Return to the Little Kingdom

by Michael Moritz

  The newsletter also contained hints of wider interest and almost from the start showed signs that Moore’s lifelong dreams about grass-roots networks had at last come true. Just as that happened, Moore was forced to leave the club because of marital troubles. When similar clubs started in Boston or San Diego or even in British Columbia, word soon appeared in the fortnightly bulletin. The Homebrew letter even carried lonely pleas from overseas. Salvatore di Franco wrote from Biccari, Italy: “Since in Italy there are no magazines, no books, no data where I could get the information and the know-how I need, that is the main reason for joining your club.” And F. J. Pretorious sent a letter from Sasolburg, South Africa, noting the local state of affairs: “It is quite discouraging that no circuits are available on 8008 or 8080 microprocessors.”

  But most of all the Homebrew Club provided an audience for a group of lonely hearts like Wozniak whose primary interest in life was something that most people couldn’t understand. And though, in later years, the club was fondly remembered as a movable science fair where like-minded souls gathered to share their secrets, display their machines, and distribute schematics—rather like older versions of school science fairs—it was also a skeptical, critical forum where sloppy designs would be savaged as “a bucket of noise.” Despite Fred Moore’s milky intentions, the brightest members of the Homebrew Club liked to work by themselves and Lee Felsenstein recalled the dominant tone: “We were all watching to see if someone else was infringing on our specialty or our little twist. It was difficult to get people together to work on the same thing. We all just had great plans with no one else to listen to but other people with their own great plans.”

  “Johnny Carson wouldn’t be bad,” Jobs said.

  In the Valley of Superlatives dreaming up a fresh slogan for a new computer was a tricky business. For months the marketing managers at Mac had been scratching their heads trying to come up with a memorable phrase or line that would capture their computer’s virtues. At one time or another, depending on the shape, mood, and ingenuity of the speaker, Mac had been referred to as The Next Apple II, The Interface for the Eighties, The Crankless Computer, The Crankless Volkswagen, or The Crankless Mercedes. As a company, Apple had exhausted variations on the theme of the personal computer. It had annexed the definite article to describe the Apple II as The Personal Computer and shortly afterward announced (mustering a magnificently straight face) that it had actually invented the personal computer.

  Competitors had countered with similar braggadocio. Digital Equipment Corporation’s advertisements read “We change the way the world thinks,” Radio Shack was calling itself “The biggest name in little computers” and the founder of Osborne Computer Corporation, before his company went bankrupt, compared himself to Henry Ford. As the slogan race escalated, Apple had launched multiple adjectives describing its best-selling machine as “the most personal computer,” a slogan that had spawned a mordant joke that Mac would simply become “the most most personal computer.”

  Partly to avoid lame tag lines, Marcia Klein, head of the Apple account at the Regis McKenna Public Relations Agency, arrived at the Mac building one morning to have a chat with Mike Murray. She wanted to bat around some ideas for a slogan but also wanted to start preparing for encounters with the press. Dressed in an olive suit and firehouse-red lipstick, Klein brought a touch of plate-glass fashion to the Mac conference room where Murray waited in slacks, a blue sports shirt, and boating shoes.

  After they had disposed of the amenities, Murray said, “Down the road we want people to think that when they’re hired in a new job they find pencils, a wastepaper basket, and a Mac. But that’s impossible to do off the bat. I’m trying to make a case that there’s a giant need for an appliance in the office. I’m pretty adamant about the appliance notion.”

  Klein listened and asked how Mac would fit in among Apple’s other computers. “When somebody asks us about the Apple II or the Apple III, what are we going to say?”

  “We don’t know what we’re going to say about the Apple III,” Murray admitted. “It’s something that just hasn’t been worked out. It’s a cop-out. We’ve got to be crystal clear about the future of the products. We cannot be really milquetoasty. People are hoping that maybe the Apple III will just go away.”

  Klein summed up her aim: “We’re trying to convey the impression that the company has a general marketing plan, that there’s overall corporate positioning and that what we say when we introduce Lisa will be consistent with what we say when we introduce Mac.”

  Murray sighed. “A lot of people tend to ignore us because it’s a real messy problem. Other people don’t realize the gravity of the problem.”

  Klein began to explain to Murray how to cope with journalists. “The press prefer to have you talk to them. They prefer not to have a sales pitch with lights and mirrors. You don’t need anything as polished as slides. You just don’t need to be slick.”

  “It’s hard to say Mac is warm and cuddly,” Murray said. “They’ll have to put their arms around it and say it’s warm and cuddly.”

  “We’d like to come up with a phrase for all of society,” Klein said.

  “Like desk appliance,” Murray said hopefully.

  “We’ve got to come up with new language,” Klein said. “An appliance is old language. An appliance is something you buy at K-Mart. An appliance is boring and functional. It loses personality.”

  “I don’t want to call it a desk-tool,” Murray said.

  Klein fiddled with a pen. “You need something like that for ads but you have the luxury when you’re dealing with the press of being able to talk in paragraphs. You don’t have to use just two words. The press is increasingly sophisticated but the audience isn’t necessarily so. The whole point of talking to the press is to educate them so they can educate their readers. For each publication you change a little bit of what you’ve got to say. Each publication looks a bit different and will ask different things. Business Week will want something different from Time.”’

  The door opened and Steve Jobs, looking disheveled and grumpy, strolled in, flopped into a chair, and slung his feet onto the table. He was dressed in jeans, argyle socks, a navy shirt, and loafers. Somebody had just told him that an MIT professor had been describing the features of Lisa and Mac on a Cable News Network program. Jobs was annoyed and turned to Klein. “I bet it was Marvin Minsky. That’s the only person it could be. Get a tape and if it was Minsky I want to string him up by his toenails.”

  Murray and Klein continued to debate various approaches for the press until Jobs cut them short. “We ought to decide what we want and then start to cultivate something because I’ve got a feeling we’ll get what we want.” He continued, “What we need is a cover of Time or Newsweek. I can see the cover as a shot of the whole Mac team. We’ve got a better shot at Newsweek than Time,” he predicted. “We had lunch with the president of Newsweek and a bunch of editors in some room at the top of the building and they stayed and talked for a couple of hours after lunch. It just went on and on. Technology. Reindustrialization. All that stuff.” He nodded to himself. “They’ll really go for that. ‘New computers from hi-tech kids’ and all that.”

  “I can see the story now,” Murray said. “It will have a dozen pictures inside with little bios underneath.”

  “Then we could do with an hour long TV special with Cavett interviewing Burrell and Andy,” Jobs said.

  “We need something more popular than that,” Klein objected.

  “Johnny Carson or something like that,” Murray suggested.

  “Johnny Carson wouldn’t be bad,” Jobs said.

  “What about that British guy who did the Nixon interviews?” Murray asked.

  “Once it starts to happen, it snowballs,” Jobs said. “I can see People magazine coming down and putting Andy Hertzfeld on the cover. We can create a mini-fame for each of these people. It’ll be a gas. We’ll have stories that say ‘Here’s the guy that designed it,’ ‘Here’s the factory th
at built it.’ People will just keep hearing all about it. We’ve got to get a lot of free editorial.”

  Jobs spotted a dummy advert lying on the table. “Ooooh, I like that,” he said in a softer voice. “Ooooh, that would be hot.” He read the slogan: “APPLE COMPUTER DOES IT AGAIN. I like that. That’s really hot.”

  “It’d be a nice cover for Newsweek” Murray volunteered.

  “It would be nice for Byte” Jobs countered as his mood improved. “It’s look so different from IBM.”

  “Its too classy for Byte,” Klein objected.

  “It’d be great for Newsweek,” Jobs agreed. “They’d sell millions of them.”

  The conversation returned to the problems of creating an image for a computer. Jobs sighed, “You know the closest thing has been Charlie Chaplin. IBM has really given their computer personality.” He paused. “I’ve got this idea for an ad. We’ll have a sort of spastic Charlie Chaplin but he’s constructed so he’s not real funny and we could do it because IBM cannot trademark Charlie Chaplin. Then Mac Man drifts in and scrunches Chaplin, or walks all over him, or comes out in front of him and shoots arrows at him from inside his coat.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Then it says, ‘Charlie Chaplin meets Mr. Mac.’”

  Murray and Klein smiled and said nothing. Jobs continued, “We need ads that hit you in the face. They’ve got to have visually high bandwidth. We have an opportunity to do an ad that doesn’t talk about product. It’s like we’re so good we don’t have to show photographs of computers.”

  “In advertising,” Murray said as Jobs finished, “we say it goes without saying and then we go ahead and say it.”

  “We don’t stand a chance advertising with features and benefits and with RAMs and with charts and comparisons,” Jobs said. “The only chance we have of communicating is with a feeling.”

  “It’s got to be like a Sony Walkman or a Cuisinart. It’s got to be a cult product,” Murray said.

  Jobs frowned. “Yeah, we say, ‘It’s a cult,’ and then we say, ‘Hey, drink this Kool-Aid.’” He strolled toward the door and said, “We want to create an image people will never forget. We’ve got to build it and we’ve got to build it early.”

  Murray was struck by a thought, looked at Jobs, and said hopefully, “The personal computer that gives you personality.”

  Jobs ignored the suggestion, stopped and examined some photographs hanging on the wall that showed children and students using Mac computers. “Maybe if we give these photographs to the press they’d print them.” He turned to Klein. “Don’t you think they’d run something like this?”

  “The San Jose Mercury might,” Klein said.

  STANLEY ZEBER ZENSKANITSKY

  Alex Kamradt was one of life’s eternal optimists. He was tall, broad but not stout, and had a round face and a head of thick, black, curly hair. He often looked beleaguered or earnestly confused and was the Pickwickian founder of Call Computer, a house-sized company, that he ran from a higgledly-piggedly office in Mountain View. The corporate epicenter was a wooden, rolltop desk piled with papers, magazines, computer printouts, calling cards, pens, and pencils. The desk was surrounded by Teletypes, grubby lime walls, a dining table, some stern, straight-backed chairs, and bookshelves stacked with hefty, looseleaf binders.

  A one-time physicist at Lockheed, Kamradt had become interested in computers while trying to write programs to solve scientific calculations. He sold a home, bought a minicomputer with part of the proceeds, and planned to use it to keep tabs on local real-estate deals. Instead he found himself renting out time on the computer to small companies along the San Francisco Peninsula. Together with a few high-school students he started to write programs that helped small businesses manage their accounts payable, accounts receivable, and inventories. His clients hooked into the computer by Teletype in the same way that Berkeley’s barterers linked up with Resource One’s Community Memory Project.

  But Kamradt sensed that the arrival of the microprocessor could change the scope of Call Computer. He wanted to rent or sell his customers a more convenient terminal with a typewriter keyboard that could be connected to a television. He began to attend meetings of the Homebrew Club with the specific intention of finding someone to design his terminal. “I started asking people who was the sharpest engineer and they said Wozniak.”

  In mid-1975 Kamradt and Wozniak formed a subsidiary of Call Computer that they named Computer Conversor. Kamradt provided around $12,000 in start-up money and took 70 percent of the company while Wozniak was given 30 percent and a free account on the minicomputer. Though the arrangement was casual, Wozniak promised to produce a design for a terminal that would, as the company’s name implied, converse with another computer. Kamradt saw the terminal as part of a grander scheme. “I wanted to have a computer terminal to sell and to rent. I knew that the first stage was to make a terminal and then gradually add more memory and turn it into a computer. Wozniak and I had an agreement that we were going to build a terminal then a computer.”

  Wozniak had a practical reason for designing the terminal. He had enviously eyed a similar machine that phone phreak John Draper had installed in the basement of his Los Altos home. It added an extra dimension to phone phreaking. Hooked to a telephone, the terminal let Draper delve in and out of ARPANET, a computer network financed by the federal government to link universities and research establishments. Armed with a few telephone numbers and the proper access codes, outsiders like Draper could connect to computers all over the United States, and some of these provided gateways to computers at European universities. Students and computer hobbyists nosed about the ARPANET files, left electronic messages for one another on informal bulletin boards, and sometimes devised ways of erasing records on distant computers.

  Wozniak used the machine he had built to play Pong as a basis for the Computer Conversor terminal. Both he and Kamradt felt that microprocessors were too expensive, and so from the outset the terminal was not supposed to be much more than a television-typewriter. The finished terminal allowed a user to type text on a television screen and ran slightly faster than an ordinary Teletype. It also had a couple of rubber muffs which slipped around a telephone receiver and allowed information to travel between the terminal and Kamradt’s minicomputer.

  Wozniak managed to tame the quirks in his prototype and found it reliable enough to use on ARPANET. “It was pretty easy to figure out how to jump around from computer to computer.” Though the terminal was satisfactory for Wozniak, the prototype presented Kamradt with a problem. “It was useful to Wozniak so he considered it finished. He could fix what was wrong. Nobody else could. The genius is nothing unless you can get it out of him. I couldn’t. He was hard to reach and didn’t want to build a company.”

  Wozniak felt that his primary responsibility lay with his full-time work. After a year of phone phreaking at Berkeley, he had left the university and had spent six months working on the assembly line at Electroglass, a company that supplied equipment to semiconductor manufacturers. He never considered going to work for his father’s employer, Lockheed, which had lost the righteous glow it had acquired during the late fifties. In part Lockheed was a victim of fashion, and at the end of the sixties much of its work was seen in a sinister light rather than in the patriotic glow that had shone around any company working to protect Americans against scores of Sputniks. Lockheed was closely linked to the imbroglio in Southeast Asia, was suffering from the winding down of the space program, was tangled in bribery scandals, was the target of congressional committees investigating cost overruns on government contracts, and had received a federal bailout.

  Life at Lockheed had acquired an antique ring. The corporate vocabulary was studded with the lingo of the industrial crescent and there was much talk of “mandates,” “mass meetings,” and “thorny noneconomic issues.” More important, the generation that had grown up in the curve of Lockheed’s satellite dishes was now dubious about the technical competence of the people who left their cars in the herrin
gbone parking lots. They thought Lockheed scientists were more like civil servants than electrical engineers. Al Alcorn at Atari formed his impressions. “Lockheed engineers were notorious for having no breadth. They could design an aileron on a missile but they couldn’t change a light bulb.” Stephen Wozniak accepted all the stereotypes and, like so many others, looked for work in the dozens of smaller electronic companies that had flourished while Lockheed aged. “I didn’t want to drink a lot. The standard picture of the Lockheed engineer was that he drank or beat his wife.”

  One of the companies that had grown while Lockheed had been covered in odium was Hewlett-Packard, and its engineers had gained their own reputation. They were younger than the Lockheed men, many had doctorates, and they had the advantage of working for a company that had its roots in the area rather than in some distant city. Hewlett-Packard had been started by some Stanford students in the Palo Alto garage just before World War II, and though the founders had become wealthy (and one of them Deputy Secretary of Defense), their underlings still called them Bill and Dave. In the late sixties and early seventies Hewlett-Packard was a steady corporate pillar on the Peninsula and had gained a formidable reputation for producing reliable laboratory instruments, computers, and calculators. It was certainly as respectable as Lockheed had been a decade before but, because of its youth, stock options, and size, Hewlett-Packard had a sprightlier edge.