Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set: Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein

by Isaacson, Walter

  Living in the house at times rekindled the physical relationship between Brennan and Jobs, and within a few months she was pregnant. “Steve and I were in and out of a relationship for five years before I got pregnant,” she said. “We didn’t know how to be together and we didn’t know how to be apart.” When Greg Calhoun hitchhiked from Colorado to visit them on Thanksgiving 1977, Brennan told him the news: “Steve and I got back together, and now I’m pregnant, but now we are on again and off again, and I don’t know what to do.”

  Calhoun noticed that Jobs was disconnected from the whole situation. He even tried to convince Calhoun to stay with them and come to work at Apple. “Steve was just not dealing with Chrisann or the pregnancy,” he recalled. “He could be very engaged with you in one moment, but then very disengaged. There was a side to him that was frighteningly cold.”

  When Jobs did not want to deal with a distraction, he sometimes just ignored it, as if he could will it out of existence. At times he was able to distort reality not just for others but even for himself. In the case of Brennan’s pregnancy, he simply shut it out of his mind. When confronted, he would deny that he knew he was the father, even though he admitted that he had been sleeping with her. “I wasn’t sure it was my kid, because I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one she was sleeping with,” he told me later. “She and I were not really even going out when she got pregnant. She just had a room in our house.” Brennan had no doubt that Jobs was the father. She had not been involved with Greg or any other men at the time.

  Was he lying to himself, or did he not know that he was the father? “I just think he couldn’t access that part of his brain or the idea of being responsible,” Kottke said. Elizabeth Holmes agreed: “He considered the option of parenthood and considered the option of not being a parent, and he decided to believe the latter. He had other plans for his life.”

  There was no discussion of marriage. “I knew that she was not the person I wanted to marry, and we would never be happy, and it wouldn’t last long,” Jobs later said. “I was all in favor of her getting an abortion, but she didn’t know what to do. She thought about it repeatedly and decided not to, or I don’t know that she ever really decided—I think time just decided for her.” Brennan told me that it was her choice to have the baby: “He said he was fine with an abortion but never pushed for it.” Interestingly, given his own background, he was adamantly against one option. “He strongly discouraged me putting the child up for adoption,” she said.

  There was a disturbing irony. Jobs and Brennan were both twenty-three, the same age that Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali had been when they had Jobs. He had not yet tracked down his biological parents, but his adoptive parents had told him some of their tale. “I didn’t know then about this coincidence of our ages, so it didn’t affect my discussions with Chrisann,” he later said. He dismissed the notion that he was somehow following his biological father’s pattern of getting his girlfriend pregnant when he was twenty-three, but he did admit that the ironic resonance gave him pause. “When I did find out that he was twenty-three when he got Joanne pregnant with me, I thought, whoa!”

  The relationship between Jobs and Brennan quickly deteriorated. “Chrisann would get into this kind of victim mode, when she would say that Steve and I were ganging up on her,” Kottke recalled. “Steve would just laugh and not take her seriously.” Brennan was not, as even she later admitted, very emotionally stable. She began breaking plates, throwing things, trashing the house, and writing obscene words in charcoal on the wall. She said that Jobs kept provoking her with his callousness: “He was an enlightened being who was cruel.” Kottke was caught in the middle. “Daniel didn’t have that DNA of ruthlessness, so he was a bit flipped by Steve’s behavior,” according to Brennan. “He would go from ‘Steve’s not treating you right’ to laughing at me with Steve.”

  Robert Friedland came to her rescue. “He heard that I was pregnant, and he said to come on up to the farm to have the baby,” she recalled. “So I did.” Elizabeth Holmes and other friends were still living there, and they found an Oregon midwife to help with the delivery. On May 17, 1978, Brennan gave birth to a baby girl. Three days later Jobs flew up to be with them and help name the new baby. The practice on the commune was to give children Eastern spiritual names, but Jobs insisted that she had been born in America and ought to have a name that fit. Brennan agreed. They named her Lisa Nicole Brennan, not giving her the last name Jobs. And then he left to go back to work at Apple. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with her or with me,” said Brennan.

  She and Lisa moved to a tiny, dilapidated house in back of a home in Menlo Park. They lived on welfare because Brennan did not feel up to suing for child support. Finally, the County of San Mateo sued Jobs to try to prove paternity and get him to take financial responsibility. At first Jobs was determined to fight the case. His lawyers wanted Kottke to testify that he had never seen them in bed together, and they tried to line up evidence that Brennan had been sleeping with other men. “At one point I yelled at Steve on the phone, ‘You know that is not true,’” Brennan recalled. “He was going to drag me through court with a little baby and try to prove I was a whore and that anyone could have been the father of that baby.”

  A year after Lisa was born, Jobs agreed to take a paternity test. Brennan’s family was surprised, but Jobs knew that Apple would soon be going public and he decided it was best to get the issue resolved. DNA tests were new, and the one that Jobs took was done at UCLA. “I had read about DNA testing, and I was happy to do it to get things settled,” he said. The results were pretty dispositive. “Probability of paternity . . . is 94.41%,” the report read. The California courts ordered Jobs to start paying $385 a month in child support, sign an agreement admitting paternity, and reimburse the county $5,856 in back welfare payments. He was given visitation rights but for a long time didn’t exercise them.

  Even then Jobs continued at times to warp the reality around him. “He finally told us on the board,” Arthur Rock recalled, “but he kept insisting that there was a large probability that he wasn’t the father. He was delusional.” He told a reporter for Time, Michael Moritz, that when you analyzed the statistics, it was clear that “28% of the male population in the United States could be the father.” It was not only a false claim but an odd one. Worse yet, when Chrisann Brennan later heard what he said, she mistakenly thought that Jobs was hyperbolically claiming that she might have slept with 28% of the men in the United States. “He was trying to paint me as a slut or a whore,” she recalled. “He spun the whore image onto me in order to not take responsibility.”

  Years later Jobs was remorseful for the way he behaved, one of the few times in his life he admitted as much:

  I wish I had handled it differently. I could not see myself as a father then, so I didn’t face up to it. But when the test results showed she was my daughter, it’s not true that I doubted it. I agreed to support her until she was eighteen and give some money to Chrisann as well. I found a house in Palo Alto and fixed it up and let them live there rent-free. Her mother found her great schools which I paid for. I tried to do the right thing. But if I could do it over, I would do a better job.

  Once the case was resolved, Jobs began to move on with his life—maturing in some respects, though not all. He put aside drugs, eased away from being a strict vegan, and cut back the time he spent on Zen retreats. He began getting stylish haircuts and buying suits and shirts from the upscale San Francisco haberdashery Wilkes Bashford. And he settled into a serious relationship with one of Regis McKenna’s employees, a beautiful Polynesian-Polish woman named Barbara Jasinski.

  There was still, to be sure, a childlike rebellious streak in him. He, Jasinski, and Kottke liked to go skinny-dipping in Felt Lake on the edge of Interstate 280 near Stanford, and he bought a 1966 BMW R60/2 motorcycle that he adorned with orange tassels on the handlebars. He could also still be bratty. He belittled waitresses and frequently returned food with the proclamation th
at it was “garbage.” At the company’s first Halloween party, in 1979, he dressed in robes as Jesus Christ, an act of semi-ironic self-awareness that he considered funny but that caused a lot of eye rolling. Even his initial stirrings of domesticity had some quirks. He bought a proper house in the Los Gatos hills, which he adorned with a Maxfield Parrish painting, a Braun coffeemaker, and Henckels knives. But because he was so obsessive when it came to selecting furnishings, it remained mostly barren, lacking beds or chairs or couches. Instead his bedroom had a mattress in the center, framed pictures of Einstein and Maharaj-ji on the walls, and an Apple II on the floor.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  XEROX AND LISA

  Graphical User Interfaces

  A New Baby

  The Apple II took the company from Jobs’s garage to the pinnacle of a new industry. Its sales rose dramatically, from 2,500 units in 1977 to 210,000 in 1981. But Jobs was restless. The Apple II could not remain successful forever, and he knew that, no matter how much he had done to package it, from power cord to case, it would always be seen as Wozniak’s masterpiece. He needed his own machine. More than that, he wanted a product that would, in his words, make a dent in the universe.

  At first he hoped that the Apple III would play that role. It would have more memory, the screen would display eighty characters across rather than forty, and it would handle uppercase and lowercase letters. Indulging his passion for industrial design, Jobs decreed the size and shape of the external case, and he refused to let anyone alter it, even as committees of engineers added more components to the circuit boards. The result was piggybacked boards with poor connectors that frequently failed. When the Apple III began shipping in May 1980, it flopped. Randy Wigginton, one of the engineers, summed it up: “The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a group orgy, and later everybody had this bad headache, and there’s this bastard child, and everyone says, ‘It’s not mine.’”

  By then Jobs had distanced himself from the Apple III and was thrashing about for ways to produce something more radically different. At first he flirted with the idea of touchscreens, but he found himself frustrated. At one demonstration of the technology, he arrived late, fidgeted awhile, then abruptly cut off the engineers in the middle of their presentation with a brusque “Thank you.” They were confused. “Would you like us to leave?” one asked. Jobs said yes, then berated his colleagues for wasting his time.

  Then he and Apple hired two engineers from Hewlett-Packard to conceive a totally new computer. The name Jobs chose for it would have caused even the most jaded psychiatrist to do a double take: the Lisa. Other computers had been named after daughters of their designers, but Lisa was a daughter Jobs had abandoned and had not yet fully admitted was his. “Maybe he was doing it out of guilt,” said Andrea Cunningham, who worked at Regis McKenna on public relations for the project. “We had to come up with an acronym so that we could claim it was not named after Lisa the child.” The one they reverse-engineered was “local integrated systems architecture,” and despite being meaningless it became the official explanation for the name. Among the engineers it was referred to as “Lisa: invented stupid acronym.” Years later, when I asked about the name, Jobs admitted simply, “Obviously it was named for my daughter.”

  The Lisa was conceived as a $2,000 machine based on a sixteen-bit microprocessor, rather than the eight-bit one used in the Apple II. Without the wizardry of Wozniak, who was still working quietly on the Apple II, the engineers began producing a straightforward computer with a conventional text display, unable to push the powerful microprocessor to do much exciting stuff. Jobs began to grow impatient with how boring it was turning out to be.

  There was, however, one programmer who was infusing the project with some life: Bill Atkinson. He was a doctoral student in neuroscience who had experimented with his fair share of acid. When he was asked to come work for Apple, he declined. But then Apple sent him a nonrefundable plane ticket, and he decided to use it and let Jobs try to persuade him. “We are inventing the future,” Jobs told him at the end of a three-hour pitch. “Think about surfing on the front edge of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-paddling at the tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun. Come down here and make a dent in the universe.” Atkinson did.

  With his shaggy hair and droopy moustache that did not hide the animation in his face, Atkinson had some of Woz’s ingenuity along with Jobs’s passion for awesome products. His first job was to develop a program to track a stock portfolio by auto-dialing the Dow Jones service, getting quotes, then hanging up. “I had to create it fast because there was a magazine ad for the Apple II showing a hubby at the kitchen table looking at an Apple screen filled with graphs of stock prices, and his wife is beaming at him—but there wasn’t such a program, so I had to create one.” Next he created for the Apple II a version of Pascal, a high-level programming language. Jobs had resisted, thinking that BASIC was all the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson, “Since you’re so passionate about it, I’ll give you six days to prove me wrong.” He did, and Jobs respected him ever after.

  By the fall of 1979 Apple was breeding three ponies to be potential successors to the Apple II workhorse. There was the ill-fated Apple III. There was the Lisa project, which was beginning to disappoint Jobs. And somewhere off Jobs’s radar screen, at least for the moment, there was a small skunkworks project for a low-cost machine that was being developed by a colorful employee named Jef Raskin, a former professor who had taught Bill Atkinson. Raskin’s goal was to make an inexpensive “computer for the masses” that would be like an appliance—a self-contained unit with computer, keyboard, monitor, and software all together—and have a graphical interface. He tried to turn his colleagues at Apple on to a cutting-edge research center, right in Palo Alto, that was pioneering such ideas.

  Xerox PARC

  The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.” Kay pushed the vision of a small personal computer, dubbed the “Dynabook,” that would be easy enough for children to use. So Xerox PARC’s engineers began to develop user-friendly graphics that could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating. The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop. The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point and click on the one you wanted to use.

  This graphical user interface—or GUI, pronounced “gooey”—was facilitated by another concept pioneered at Xerox PARC: bitmapping. Until then, most computers were character-based. You would type a character on a keyboard, and the computer would generate that character on the screen, usually in glowing greenish phosphor against a dark background. Since there were a limited number of letters, numerals, and symbols, it didn’t take a whole lot of computer code or processing power to accomplish this. In a bitmap system, on the other hand, each and every pixel on the screen is controlled by bits in the computer’s memory. To render something on the screen, such as a letter, the computer has to tell each pixel to be light or dark or, in the case of color displays, what color to be. This uses a lot of computing power, but it permits gorgeous graphics, fonts, and gee-whiz screen displays.

  Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became features of Xerox PARC’s prototype computers, such as the Alto, and its object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk. Jef Raskin decided that these features were the future of computing. So he began urging Jobs and other Apple colleagues to go check out Xerox PARC.

  Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as an insufferable theorist or, to use Jobs’s own mo
re precise terminology, “a shithead who sucks.” So Raskin enlisted his friend Atkinson, who fell on the other side of Jobs’s shithead/genius division of the world, to convince Jobs to take an interest in what was happening at Xerox PARC. What Raskin didn’t know was that Jobs was working on a more complex deal. Xerox’s venture capital division wanted to be part of the second round of Apple financing during the summer of 1979. Jobs made an offer: “I will let you invest a million dollars in Apple if you will open the kimono at PARC.” Xerox accepted. It agreed to show Apple its new technology and in return got to buy 100,000 shares at about $10 each.

  By the time Apple went public a year later, Xerox’s $1 million worth of shares were worth $17.6 million. But Apple got the better end of the bargain. Jobs and his colleagues went to see Xerox PARC’s technology in December 1979 and, when Jobs realized he hadn’t been shown enough, got an even fuller demonstration a few days later. Larry Tesler was one of the Xerox scientists called upon to do the briefings, and he was thrilled to show off the work that his bosses back east had never seemed to appreciate. But the other briefer, Adele Goldberg, was appalled that her company seemed willing to give away its crown jewels. “It was incredibly stupid, completely nuts, and I fought to prevent giving Jobs much of anything,” she recalled.