iWoz

by Steve Wozniak

  This is what killed the Apple Ill’s chances from the get-go. Here’s why. A businessman buying an Apple II for his work could easily say, “I’ll buy an Apple III, and use it in the Apple II mode since I’m used to it, but I’ll still have the more modern machine.”

  But Apple killed the product that businessman would want by-disabling the very Apple II features (extra memory and eighty-column mode) he was buying the computer for.

  Out of the chute, the Apple III got a lot of publicity, but there was almost nothing you could run on it. As I said, it wasn’t reliable. And in Apple II mode, it was crippled.

  To this day, it boggles my mind. It’s just not the way an engineer—or any rational person, for that matter—would think. It disillusioned me that big companies could work this way.

  • o •

  Finally, finally, about a year after Apple was able to make the Apple III reliable enough so it wouldn’t break constantly, the computer still wouldn’t sell. Because by then it had such a bad rep as a terrible, unreliable machine. You see, first impressions matter. When a computer passes by its period of acceptance, you just aren’t going to get people jumping on the bandwagon by fixing the problem.

  My feeling was, Hey, try to forget about it, and just change the name of the Apple III to the Apple IV and make it look different on the outside, and maybe then you could sell some.

  • o •

  From the years 1980 to 1983, Apple made the Apple III its highest priority. It’s fair to say that Apple became the Apple III company. An Apple III company that just happens to sell Apple lis.

  By 1983 everybody at Apple was forced to have an Apple III on their desk. Suddenly, whenever I walked into the company, they’d be talking like, “Oh my god, did you see such and such new piece of software running on the Apple III?” And it was like, Who cares? I would go around the country in those days and give speeches to computer groups. I would talk to computer groups all over the place, and everywhere I went there would be ninety people with Apple lis and three people with Apple Ills.

  Why would Apple pretend it was an Apple III company when it wasn’t? That was my question.

  After all, during these years the Apple II was the largest-selling computer in the world. The Apple II was carrying us. In those days, almost every ad Apple ran in major magazines like Time and Newsweek showed an Apple III. They never showed an Apple II. The executive staff cut plans for all Apple II products. Totally. There were only a couple of education-related products left.

  Despite all this, the Apple II was still paying everyone’s salaries and making a huge profit for the company. And it wasn’t even being advertised. About the only salary Apple spent on the Apple II during that period—1980 to 1983—was on the guy who printed the price lists.

  • o •

  It was terrible. I mean, we had everybody at Apple—all the employees and all the money—going into the Apple III and nothing was coming out. And accounting didn’t account for it that way. The company lost so much money on the Apple III in those days—in today’s money, it would be at least a billion. I calculated at the time that we lost about $300 million. That’s just my own estimate.

  And not only was the Apple II carrying the whole company and carrying a debacle like the Apple III, it was hiding the Apple Ill’s real deficiencies from the world. Nobody in the real world, but nobody, treated the Apple III as if it was significant.

  All of our users had no idea, I’m telling you. Because if you opened up a computer magazine, all you saw were fifty ads for the Apple II—not by Apple, but by resellers and small mom-and- pop shops who were building all those games and add-ons for the Apple II.

  As for the computer magazines, in their reviews of the Apple III, almost every one of them acknowledged it was a failure in the marketplace. Never did they acknowledge that it was a prominent part of Apple’s business. They gave consumers the impres

  sion that we were largely an Apple II company—with this hugely successful product—and that there was this big group still working on the flawed Apple III for some reason.

  • o •

  Now, I accept that Apple had to work the way a company has to. There are a lot of people who operate the company, and there are a lot of people on the board who run things. So the reasoning is very difficult to see. I mean, this was a time when the company had one reputation but it was totally different on the inside. It very much bothered me that you can get away with all kinds of things when you are successful. For example, a bad person can get away with a lot of things if they have a lot of money. And a bad person can hide it—hide behind the money—and keep on being a bad person.

  In this case, we had a bad computer, the Apple III, even though the Apple II was selling like hotcakes. It had taken over the world. The IBM PC didn’t overtake it until 1983. So it was a leader.

  I still don’t understand it.

  • o •

  To be fair, the Apple III had some serious competition. In about 1981, IBM finally came out with its answer to the Apple II. It was selling great almost right away. It was truly becoming a huge success really rapidly. So we had some serious competition all of a sudden, and we’d never had that before.

  All those big companies with big IBM mainframe and other large computers were already IBM customers, and it didn’t take much for the IBM rep to sell them an IBM PC to go with it all. As a matter of fact, there used to be a saying that “you can’t get fired for buying IBM.”

  When the IBM PC first came out, we were kind of cocky aboul it. We took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal thai said, “Welcome IBM. Seriously.”

  And like I said, the PC passed by the Apple II, the largest-selling computer in the world, in 1983.

  • o •

  By this time, I should point out, Mike Scott—our president who took us public and the guy who took us through the phenomenally successful IPO—was gone. During the time the Apple III was being developed, he thought we’d grown a bit too large. There were good engineers, sure, but there were also a lot of lousy engineers floating around. That happens in any big company.

  It’s not necessarily the lousy engineer’s fault, by the way. There’s always going to be some mismatch between an engineer’s interests and the job he’s doing.

  Anyway, Scotty had told Tom Whitney, our engineering manager, to take a vacation for a week. And meanwhile he did some research. He went around and talked to every engineer in the company and found out who was doing what and who was working and who wasn’t doing much of anything.

  Then he fired a whole bunch of people. That was called Bloody Monday. Or, at least, that’s what it ended up being called in the Apple history books. I thought that, pretty much, he fired all the right ones. The laggards, I mean.

  And then Mike Scott himself was fired. The board was just very pissed that he’d done this without a lot of backing and enough due process, the kind of procedure you’re supposed to follow at a big company.

  Also, Mike Markkula told me Mike Scott had been making a lot of rash decisions and decisions that just weren’t right. Mike thought Scotty wasn’t really capable of handling the company given the point and size it had gotten to.

  I did not like this one bit. I liked Scotty very, very much as a person. I liked his way of thinking. I liked his way of being able to joke and be serious. With Scotty, I didn’t see many things fall

  through the cracks. And I felt that he respected the good work that I did—the engineering work. He came from engineering.

  And as I said, Scotty had been our president, our leader from day one of incorporation until we’d gone public in one of the biggest IPOs in U.S. history. And now, all of a sudden, he was just pushed aside and forgotten.

  I think it’s sad that none of the books today even seem to recall him. Nobody knows his name. Yet Mike Scott was the president that took us through the earliest days.

  • o •

  I learned a lot of things at Apple those first few years. I learned right away that in a
company, you can have different ideas about what ads look like or what the logo looks like, even different ideas about the name of the company or a product it has. People have different and often conflicting ideas about all these things.

  One thing I’ve learned directly from this new experience of creating and working at a company with so many different people is: Hey, never pretend you can do someone’s job better than someone who’s been doing it for years.

  I was much better keeping quiet and just focusing on my particular talent of engineering. That guaranteed that I would be productive at what I do and could let other people be productive at what they did best.

  So few companies were like this. But companies don’t always evolve the way you want them to. After all, when we first started Apple, Steve and I really had this engineering-centric model in mind. We wanted Apple to have the amazing employee morale we think HP got as a result of treating its engineers like upper-class citizens, you know?

  But we knew what were getting into because Mike Markulla told us. He said, “This is going to be a marketing company.” The product is going to be driven, in other words, by demands that the marketing department finds in customers. This is just the

  opposite of a place where engineers just build whatever they love, and marketing comes up with ways to market them. I knew this was going to be a challenge for me.

  • o •

  Back in high school, I read a book called The Loneliness of the LongDistance Runner by Alan Sillitoe. It just grabbed me. It was about a criminal going through this big mental discussion. It really showed how he was thinking very independently—it showed the way people in general who are inwardly driven think—and he’s trying to decide whether he should win this big footrace while he’s in jail. The bad governor will become famous if the criminal wins.

  And he’s trying to decide, Should he win the race, or shouldn’t he? Should he let the governor have all the fame? Or should he try to run away, and keep running, and just escape?

  The whole thing had a huge impact on my own thinking. In life, there is an “us” and a “them.” A “we” and a “they.” And the “they” is the administration, the authorities. And sometimes they’re on the wrong side and we’re on the right side.

  Chapter 16

  Crash Landing

  Before Alice and I were divorced, Alice told me about a friend of hers, Sherry, who was interested in buying a movie theater. A real running theater. It was the Mayfair Theater in San Jose. Alice thought I should buy it, and I could never turn Alice down when it came to anything she wanted to do.

  So I bought it.

  Sherry and Alice had gotten involved with a group called Eastern Star, a group of women who had relatives in the Freemasons. Because she was in Eastern Star, she was spending a lot of time there, a lot of nights away there. In order to have more time with her, I decided that I would become a Freemason. Freemasons, after all, regularly have joint events with Eastern Star. So I went down to the Masonic lodge and did a lot of training, and after some period of time and three big events, I became a third-degree Mason. Then I got more time with Alice. I eventually became an officer and everything.

  I should tell you that although I am a lifetime Freemason, I’m not like the other people who are Freemasons. My personality is very, very unlike theirs. To get in, you have to say all this stuff about God, the Bible, words that sound a little bit like they come from the Constitution, and none of this ritual stuff is the way I

  think, you know? But I did it, and I did it well. If I’m going to do something, I always try to do it well. And I did this for one reason, as I said: to see Alice more. I wanted to save the marriage. I would go so far as to join the Freemasons if that’s what it took. That’s how I was.

  So anyway, pretty much near the end of the marriage, I was a Freemason and I bought that theater. Alice’s friend Sherry and Sherry’s boyfriend, Howard, would run it. It had been their idea from the start, to run a theater. They’d gotten to Alice, as a friend, so she got to me. And now I owned it.

  The Mayfair Theater was in kind of a low-income area of town. I remember we had to paint the bathroom black because of all the graffiti, and even afterward, people would still put graffiti in it, only in white paint. At least we could wash the walls.

  I felt like making it into something special. I never had the idea that it was going to make a lot of money, but I wanted it to be kind of special and I put in nice seats and a good sound system. I had a couple of guys running it, and they scraped off a wall one day and found there was this beautiful natural wood artwork underneath this blah wall someone had tacked up on top of it. So we actually brought in some experts who sanded everything down, and they were able to recover the original artwork. I loved that theater.

  But then Alice and I got divorced, and I was stuck with the theater. I went there every day after work at Apple. I drove down there, set up my computer so I could get some work done, saw what movies were playing, and said hi to everybody. The theater was this fun group of people, a really small operation. It was neat to see how it operated. I mean, it was a small, low-budget theater. We didn’t get that many customers. And we only got pretty low-rate movies. For instance, we had Friday the 13th. That was probably the biggest movie we ever showed, and we only got it long after it opened.

  Actually, the only movies we ever sold out on were gang movies, like The Warriors. That made sense, considering what part of town we were in!

  I’d only been single a few weeks when I asked out the woman who would be my second wife, Candi Clark. I knew her because once, when I bought a bunch of advance tickets to a Star Trek movie and offered them half price to Apple employees, she’d asked for a bunch because she had a lot of brothers. I thought she was pretty cute, so I asked her to come to one of those low-budget science fiction movies we were showing at my theater, and she did. The next day, we raced bumper cars at the Malibu Grand Prix track near the San Francisco airport and I beat her really well.

  I thought she was just super pretty. She was blonde, medium build, and it turned out she had been an Olympic kayaker. (I found that out when I saw a picture of her and Ronald Reagan on the wall of her apartment after our second date.) She worked at Apple creating database reports for managers, that sort of stuff.

  So now I had a girlfriend and that was it. It was all really quick.

  • o •

  It wasn’t very long after I’d divorced Alice and met Candi that we decided to get married. She had an uncle down in San Diego who made jewelry, and I had this idea. Let’s get a ring for me, I said, that has the diamond on the inside so nobody can see it. I thought that would be more special than a normal ring. We would know there was a diamond, but the world wouldn’t.

  So we decided to fly down on a plane, on my V-tail Beechcraft, which I’d bought right after getting my pilot’s license six months before. I think today that it was the most beautiful and unorthodox single-engine plane there is. It was so distinctive, the shape of its tail was so unique, and I was so proud to fly it. I had it painted—by a painter named Bill Kelly, he’d done PR for Apple— in the nicest earth tones.

  The first time in my life that I was able to take a passenger

  alone, it was with Candi. I took her down to San Jose one night, and it was raining. Of course, I had never flown in the rain at night, but I did and we got back safely. I think that might have been my best landing ever.

  But no, I wasn’t at all cocky about my flying. I knew how to do a flight plan and how to do flights. I knew the rules to follow. But still, I was a beginner pilot. I was still a pretty rough new trainee. But anyway, Candi and I took a few trips in the new plane, and then one day we decided to fly down to San Diego where Candi’s uncle could design that wedding ring with the diamond on the inside.

  Candi and I flew from San Jose to a small airport in Scotts Valley to pick up Candi’s brother Jack and Jack’s girlfriend, Claris. Usually I would just taxi around and then take off, you know? So I’m going around, and
suddenly I notice I’m blocked by another plane that’s just sitting there, stalled on the taxiway. I’m thinking, Great. Great. I can’t even get out of there.

  So I looked around—I think we turned the airplane around— and I go off some other side way. By then the stalled airplane was gone and finally I got to the start of the runway. And I did all the little start-up procedures and reached for the throttle and you know what?

  I remember reaching for the throttle at the start of the runway, and that’s it. I can remember every other detail of the airport and everything that day up to that point. But I can remember absolutely nothing about what happened after that point. I have no memoiy of what happened next. (Later, I figured out that maybe Candi, who was sitting in the front, accidentally leaned on one of the controls, but we’ll never know exactly what caused that accident.)

  I woke up in the hospital, so they tell me, but it wasn’t until five weeks later that I was able to remember that I was in a plane crash.

  My friend Dan Sokol later told me that he saw news of the accident on TV. He said he turned on the TV and clicked onto the news channel when he heard something about an executive of a Silicon Valley computer company crashing his plane in Scotts Valley. And he immediately turned around just in time to see about two seconds of the Beechcraft upside down. I had crashed in the parking lot of a skating rink.

  Of course, as I told you, I remember absolutely nothing about what happened, not even about being in the hospital or anything. It was some head injury! Dan told me my room was filled with gifts and toys and stuff from people at Apple. Handmade cards, off-the-shelf cards, and junk food. It was all there, Dan said, but I have no memory of it. Zero memory. Dan even told me that I asked him to smuggle in a milk shake and pizza for me, which sounds exactly like me, so at least I know that I was really in there. I mean, people took pictures of me in there playing computer games, which is what I would do, but I have no memory of that. No memory at all.