he recalled. He
would rail, but then write the check. Having been ousted at Apple and flailing at NeXT, he
couldn’t afford a third strike.
To stem the losses, he ordered a round of deep layoffs, which he executed with his
typical empathy deficiency. As Pam Kerwin put it, he had “neither the emotional nor
financial runway to be decent to people he was letting go.” Jobs insisted that the firings be
done immediately, with no severance pay. Kerwin took Jobs on a walk around the parking
lot and begged that the employees be given at least two weeks notice. “Okay,” he shot
back, “but the notice is retroactive from two weeks ago.” Catmull was in Moscow, and
Kerwin put in frantic calls to him. When he returned, he was able to institute a meager
severance plan and calm things down just a bit.
At one point the members of the Pixar animation team were trying to convince Intel to
let them make some of its commercials, and Jobs became impatient. During a meeting, in
the midst of berating an Intel marketing director, he picked up the phone and called CEO
Andy Grove directly. Grove, still playing mentor, tried to teach Jobs a lesson: He supported
his Intel manager. “I stuck by my employee,” he recalled. “Steve doesn’t like to be treated
like a supplier.”
Grove also played mentor when Jobs proposed that Pixar give Intel suggestions on how
to improve the capacity of its processors to render 3-D graphics. When the engineers at
Intel accepted the offer, Jobs sent an email back saying Pixar would need to be paid for its
advice. Intel’s chief engineer replied, “We have not entered into any financial arrangement
in exchange for good ideas for our microprocessors in the past and have no intention for the
future.” Jobs forwarded the answer to Grove, saying that he found the engineer’s response
to be “extremely arrogant, given Intel’s dismal showing in understanding computer

graphics.” Grove sent Jobs a blistering reply, saying that sharing ideas is “what friendly
companies and friends do for each other.” Grove added that he had often freely shared
ideas with Jobs in the past and that Jobs should not be so mercenary. Jobs relented. “I have
many faults, but one of them is not ingratitude,” he responded. “Therefore, I have changed
my position 180 degrees—we will freely help. Thanks for the clearer perspective.”

Pixar was able to create some powerful software products aimed at average consumers, or
at least those average consumers who shared Jobs’s passion for designing things. Jobs still
hoped that the ability to make super-realistic 3-D images at home would become part of the
desktop publishing craze. Pixar’s Showplace, for example, allowed users to change the
shadings on the 3-D objects they created so that they could display them from various
angles with appropriate shadows. Jobs thought it was incredibly compelling, but most
consumers were content to live without it. It was a case where his passions misled him: The
software had so many amazing features that it lacked the simplicity Jobs usually demanded.
Pixar couldn’t compete with Adobe, which was making software that was less sophisticated
but far less complicated and expensive.
Even as Pixar’s hardware and software product lines foundered, Jobs kept protecting the
animation group. It had become for him a little island of magical artistry that gave him
deep emotional pleasure, and he was willing to nurture it and bet on it. In the spring of
1988 cash was running so short that he convened a meeting to decree deep spending cuts
across the board. When it was over, Lasseter and his animation group were almost too
afraid to ask Jobs about authorizing some extra money for another short. Finally, they
broached the topic and Jobs sat silent, looking skeptical. It would require close to $300,000
more out of his pocket. After a few minutes, he asked if there were any storyboards.
Catmull took him down to the animation offices, and once Lasseter started his show—
displaying his boards, doing the voices, showing his passion for his product—Jobs started
to warm up.
The story was about Lasseter’s love, classic toys. It was told from the perspective of a
toy one-man band named Tinny, who meets a baby that charms and terrorizes him.
Escaping under the couch, Tinny finds other frightened toys, but when the baby hits his
head and cries, Tinny goes back out to cheer him up.
Jobs said he would provide the money. “I believed in what John was doing,” he later
said. “It was art. He cared, and I cared. I always said yes.” His only comment at the end of
Lasseter’s presentation was, “All I ask of you, John, is to make it great.”
Tin Toy went on to win the 1988 Academy Award for animated short films, the first
computer-generated film to do so. To celebrate, Jobs took Lasseter and his team to Greens,
a vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. Lasseter grabbed the Oscar, which was in the
center of the table, held it aloft, and toasted Jobs by saying, “All you asked is that we make
a great movie.”
The new team at Disney—Michael Eisner the CEO and Jeffrey Katzenberg in the film
division—began a quest to get Lasseter to come back. They liked Tin Toy, and they thought
that something more could be done with animated stories of toys that come alive and have
human emotions. But Lasseter, grateful for Jobs’s faith in him, felt that Pixar was the only

place where he could create a new world of computer-generated animation. He told
Catmull, “I can go to Disney and be a director, or I can stay here and make history.” So
Disney began talking about making a production deal with Pixar. “Lasseter’s shorts were
really breathtaking both in storytelling and in the use of technology,” recalled Katzenberg.
“I tried so hard to get him to Disney, but he was loyal to Steve and Pixar. So if you can’t
beat them, join them. We decided to look for ways we could join up with Pixar and have
them make a film about toys for us.”
By this point Jobs had poured close to $50 million of his own money into Pixar—more
than half of what he had pocketed when he cashed out of Apple—and he was still losing
money at NeXT. He was hard-nosed about it; he forced all Pixar employees to give up their
options as part of his agreement to add another round of personal funding in 1991. But he
was also a romantic in his love for what artistry and technology could do together. His
belief that ordinary consumers would love to do 3-D modeling on Pixar software turned out
to be wrong, but that was soon replaced by an instinct that turned out to be right: that
combining great art and digital technology would transform animated films more than
anything had since 1937, when Walt Disney had given life to Snow White.
Looking back, Jobs said that, had he known more, he would have focused on animation
sooner and not worried about pushing the company’s hardware or software applications. On
the other hand, had he known the hardware and software would never be profitable, he
would not have taken over Pixar. “Life kind of snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it
was for the better.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

A REGULAR GUY

Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word

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