Part 3 (1/2)

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. .h.i.t. 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 a.s.sumed, 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 designa 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.

Astonis.h.i.+ngly, 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. I t would be another ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being shown the tale in a book on the history of Atari t.i.tled 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. I f 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.” T o 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 rehas.h.i.+ng. 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 pa.s.s,” he said when I pressed the point. ”I t'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 att.i.tude. ”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 att.i.tude. I t 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 a.s.sume that you are.'”

CHAPTER FIVE.

THE APPLE I.

Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In ...

Machines of Loving Grace.

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; partic.i.p.ants 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 cla.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+ft 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. I t 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 j.a.pan 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 partic.i.p.ant 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 T om 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 s.p.a.ce; its subt.i.tle was ”Access to T ools.” 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. T ools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: ”I see G.o.d 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 Inst.i.tute, 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. I t 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.

The Homebrew Computer Club.

The group became known as the Homebrew Computer Club, and it encapsulated the Whole Earth fusion between the counterculture and technology. I t 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? T erminal, TV, typewriter?” it asked. ”I f 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. I t 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 T echnologies that was electronically the same but cost only $20. I t 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.” I t was Sunday, June 29, 1975, a milestone for the personal computer. ”I t 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 partic.i.p.ant 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.'” I t 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?” I t 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. ”I t never crossed my mind to sell computers. I t 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. ”Ididn'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.