Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Alvy Ray Smith: I get the call from Jerry Elkind, my boss. He says, “We’re going to let you go.” And I went, “Well, why?” And he said, “Well, we’ve decided not to do color.” I said, “But Mr. Elkind, the future is color. It’s obvious. And Xerox owns it completely!” He said, “That may be so, but it’s a corporate decision to go black-and-white.” Okay, bye.

  Dick Shoup: Alvy got the boot.

  Bob Taylor: Alvy was an asshole.

  Alvy Ray Smith: Several years later Dick Shoup and Xerox PARC got a technical Emmy for SuperPaint. And what was used to seal the deal was Vidbits—my calling card. And of course Xerox PARC tried to deny any association with this thing.

  Stewart Brand: Xerox PARC went from freewheeling and freethinking and openly connected to shut off and under suspicious corporate oversight. It was the beginning of the end.

  Breakout

  Jobs and Woz change the game

  When Xerox PARC and Atari were both just getting started, so were two Silicon Valley whiz kids: Steve Wozniak and his best buddy and sometime business partner, Steve Jobs. In the spring and summer of 1972, they built and sold “blue boxes” door-to-door in the UC Berkeley dorms. The highly illegal electronic gizmos emitted tones that could be played into a telephone to trick Ma Bell’s switching equipment into letting the bearer of the blue box place free long-distance calls. Selling blue boxes was a lucrative sideline, but ultimately too risky. By January 1973 both Steves had dropped out of college and went looking for real jobs. Woz landed at the staid and respectable Hewlett-Packard, while Jobs wound up at the hippest new start-up in Silicon Valley: Atari. After a few years of feverish after-hours hacking by Woz and, for Jobs, a mind-expanding trip to India, the two friends founded their own computer company.

  Steve Jobs: I don’t think there would have ever been an Apple computer had there not been blue boxing.

  Dan Kottke: The blue-box article came out in 1971.

  Captain Crunch: Ron Rosenbaum wrote “The Secrets of the Little Blue Box” in Esquire magazine.

  Ron Rosenbaum: It was only my second magazine story.

  Steve Jobs: It was about this guy named Captain Crunch who could supposedly make free telephone calls.

  Captain Crunch: You can do what a telephone operator can do, even more—including calling overseas and deciding whether you want to go through cable or through a satellite.

  Ron Rosenbaum: Woz’s mother sent Woz the Esquire piece and Woz couldn’t believe it could be real.

  Captain Crunch: You can route the calls through different cities, hiding your location. They can trace the calls all they want, they’ll never find you! That’s how, for instance, I was able to call the CIA crisis hotline into the White House. I told Nixon that we needed toilet paper—that there was a toilet paper crisis!

  Steve Jobs: We were captivated. How could anybody do this? And we thought it must be a hoax. And we started looking through the libraries, looking for the secret tones that would allow you to do this. And we were at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center one night, and way in the bowels of their technical library, way down at the last bookshelf in the corner bottom rack, we found an AT&T technical journal that laid out the whole thing. And that’s another moment I’ll never forget. When we saw this journal, we thought, My God, it’s all real!

  Steve Wozniak: So I designed this little box and Steve said, “Oh, let’s sell it.”

  R. U. Sirius: And then Jobs and Woz manufactured those blue boxes.

  Captain Crunch: And I met Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and one or two more individuals who were UC Berkeley students. Steve Wozniak was going there for his engineering degree.

  Steve Wozniak: We both sold it to people in the dorms for a year.

  Ron Rosenbaum: It was the beginning of the Apple partnership, even though as far as I can tell they weren’t very good at it then.

  Steve Jobs: We built the best blue box in the world! It was all digital.

  Captain Crunch: Their blue boxes were not pure. You use those blue boxes, you go to jail. I drilled it into Woz. After I met him in the dorm, I said, “Steve, you really don’t want to be selling these. I’m going to give you some advice. I’m talking to you from an analog engineer’s point of view, not from a digital engineer’s—like you are. I deal in analog signals, not digital. Analog signals are much more complicated and they are not as cut and dry as digital signals.” I told him, I said, “When you put those tones together by whatever means of injection into the phone line, you are going to drop a trouble card. They will notice it immediately.” I made that very clear to Steve. He didn’t seem to care.

  Steve Wozniak: I liked exploring the network and being able to convince a Tokyo operator that I was a New York operator and get her to put it over to London and around the world. And I’d call one phone and speak into my phone and it would come out the other one a second later.

  Steve Jobs: And you might ask, “Well, what’s so interesting about that?” what’s so interesting is that we were young. And what we learned was that we could build something ourselves that could control billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure in the world. And that was an incredible lesson.

  But after being robbed of a blue box at gunpoint in the parking lot of a Sunnyvale pizza parlor while trying to close a sale, Woz and Jobs decided to shut down their illegal business. The venture wasn’t making much money, and besides, Silicon Valley had just spawned something even more exciting than phone phreaking—Atari had just invented the video game industry.

  Steve Wozniak: I had a friend that worked at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, so I’d ride my bike over there and it was just open. You know smart people are always open thinkers, and they don’t lock doors. So I walk right in. Spacewar was running on a PDP-11 there. And wow! You had the spaceship going around, being pulled by gravity into the center. So that was the idea of what could come in arcade games, but it was so expensive. No person could ever afford it.

  Nolan Bushnell: The big X-Y displays were about $20,000 at the time.

  Steve Wozniak: But then I saw a real arcade game, and that was Pong, and I was stunned: My God—the television set solves the problem of the cost! The movement toward the games we have today was largely one of how do you do it at a reasonable cost that people can afford. That was a big challenge, you know. I thought, Oh my gosh. I know how TVs work. I know all their signals for drawing lines in drawing frames and putting dots on the screen. So I built a little device—twenty-eight little one-dollar chips—and I built my own Pong. But it was hardware. See, nowadays you would just write a game of Pong in software and if you kind of know what you are doing it might even take you a day or two days. Back then it was hardware. That was a different world.

  Steve Jobs: I decided I wanted to travel, but I was lacking the necessary funds. I was looking in the paper and there was this ad that said, “Have fun and make money.” I called. It was Atari.

  Al Alcorn: I enjoyed getting these people that were really bright that wanted to come to work and do fun things. The semiconductor business wasn’t much fun. It was like that Ampex model. Atari was probably the most fun place to work at the time in the Valley.

  David Kushner: Atari was the company that established Silicon Valley’s casual culture as we know it today. Just the idea of showing up to work in jeans and a T-shirt? Prior to Atari the Valley was the era of Intel and essentially men in suits. With Atari it became smelly hippies in jeans smoking weed. Atari was the counterculture come to Silicon Valley. And so it was no coincidence that one of the smelly hippies that walked into Atari was Steve Jobs.

  Steve Wozniak: I did a copy of Pong in twenty-eight chips, and two of the chips put a four-letter word on the screen when you missed the ball—I’m into humor—and I showed it to my friends at Hewlett-Packard and then Steve came into town, and he saw it, and he took my board to Atari.

  Al Alcorn: One day the personnel lady came in and said, “I know you like to see these walk-ins. I’ve got one for you: an eighteen-year-old hippie.�
�� I said, “Bring him in.”

  Steve Wozniak: I don’t know if he was telling them that he had designed it or he and another guy had designed it or what, but I’m sure they were impressed by it.

  Al Alcorn: Jobs had a résumé which was pretty much nothing. He dropped out of Reed College. I go, “Well, was Reed an electrical engineering school?” “No. It’s a literary school.” He’s not an engineer, but he had spark and enthusiasm and he could solder. I needed a tech, so I hired him.

  Nolan Bushnell: Jobs was a technician—basically someone who did a lot of the actual soldering.

  Steve Jobs: I was, like, employee number forty. It was a small company. They had made Pong and two other games.

  Nolan Bushnell: He came to me one time and said, “No one in this company knows how to solder!” I looked at some of his work and it’s just pristine. He was extraordinary. I said, “Well, teach everybody.” So he did. He was not kind in doing it, but I actually think he upped our game somewhat.

  Lee Felsenstein: In 1974 I found myself standing in front of Al Alcorn’s desk at Atari looking for a job, and it was Jobs who conducted me into that office. Jobs was wearing a nice little white shirt. He might’ve had a tie. He had a scuzzy beard. It wasn’t the mythical Jobs, let’s put it that way. He didn’t exist yet. I think this was before his India trip.

  Al Alcorn: He had this weird diet. He would pass out occasionally. And he said, “Don’t call 911 if I pass out. Just push me under the table.” Oh, okay.

  Dan Kottke: Steve had found the Mucusless Diet Healing System, which is a fruitarian diet for healing. It’s not like it cured anything. In fact it’s not a great diet; it’s just sugar.

  Nolan Bushnell: Steve was brash. He was difficult. He didn’t bathe. And subsequent to Al hiring him, Steve and I got to be friends. Steve was very, very up to speed on Eastern philosophy. I was very up to speed on Western philosophy, and we would have these interesting conversations which I really liked.

  Dan Kottke: I don’t think that Steve had a spiritual phase—not really. The whole thing for Steve was that he was always looking for a mentor; he was actively looking for a mentor.

  Nolan Bushnell: Steve had one speed—full-on—and I was always impressed by that.

  Al Alcorn: Jobs was impressive, but not that impressive.

  Dan Kottke: Kobun Chino Otogawa was the roshi—or teacher—at the Los Altos Zendo. I’m not sure when Steve first met him, but the very first time I came down from Reed to visit, Steve brought me to the zendo and we did the meditation. Steve was big on doing that a few times a week. Kobun was his mentor.

  Kobun Chino Otogawa: Steve always say, “Make me monk. Please make me monk.” I say, “No.”

  Nolan Bushnell: I think Steve perceived himself to be a deep thinker on philosophical issues.

  Dan Kottke: Eastern literature, Hare Krishna food, and then psychedelics, that was part of the mix.

  Steve Jobs: This was California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense of experimentation and openness—openness to new possibilities.

  Dan Kottke: And I just assumed that Steve had taken LSD in high school. But all these years later I pretty much know who all his friends were then—and I can’t think of any of them who would have taken LSD; certainly not Woz.

  Steve Wozniak: I never used LSD—or even pot!

  Dan Kottke: So I might have turned him on.

  Steve Jobs: I’d been turned on to the idea of enlightenment and trying to figure out who I was and how I fit into things.

  Dan Kottke: Steve was looking for a guru who would tap him on the head and make him enlightened.

  Al Alcorn: I remember when he said, “I’m going to go to India to meet my guru.” I said, “Well, great!”

  Dan Kottke: I dropped out of Reed to go to India. Steve generously offered to buy my ticket, $800. I was carrying a stack of books. Steve was looking for his enlightenment experience. There was one pilgrimage we took, where we went to Kainchi, which was where Neem Karoli’s ashram was.

  Larry Brilliant: Neem Karoli Baba is the guru of Baba Ram Dass and Danny Goleman and a lot of other people you’ve heard of a little bit. Ram Dass wrote a book called Be Here Now, which was about Neem Karoli Baba. He had a hundred different names: Neem Karoli Baba, Blanket Baba, Maharaj-ji. He was a guru, probably in his eighties, and he had an ashram or a monastery. I say “monastery” sometimes just to make it seem more familiar, but it didn’t train monks, it trained people who were interested in being enlightened. By the time they got there Neem Karoli Baba had died.

  Dan Kottke: It was deserted, completely deserted. It had been a huge scene only a year before.

  Larry Brilliant: Steve wanted to find a guru—there were other gurus in the hills—and he became interested in one called Hariakhan Baba.

  Dan Kottke: And then we took this pilgrimage to see Hariakhan Baba.

  Larry Brilliant: And Steve followed Hariakhan Baba through the forests, barefoot, and Hariakhan Baba told him to cut his hair, and so he shaved his head.

  Al Alcorn: And he came back a few months later. I remember Ron Wayne came in and said, “Hey, Stevie is back.” And I said, “Steve who?” “Steve Jobs.” Oh that kid, yeah. “Oh, bring him in.” And I wish I had a camera. He was wearing a saffron robe, shaved head, barefoot, had a Baba Ram Dass book, Be Here Now. Steve gives me the Baba Ram Dass book and says, “Can I have my job back?” “Sure.”

  Nolan Bushnell: Steve was creating too much havoc in the engineering department, so I decided to put him on the night shift knowing that I would get two Steves at the price of one.

  Steve Wozniak: I got to play Gran Trak 10—the first car game—before it was out.

  Steve Jobs: I would just let him in at night and let him onto the production floor and he would play Gran Trak all night long.

  Al Alcorn: I had the responsibility to get these games out, coin-op games. The number one responsibility is to keep the factory going, right? But Nolan had a very short attention span, and he’d come into engineering and change the product halfway through. Well, they’re never going to ship if you keep doing that! So I had a pager installed, and when Nolan went into engineering they’d buzz me. That way Nolan could talk all he wanted, but later I’d come in and I would get everything set back on course. I had to do that. I had to get things to ship.

  Nolan Bushnell: I had designed this game that was called Breakout and I couldn’t get any of our engineers to do it. We had this thing where engineers could bid on projects, and the perception was that ball-and-paddle games were over. We’d done Pong, Pong Doubles, Quadrapong, what have you—about as much ball-and-paddle as you can do. And so everybody thought ball-and-paddle was over, and Breakout was a ball-and-paddle.

  Al Alcorn: And so Nolan went around me and he cornered Steve Jobs to go do Breakout. Nolan didn’t know that Steve wasn’t an engineer. That’s a fact. He thought Steve was an engineer, and Jobs never dissuaded him of that notion.

  Nolan Bushnell: I thought, Okay, I’ll put Steve on it—knowing that Wozniak was actually going to do the stuff, and they knocked it out in amazingly short time.

  Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs came to me and he said that Atari wanted me to design Breakout and I had only four days to do it. This was a half a man-year project! It was all in hardware. Four days! I didn’t think I could do it. But I’d already done Pong, so it was really just an extension of that game. It was just putting in the reflection counting when you hit bricks. We went four days with no sleep. Steve and I both got mononucleosis, the sleeping sickness. But we delivered a working Breakout game.

  Al Alcorn: By this time Jobs was working for Harold Lee, and Jobs shows Harold this Breakout game that wasn’t even on the list of things to do. Steve alleges to Harold that “I, Steve Jobs, designed it.” And Harold looks at the design and was like, “What the hell! I mean I’ve never seen a design like this.” And he said, “If Jobs did this, I’m really blown away.”

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nbsp; Steve Wozniak: Supposedly the Atari engineers couldn’t understand my design. It was just so beautiful and advanced. I never got to talk to them. I don’t know if they knew that I did it.

  Al Alcorn: Here was Breakout in, like, forty integrated circuits. I couldn’t do Pong in less than seventy!

  Steve Wozniak: Atari was getting tired of their engineers designing games with 150 chips, 160 chips, 190 chips in them.

  Al Alcorn: And Nolan had said, “If you make the game with anything less than fifty chips, you’ll get a thousand per chip bonus”—pretty well knowing there is no way you could do less than fifty.

  Steve Wozniak: Steve had asked me how many chips my design was. I said, “It looks like forty-five chips.” He said, “If we get it under fifty chips, we get seven hundred dollars, but if we get it under forty chips, we get a thousand.” He was motivating me to get it down.

  Nolan Bushnell: They came in at, I think, forty-five chips. The deal was that they got a bonus.

  Steve Wozniak: They paid Steve Jobs and then he paid me half the money, supposedly. He told me that we would get paid seven hundred bucks.

  Nolan Bushnell: It was about five grand.

  Steve Wozniak: Then he wrote me a check for 350. So, whatever. Steve should have been more open and honest with me. He should have told me differently because we were such close friends. But the fun of doing it overrides anything like that. Who cares about money? Right after we finished the game he went up to Oregon, and bought into that orchard or whatever it was.

  Dan Kottke: It was apple harvest time and Steve may have stayed there longer than me, but I was there for like a week doing the apple harvest. We were fasting on apples. It was our fruitarian experiment. And that’s why the name Apple was in the air.

  Also in the air, thanks to Stewart Brand’s 1972 Rolling Stone article, was the idea of a “personal computer.” Brand coined the phrase after meeting Alan Kay at Xerox PARC. There were lots of personal computers at PARC—the Altos—but it wasn’t until the release of the Altair, a build-it-yourself computer kit, that an ordinary hobbyist could get his or her hands on one. It was all the excuse the hackers in Silicon Valley needed to get together. The first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club was held in 1975, and no one was more excited about it than Woz.