One of my recent side projects involved using Woz’s new, one-to-one interleave floppy disk routines to make very fast slideshow disks on the Apple II. I had just made one full of Disney cartoon characters that were scanned by Bob Bishop, one of the early Apple software magicians. Bob adored the work of Carl Barks, the Disney artist who specialized in Donald Duck, and he had scanned dozens of Barks’ Donald Duck images for the Apple II. I selected an image of Scrooge McDuck sitting on top of a huge pile of moneybags, blithely playing his fiddle with a big grin on his beak. I’m not sure why I picked that one, but it seemed to be appropriate for some reason.
Burrell’s DMA instructions
Even though it was starting to get late, I was dying to see if my routine was working properly, and thought it would be very cool to surprise Burrell when he came in the next day with a detailed image on the prototype display. But when I went to try it, I noticed that Burrell’s Apple didn’t have a disk controller card, so there was no way to load my program. Damn! I couldn’t shut the computer down to insert the card, because I didn’t know how to reinitialize the Macintosh board after power-up; Burrell hadn’t left the magic incantation for that. I thought I was stuck and would have to wait until Burrell came in the next morning.
The only other person in the lab that evening was Cliff Huston, who saw the trouble I was having. Cliff was another early Apple employee and was Dick Huston’s (the heroic programmer who wrote the 256-byte Apple II floppy disc boot ROM) older brother and an experienced though somewhat cynical technician. I explained the situation to him and was surprised when he started to smile.
Cliff told me he could insert a disk controller card into Burrell’s Apple II with the power still on without glitching it out, a feat I thought miraculous. He’d have to be incredibly quick and steady not to short-circuit any of the contacts while inserting the disk controller, or he’d run the risk of burning out both the Apple II and the card. But Cliff said he’d done it many times before. All that was required was the confidence that you could actually do it. So I crossed my fingers as he approached Burrell’s Apple like a samurai warrior and concentrated for a few seconds before holding his breath and slamming the disk card into the slot with a quick, staccato thrust.
I could barely make myself look, but amazingly enough Burrell’s machine was still running, and the disk booted up so I could load the Scrooge McDuck image and my new conversion routine. And even more surprising, my routine actually worked the first time and displayed a crisp rendition of Uncle Scrooge fiddling away on the Mac’s tiny monitor. The Apple II only had 192 scanlines, while the embryonic Macintosh had 256, so I had some extra room at the bottom where I rendered the message “Hi Burrell!” in a nice-looking 24-point, proportional font.
By the time I came in the next morning, an excited Burrell had already showed the image to everyone he could find. But then he accidentally reset the prototype somehow and didn’t know how to get the image back on the screen. I loaded it again so he could show it to Tom Whitney, the engineering VP. I think Jef was pretty pleased to see his new computer start to come alive, but I don’t think he was very happy about me giving the demo because he thought I was too much of a hacker, and I wasn’t supposed to be involved with his pet project.
Some Disney collectors have tried to track down the original image, with Uncle Scrooge fiddling, but they didn’t have any luck. I also asked Bob Bishop to go through his collection, but he couldn’t find the image I described. So I guess it’s possible that my memory is faulty here.
It’s the Moustache that Matters
September 1980
Burrell wants to get promoted to engineer
Apple hired Burrell (employee #282) in February of 1979 as a lowly service technician, one of the lowest-paying jobs at the company. Even though he’d been doing genius-quality work as a hardware designer on the Macintosh project for more than nine months, and was even filling in for Steve Wozniak on the low-cost Apple II project, he still hadn’t been officially promoted to engineer as he requested and was getting pretty frustrated.
Burrell started thinking about what it would take to get promoted. It obviously wasn’t a matter of talent or technical skill because he was already far more accomplished in that regard than most of the other hardware engineers. And it wasn’t a matter of working harder because Burrell already worked harder and was more productive than most of the others. Finally, he noticed something that most of the other engineers had in common that he was lacking: they all had fairly prominent moustaches. And the engineering managers tended to have even bigger moustaches. Tom Whitney, the engineering VP, had the largest moustache of all.
So Burrell immediately started growing his own moustache. It took around a month or so for it to fully come in, but he finally pronounced it complete. And sure enough, that very afternoon, he was called into Tom Whitney’s office and promoted to “member of technical staff” as a full-fledged engineer.
Steve Jobs, Jerry Manock, Steve Capps, and Bill Atkinson
Good Earth
October 1980
The original Mac team’s original office
In 1979 and 1980, Jef Raskin’s Macintosh project was a four-person research effort with a tenuous existence. It wasn’t considered important within Apple, and was almost cancelled a couple of times. When Apple had another major reorganization in the fall of 1980, it was terminated again, but Jef pleaded with Mike Scott and Mike Markkula for more time and was granted three more months to show that he was really onto something. As part of the re-org, the four-person Macintosh team (Jef Raskin, Brian Howard, Burrell Smith, and Bud Tribble) relocated to a small office building a few blocks from the main Apple campus. The new office, located at 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, California, was called the Good Earth building because it was adjacent to a Good Earth restaurant. In fact, the office was Apple’s very first office in Cupertino after they moved out of Steve Jobs’ parents’ house, and it was later used as the first office of the Lisa project when the Lisa team had fewer than 10 employees. The Mac team moved in and outfitted it with lots of beanbag chairs and all kinds of interesting toys.
Jef was very playful and always encouraged his team to express themselves creatively, so the office quickly began to look more like a day care center than an engineering lab. Periodically, work would cease and the entire team, plus any visitors who might be on the premises, would play some organized game, usually led by Jef and Brian.
Their favorite game, which was usually played just after lunch, was a form of tag played with Nerf balls. There were dozens of brightly colored Nerf balls scattered around the office. The rules would be improvised, but usually the person who was it had to confer “it-hood” on someone else by hitting them with a Nerf ball. This inspired everyone to surround his work area with barricades made out of cardboard to provide cover during the game, making part of the office look like a cardboard maze.
Jef and Brian were both serious musicians, so the office was also littered with a variety of musical instruments, and sometimes, spontaneous concerts would erupt. Jef was also interested in model airplanes and automobiles—especially radio-controlled ones. It wasn’t unusual to see a radio-controlled car dart underneath your desk, and occasionally, everyone would go outside to see the maiden voyage of the latest radio-controlled plane.
Jef was writing his Book of Macintosh during much of 1979 and all of 1980, articulating his vision in ever-finer detail. Burrell’s 6809-based prototype came alive in the early part of 1980, but then he went off to work on the low-cost Apple II project. Jef hired Marc Lebrun to write software in early 1980, but Marc was more interested in Lisp machines than in a limited memory microcomputer like the Mac, so nothing much happened until Bud Tribble replaced him in September of 1980.
Bud knew Jef from UCSD, and was also good friends with Bill Atkinson. They had a part-time, two-person consulting company in Seattle called Synaptic Systems while they were both graduate students. Bill and Jef convinced Bud to take a one-year
leave of absence from the M.D./Ph.D. program he was pursuing at University of Washington at Seattle. Bud was in the fifth year of a seven-year program. Instead of returning to med school, Bud moved into a spare room at Bill Atkinson’s house and started work on the Mac project at Apple. He quickly began to breathe life into Burrell’s languishing prototype by writing some graphics routines for the 6809.
With a new but limited lease on life, and software finally starting to happen, the move to Good Earth in October 1980 came at an interesting time. But the Good Earth era was rather short lived.
Around two months after the move, Bud convinced Burrell to consider using the 68000 processor instead of the 6809. Burrell came up with a brilliant design that caught the attention of Steve Jobs. Steve took over the project and quickly recruited most of the early Apple II crew that he trusted (including Steve Wozniak and Rod Holt), and moved the project to larger offices a half-mile away, in Texaco Towers (see “Texaco Towers” on page 26).
Black Wednesday
February 1981
A shakeup in Apple II engineering frees me up to work on the Macintosh
I could tell there was something wrong the moment I stepped into the building on the morning of Wednesday, February 25th, 1981. Instead of the normal office buzz there was a muted sadness hanging in the air. People were standing around, huddled in small groups. I ran into Donn Denman, who had a cubicle near mine, and asked him what was going on.
“Didn’t you hear? Scotty fired almost half of the Apple II engineering team this morning. He started calling people into his office around 9 A.M., one at a time, and telling them that they were being fired. I think over 30 people have been fired so far. No one knows why, or who’s going to be next. There’s going to be a meeting out back around noon when he’s supposed to tell us what’s going on.”
Apple had gone public a couple of months before and was still growing at a frenzied pace. Sales were booming and there was no financial reason to pare back. I wondered what was going on.
“Do you know who they fired?” I asked Donn.
“Yeah, it’s amazing. Scotty fired three out of the four managers, so almost everyone’s boss is gone. And believe it or not, they fired Rick Aurrichio.”
I thought the managers were more or less incompetent, so that didn’t bother me. But the Rick Aurrichio part was shocking because Rick was clearly one of the most talented programmers in the Apple II division. He would usually do a week’s worth of work in a day or two, and then spend the rest of the week messing around with whatever caught his fancy, usually one of the latest games. I understood how he could be a management challenge, but it made no sense to fire him. He was also my partner on the new DOS 4.0 project, which was just getting underway. He was the only other programmer besides me working on it, so it was especially distressing they would fire him so abruptly.
So I joined the ranks of the shell-shocked and listened numbly to the basement meeting where Scotty explained his rationale. He said that the company had grown much too fast over the last year and had made a few key bad hires, who themselves had hired even worse people. He thought the Apple II division had become too complacent, and that we had lost the start-up hustle that was the basis of our success. He wanted to shake us out of our complacency and prune out the bad hires, so we could start growing again in the right direction.
Scotty himself seemed a little shaken and unsure. Some of the other senior executives were standing off to the side, but they didn’t participate in the meeting. There was a Q&A session at the end of the meeting where a couple employees told Scotty how horribly he handled the situation, but in general everyone seemed listless, as if we didn’t know how we should react. Within a few days, everyone was referring to the incident as “Black Wednesday.”
Later in the day, I talked to Dick Huston about what had happened. Dick was an early Apple programmer who had written the boot ROM for the disk controller card. He was also an astute observer of Apple politics and was friendly with Scotty. He told me he knew that the purge was going to happen and had even met with Scotty a couple of times in the last week to help him draw up the list of dead weight. He also told me Scotty had asked for the approval of Mike Markkula and the board of directors, and hadn’t received it yet, but decided to do it anyway.
I told Dick I agreed that Apple had made some poor hires over the last year, especially some of the managers, but a Stalin-like purge was not a valid way to run a company. I complained about Rick’s firing and told him the situation made me feel alienated from the company. I was the type of programmer who had to believe in what I was doing, and I wasn’t so sure about Apple’s values anymore.
When I came in to work the next morning there was a message on my desk from Mike Scott’s secretary, saying he wanted to talk to me. Obviously, Dick must have talked to him. I called Mike’s secretary back and arranged to show up at his office in an hour. Scotty looked harried, and our conversation was interrupted a few times by various phone calls. Scotty told me he had heard I was upset and was thinking about leaving, and said he wanted me to stay. He asked what he could do to get me excited about Apple again. I told him I might like to work on the Macintosh, with Burrell and Bud.
Later that afternoon, Scotty’s secretary called to tell me she’d arranged for me to talk with Steve Jobs. Steve had been involved with the Mac project for more than a month now and, although I didn’t know it at the time, had dismissed the founder of the project, Jef Raskin, the day before. He’d made Jef take a mandatory leave of absence after Jef had complained about Steve’s leadership.
Lots of people at Apple were afraid of Steve Jobs because of his spontaneous temper tantrums and his proclivity to tell everyone exactly what he thought, which was often very unfavorable. But he was always nice to me, although sometimes a bit dismissive in the few interactions I had with him. I was excited to talk with him about working on the Mac.
The first thing he said to me when I walked into his office was, “Are you any good? We only want really good people working on the Mac, and I’m not sure you’re good enough.” I told him that, yes, I thought I was pretty good. I was friends with Burrell and had already helped him out with software a few times.
“I hear you’re creative,” Steve continued. “Are you really creative?”
I told him I wasn’t the best judge of that, but I’d love to work on the Mac and thought I’d do a great job. He said he’d get back to me soon about it.
A couple of hours later, around 4:30 P.M., I was back to work on DOS 4.0 for the Apple II. I was working on interrupt handlers and dispatchers for the system when I noticed Steve Jobs peering over the wall of my cubicle.
“I’ve got good news for you,” he told me. “You’re working on the Mac team now. Come with me, and I’ll take you over to your new desk.”
“Hey, that’s great,” I responded. “I just need a day or two to finish up what I’m doing here, and I can start on the Mac on Monday.”
“What are you working on? What’s more important than working on the Macintosh?”
“Well, I’ve just started a new OS for the Apple II, DOS 4.0, and I want to get things in good enough shape so someone else can take it over.”
“No, you’re just wasting your time with that! Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. Your OS will be obsolete before it’s finished. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you’re going to start on it now!”
With that he walked over to my desk, found the power cord to my Apple II, gave it a sharp tug and pulled it out of the socket, causing my machine to lose power and the code I was working on to vanish. He unplugged my monitor, put it on top of the computer, and then picked both of them up and started walking away. “Come with me. I’m going to take you to your new desk.”
I also recall the meeting in the Taco Towers basement. We’d heard about the firings, and then we were told to meet in the basement. We all filed in, and there was Scotty standing next to a keg of beer. We got beers and sat down
and Scotty began to talk. What stuck with me was his opening line: “I used to say that when being CEO at Apple wasn’t fun any more, I’d quit. But now I’ve changed my mind—when it isn’t fun any more, I’ll fire people until it’s fun again.” Standing there with a beer in his hand. Wow, I thought. In later years I witnessed many Apple layoffs—and now Scotty’s way of talking to us seems like a class act, compared to all the mealy-mouthed HR-driven rhetoric that replaced it.
David Casseres
We walked outside to Steve’s silver Mercedes and he dropped my computer into the trunk. We drove a few blocks to the corner of Stevens Creek and Saratoga-Sunnyvale, to a nondescript, brown-shingled, two-story office building next to a Texaco station, while Steve waxed eloquent about how great the Macintosh was going to be. We walked up to the second floor and through an unlocked door. Steve plopped my system down on a desk in an office near the back of the building and, before darting off, said, “Here’s your new desk. Welcome to the Mac team!”
I started looking around the office and saw Burrell Smith and Brian Howard in the next room, huddled over a logic analyzer connected to a prototype board. I told them what happened and they said Steve had been over earlier, asking them if they thought I was any good. They were happy I had joined the team.
After helping them a bit with the disk diagnostic routines they were trying to debug, I returned to my new desk and looked inside the drawers. I was surprised to see it was still full of someone else’s stuff. In fact, the bottom drawer had all kinds of unusual stuff, including various kinds of model airplanes and some photography equipment. I later found out Steve had assigned me to Jef Raskin’s old desk, which he hadn’t had time to move out of yet.
Revolution in The Valley [Paperback] Page 3