Return to the Little Kingdom

by Michael Moritz

  Unlike Jobs, who guarded his founder’s stock carefully, Wozniak distributed some of his. He gave stock worth $4 million to his parents, sister, and brother and $2 million to friends. He made some investments in start-up companies. He bought a Porsche and fastened the license plates APPLE II to the car. His father found $250,000 worth of uncashed checks strewn about the car and said of his son, “A person like him shouldn’t have that much money.” After Wozniak finally did arrange for some financial advice, he arrived at Apple one day to announce, “My lawyer said to diversify so I just bought a movie theater.” Even that turned into a complicated venture. The theater, located among the barrios on the east side of San Jose, provoked angry community protests after it screened a gang movie, The Warriors. Wozniak attended a few community meetings, listened to the concerns of the local leaders, promised that his theater wouldn’t show violent or pornographic movies, and accompanied by Wigginton, spent a few afternoons in the empty, darkened theater screening movies and playing censor.

  A few months before Apple became a public company, Wozniak took up flying, bought a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza, and eight weeks after the stock offering, came close to fulfilling the last half of Samuel Johnson’s adage. Wozniak embarked on a weekend flying expedition along with Candi Clark, the daughter of a California building contractor, whom he had first met during a water-gun fight at Apple and who was about to become his second wife. They were accompanied by another couple and were supposed to fly to Southern California to pick up Wozniak’s wedding rings. Before setting off from Scotts Valley airport, located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Wozniak was jittery. He complained about interference on his headsets and his companions were equally nervous. Their queasiness was justified. When the plane left the runway, it rose about fifty feet in the air, touched down again, bounced a couple of times, reared at an angle, barreled through two barbed-wire fences, careened up an embankment, and tipped on its nose about two hundred and fifty feet from a roller-skating rink crammed with teenagers. A San Francisco stockbroker who arrived on the scene switched off the plane’s ignition and found Wozniak slumped in his fiancée’s lap.

  After an investigation the National Transportation Safety Board found no evidence of mechanical failure. Meanwhile, doctors examined the four injured victims. They found that Wozniak had bitten through his upper lip, smashed a tooth, fractured the orbital socket around his right eye, had double vision, and was suffering from amnesia. His fiancée, meanwhile, needed plastic surgery to touch up cuts on her face. Wozniak’s accident prompted dark headlines in the local newspapers: COMPUTER EXEC IN PLANE CRASH, APPLE EXEC IN GUARDED CONDITION. In the days following the accident, Jobs rented a limousine to ferry Wozniak’s parents to and from El Camino hospital. There in his bed Wozniak became frantic, refused food, and said that the government was plotting to blow up the hospital and take all his money. Though his doctors were divided on the issue, seven days after the accident Wozniak was released and six months later he ordered a brand-new single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza.

  “He doesn’t want photographs right now,” she said.

  The Stanford University dormitory lounge looked like a poorly lit set for a nineteenth-century Gothic romance. Imitation-marble plinths sagged above the radiators, gilt-edged chandeliers threw yellow shadows across a ceiling painted crème de menthe. Branches of trees, thinned by fall, brushed in a drafty dusk against the windowpanes. A hundred or so freshmen, most of whom seemed to possess an earnest desire to graduate, were folded in various states of repose. A couple were fidgeting with small tape recorders. They had come to listen to Steve Jobs. The informality did not extend to the three women from the Regis McKenna Public Relations Agency who perched at the rear of the room. They had helped select the students’ invitation from among the two dozen or so requests that Jobs received every week. The youngest of the trio had not met Jobs before, but monitored him with marital familiarity and clucked to a magazine photographer, “He isn’t in a good mood. He doesn’t want photographs right now.”

  For the students the chairman of Apple Computer was a welcome break from the diet of familiar college administrators and professors they had been fed on previous occasions. Jobs was dressed with formal indifference in a well-cut cotton sports coat and jeans: chest courtesy of San Francisco clothier Wilkes Bashford, legs furnished by Levi Strauss. While a student made some introductory remarks Jobs shucked his jacket, tugged off a pair of worn corduroy boots which revealed a pair of argyle socks, and took up a lotus position on a coffee table.

  The students seemed a touch intimidated but the line of questions quickly showed that the subject under inspection possessed, in their eyes, the same molecular structure as Apple Computer. Jobs used the questions to give a seductive talk which, with slight variations, served as his standard speech for magazine editors, congressional committees, state commissions, business school students, electronics conventions, politicians, and visiting academics. It explained part of the reason for Apple’s popular appeal and why Jobs, some months before, had made the cover of Time. It was a cross between technological evangelism and corporate advertisement and Jobs busily juggled the roles of standard bearer and corporate promoter.

  He told how Apple got started. “When we first started Apple we really built the first computer because we wanted one.” Then he said, “We designed this crazy new computer with color and a whole bunch of other things called the Apple II which you have probably heard about.” He added, “We had a passion to do this one simple thing which was get a bunch of computers to our friends so they could have as much fun with them as we were.”

  Suddenly the magazine photographer’s light flashed and Jobs asked, “What’s that?” and provoked a barrel of snickers. The photographer crouched near a pillar and raised her camera. Jobs paused and stared into the lens and said, “Hi!” and the questions stopped. When they resumed a student wanted to know when the company stock would rise. “I cannot talk about that,” he said demurely. He said that he hoped Apple would someday sell half a million computers a month. “It’s still kind of a pain in the ass to use a computer.” He told the students about the company’s Lisa computer, disclosed his dream of putting a computer in a book, and promised, “We won’t put garbage in a book because our competitors will do that.”

  He proceeded to tell the students about his plan to give a computer away to every high school in the country. Cynics said that it was a cold marketing ploy to produce generations of Apple users, but at the start it had been a romantic gesture. The plan was formally called The Technology Education Act of 1982, but at Apple it had become known as the “Kids Can’t Wait” program and reflected Jobs’s impatience to get things done. On his first serious excursion, he had spent a couple of months lobbying congressmen, hoping to get a change in the tax law that would give companies the same relief for donating computers to schools that they received when they gave them to universities. Jobs had given senators and congressmen a standard twenty-minute pitch but the Reagan administration had been unwilling to bend the tax laws to help special cases. So when the students wanted to know what had become of the well-publicized plan, Jobs announced that Apple wasn’t willing to support the amended legislation and that “the Senate has screwed it up.”

  Apple had received a warmer reception at the California legislature which had amended a local law, and Jobs said that the company would soon start distributing ten thousand computers throughout the state. “We’re in the right place at the right time with the right people to give something back. That’s kind of nice. Computers and society are out on their first date so wouldn’t it be great if we could make the date go great and blossom.” He added, “The race is on to improve the productivity of the knowledge worker. The personal computer can generate—at a crude level—free intellectual energy but the computer will dwarf the petrochemical revolution.”

  In answer to some more questions he told the students, “The company that will most affect how we do is not IBM. It’s Apple. If we do what w
e know how to do well, we’ll leave everyone else in the dust.” After a student asked what it was like to run an empire Jobs replied, “We don’t think of it as an empire. We hire people to tell us what to do.” He dismissed the Japanese quest for a new generation of computer as having “a very high bullshit content. They don’t really know what they’re talking about.” He complained about the Japanese and the evils of protectionism. He also said it was no longer possible to start a computer company in a garage but suggested the students might still have a shot with a software company.

  As the questions died down Jobs conducted his own informal poll. He asked what part of the country students came from and what they were studying. Most seemed to be enrolled in computer science. “How many of you are virgins?” he asked. There were a few giggles, but no hands were raised. “How many of you have taken LSD?” There were some flushes of embarrassment and one or two hands rose slowly. “What do you want to do?” he asked, and a student blurted, “Make babies.”

  There wasn’t much hint that Jobs had acted through the script dozens of times, or had casually talked with friends about the possibility of running as an independent candidate for president. Jobs knew all the punch lines. It was the work of a corporate sorcerer with an actor’s sense of timing. After Jobs’s questions he was badgered again. A couple of students tugged at his cuffs. One just wanted to introduce himself as the owner of an Apple II, another wanted Jobs’s autograph on one of the Apple annual reports that were spilling out of a couple of cardboard boxes. A tall junior wondered whether he could get a tour of an Apple factory. Most of the students seemed pleased with the evening. “Well, at least he’s not a jerk,” one brown-haired coed said as she, in her Lacoste shirt, carefully pressed jeans, topsiders, and companion made for the door.

  WELCOME IBM, SERIOUSLY -

  The stock market provided the loudest applause for Apple Computer but there was plenty from other quarters. Small newspapers tracked the progress of Apple IIs all across America and greeted the appearance of these personal computers with charming, goggle-eyed astonishment. This was an updated version of the gasps that had followed the arrival of automobiles in muddy country lanes and of radios in quiet living rooms. But now the photographs were not of a family sitting upright in stiff leather seats with hats poking over the brow of a windshield, or knitting and smoking around a fireplace while ears were tuned to the wireless perched in holy splendor on a mantelpiece. The new trailblazers were pictured in hunched positions around a screen that glowed, their hands perched on a keyboard, and the heads that tilted toward the camera seemed to be saying that the future had arrived.

  As well as the photographs of the flash-stunned teenager in the family den, there were snapshots of Apples in libraries and class-rooms, banks and laboratories, mobile homes and airplanes, houseboats and music studios, and there were even a couple bracketed to electric guitars. Reports of these California curiosities slipped into papers like the East Aurora Advertiser, the Geneva (Neb.) Signal and the Bristol Herald Courier. The Chaska (Minn.) Herald marveled as BOY HANDLES COMPUTER PROGRAMS while the Columbia Independent in Ohio resorted to an apocalyptic tone: EUCLID JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL ENTERS COMPUTER AGE. When an Apple arrived in Southern California, the La Jolla Light announced COMPUTER AGE COMES TO COUNTRY DAY and the Star Press in Blairstown, Iowa, told of a farmer learning to program an Apple and finding the experience “not nearly as tough as it is to teach a computer person how to feed cattle.” Apples helped a belly dancer keep track of her Jezebel brassieres and monitored the temperature of mud around a semisubmersible oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. A University of Virginia coach used an Apple to calculate the velocity of a football and a Boeing engineer programmed his to forecast four out of five winners at a Washington State racetrack—but admitted, “The more I refine this handicapping program, the worse the results.” In Buffalo Grove, Illinois, a high-school senior organized a tennis tournament with an Apple and in Sarasota, Florida, a cerebal-palsy victim could communicate more easily after an Apple was connected to a speech synthesizer.

  In Manhattan, a vice-president at W. R. Grace and Company programmed an Apple II to estimate how many sides of beef his company’s restaurant chain should order, while the poet laureate of Florida wrote paeans with an Apple hooked to a large-screen television. His words sparkled, rotated, and grew on the screen in line with their importance and he took to calling himself “a solid-state balladeer.” The Sunnyvale Police Department, working from physical descriptions, used an Apple to help search for the names of suspects. And in Santa Ana, California, a man was arrested for running a major prostitution ring with the help of an Apple that kept track of his four thousand clients, their credit history, and proclivities.

  Overseas, Apples analyzed census data in North Africa, measured factors affecting crop yields in Nigeria, provided diagnostic assistance for eye disorders in Nepal, improved irrigation planning in the Sahara, monitored developing bank activities in Latin America, assisted a schoolteacher in Botswana, and in the darker reaches of the world like Cardiff, Wales, The South Wales Echo reported that for a university lecturer an Apple provided “a hobby that became a way of life” though his teenage daughter complained the new arrival meant “we don’t really talk to one another anymore.”

  The users groups that sprang up all over the world added further testimony to the reach of Apple. The envelopes that arrived in Cupertino might have been addressed to a collector of exotic postage stamps. There were letters from Grupo Usarios Apple de Columbia, Brazil Apple Clube, Jakarta Apple, Apple Club Zagreb, Hong Kong Apple Dragon, Apple Gebruikers Groep Nederland, Catalunya Apple Club and others from Sweden and the Philippines, New Zealand and Israel, Tasmania and Guam.

  In the United States new clubs in different cities invented names with the gusto that editors of cookbooks reserve for fresh concoctions. There were Apple Peelers and Crab Apples, Green Apples and Applebutter, Applesiders and Apple Tart, Applepickers and Apple Jacks, Apple Pi and Apple PIE, Appleseed and Applesac, Appleworms and Apple Cart, but two with the nicest ring were Appleholics Anonymous and Little Rock Apple Addicts. Magazines with names like inCider, Apple Orchard, Call Apple and Apple Source were published to reach customers and dealers. Exhibition halls were rented to stage Appleexpos and Applefests that were undisguised celebrations of the company’s computers.

  Apple’s founders were presented with Apples of various sizes, fashioned from so many materials that they must have wondered why they hadn’t called the company Matrix Electronics. They were deluged with apples carved from koa, mahogany, cedar, and redwood, fired in porcelain and china, dried in papier-mâché, blown from crystal, melted in brass, and stamped in plastic. There was also a proliferation of memorabilia supplied by little companies that specialized in making corporate trinkets and icons. There were apple belt buckles and apple pens, apple doormats and apple goblets, apple notebooks and apple paper knives, apple calendars and apple paperweights, apple key chains and apple bumper stickers.

  As Apple became a major computer company there were less convenient, more oblique compliments to the size of its success. There was, for a start, the irritating flattery of imitation. On the East Coast of the United States, Franklin Computer Corporation manufactured a machine very similar to the Apple, called it the ACE 100, and in advertisements shamelessly touted it by placing an apple in a prominent position and declaring that it was “sweeter than an apple.” (In federal court in 1983 Franklin admitted that it had copied Apple’s operating system.) A computer from Commodore was boosted with a series of commercials saying that it was “the worm that ate the apple.” In Taiwan and Hong Kong local knock-off artists made copies that were decorated with names such as Apolo II, Orange Computers, and Pineapple. A West German computer distributor manufactured still another look-alike, a small Italian firm designed a computer that bore a lemon logo, while a British firm decorated its machine with a rainbow-colored pear.

  In California Apple was troubled by a local disease, becoming a carcass
for headhunters to pick over. The more persistent got to be so well known that Apple’s telephone operators were ordered not to forward their calls. Undeterred, the cunning “executive recruiters” simply resorted to false names. Apple was not immune to job-hopping and in time people started to leave. It was by no means a mass exodus but the dribs and drabs were enough to be irritating. The lure of other start-ups, the sight of the flaws and frailties of Apple’s founders, and the fear of getting bogged down in a large company all helped to nudge the ambitious toward the door. Within two years of the public issue, four small companies had been started by one-time Apple employees, and even if the turnover was nowhere near as high as in some corners of Silicon Valley, it was also nowhere near as low as Apple’s managers liked to say.

  So with all these accolades—some overt and some opaque—the people working in the creamy shadows of the Cali Brothers grain silos in Cupertino had ample reason for pride. They could be excused if they sometimes dreamed that the world was no longer round but had assumed the shape of their corporate logo. However, as they started to believe that Apple was a top dog, the company also became intrigued with the notion of empire, and an aggressive conceit threatened to unravel much of the earlier success.

  Outsiders who had followed Apple’s progress spotted the danger signals. Hank Smith, the venture capitalist, began to warn the officers of other young companies about the penalites of success and he used Apple as his case study. Richard Melmon, who had worked on the Apple account for the Regis McKenna Agency and was later connected with a software company that sold programs for Apples, agreed: “Everybody at Apple sits around and says, ‘We’re the best. We know it.’ They have a culture that says it and it starts from Steve Jobs and works on down.” And Ed Faber, the president of Computerland, summed up Apple’s swaggering demeanor: “The word that keeps popping up is ‘arrogant.’” Arrogance seeped right through the company and came to affect every aspect of its business: the style with which it treated suppliers, software firms, and dealers, its attitude toward competitors, and the way it approached the development of new products.