Return to the Little Kingdom (36 page)

He struggled to make the manufacturing area out-of-bounds for the rest of the company and made withering comments when people slopped into his bailiwick without shoes. “Steve Jobs didn’t want to limit access. I said, ‘Baloney!’ I don’t want my people in a goldfish bowl.’” Don Bruener, the high-school student originally hired to troubleshoot balky boards, observed the new tone. “At the beginning if you thought about a change in production you could talk to someone and get it changed. It became more of an assembly line and you had to go through channels and write up a proposal for change.”

The same sort of shift occurred in the engineering laboratory. Rod Holt, the unwilling head of the department, found himself trying to guide the affairs of quality control, service, documentation, mechanical engineering, industrial design, and the work of the hardware engineers. “I stood up at a staff meeting,” Holt recalled, “and said, ‘If you guys don’t square this around, I’m quitting.’” To solve the problem Apple overcompensated by chasing two candidates. One, Tom Whitney, had guided large calculator projects at Hewlett-Packard and was a college friend of the hardware engineer, Wendell Sander, and a former boss of Steve Wozniak. The other, Charles H. Peddle III, had managed the MOS Technology team that had designed the 6502 microprocessor that lay at the heart of the Apple II. When both men agreed to join Apple their decisions were greeted with enthusiasm. Each, however, was surprised to find the other present, and after a few weeks, Peddle left.

Whitney, a tall man with a studious air, sought to introduce some of the practices that had proved effective at Hewlett-Packard. He assigned project leaders, scheduled meetings on design specifications, and tried to sort through the heap of tasks that needed attention. A battery of forms with various Hewlett-Packard acronyms became part of the Apple vocabulary. ECOS stood for engineering change order, ERS for external reference specification, and IDS for internal design specification. One of the young engineers, Chuck Mauro, said that his colleagues greeted the new regimen with guffaws. “We thought, ‘Here we go. Here comes red tape and forms to fill out and meetings every week.’ Organization was just too hard to take.”

The creeping professionalism was also reflected in the sort of software that was produced. Among the youngsters there was a strong allegiance to the BASIC programming language which had ruled strong at the Homebrew Club, was the lingua franca of the hobbyist community, and had proved more than adequate for games like Breakout—but it wasn’t really suitable for more powerful applications. Jef Raskin, who wrote the first proper Apple manual, argued for the merits of the more powerful language, Pascal, and helped convince Jobs that he should at least give it a try. Bill Atkinson, a programmer who did much of the work on Pascal, recalled, “Mike Scott didn’t believe in software. He thought we should put out hot hardware and people would supply software. Steve Jobs said, ‘Our users only want assembly language and BASIC but I’ll give you three months to convince me otherwise.”

Jobs allowed his skepticism to be overruled by his natural inclination to find a better way to do things. Once Pascal was converted to run on the Apple, it gave the company a new language to sell, simplified development of new programs, and most important, boosted the company’s reputation among experienced programmers who considered it a seal of respectability. Raskin and others continued to complain that Apple treated software as hardware’s stepsister. “Software is the glass through which the majority of our users see the Apple. If it doesn’t work right, the Apple isn’t working right.” Gradually his complaints, the arrival of some more graybeards, and the demands of the market helped nudge Apple away from a devotion to hardware.

A drive to introduce the ways and procedures of a larger company wasn’t limited to recruitment or software. It extended to the invisible skein of systems that started to streak about the place. Scott found that his admiration for order and his interest in computers blended in a management-information system that linked most aspects of the company. At first Apple leased computers from an outside firm; then, when the monthly bills mounted, it bought its own minicomputers. The Management Information System was not glamorous and, for the most part, it was invisible. Yet it became one of the major reasons for the growth of Apple and was, perhaps, Scott’s most important contribution. The system became Scott’s pet delight. Sitting at a terminal he—and other top managers—had a birds-eye view of the entire company. He could punch in a code and find out how many resistors were in stock at a warehouse, which parts were running low, how new orders were piling up, and which customers weren’t paying their bills.

One feature allowed Scott complete control. He could throw other users off the system, switch his terminal into lockstep with another to find out how someone was coping with the computer, and fire off messages to the hapless. It was an elaborate electronic toy calculated to appeal to his sense of whimsy and his passion for control. In a company where any number of programmers could wreak havoc with sensitive files, Scott’s master password was changed frequently. His favorite moniker was adopted from his aptly named cat: Baal.

 

The appearance of managers with fringes of gray hair and business-school graduates with an ambitious glint raised eyebrows. The old-timers viewed the newcomers with increasing suspicion. They looked on them as arrivistes. When rumors started to trickle out about the stock options and incentive schemes used as enticements, the bitterness was given a sharper edge. They were classified as corporate parvenus willing to go wherever they thought they could make a killing. So a gap opened between the newcomers and those who had been around during the early months. It was a difference that amounted to a clash between notions of amateurism and professionalism.

Some of the fresh faces turned up their noses at most of the young programmers, dismissing them as “talented backyard hackers” who wouldn’t bother to document their software and were only capable of writing “spaghetti code.” One manager wrote a vitriolic memo dismissing a program written during the early months as “riddled with bugs the way an old log is full of termites.” Tom Whitney summed up his attitude: “I wasn’t interested in working for a game company. We needed to become more professional. Compatibility and providing support for the customer were more important than getting the new, whizziest features into a computer.”

Some, usually the engineers and programmers who had been allied with the Homebrew Club, moaned that Apple had deserted its aim of making computers for all people and supplying free software. They found that designing the fastest version of
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was no longer enough to gain a badge of honor and muttered that if they had wanted to make business computers they would have joined IBM. Youngsters like Chris Espinosa thought that the marketing types with their button-down shirts, ties, and neatly pressed suits should have stayed as “extras in Cary Grant movies of the sixties.” Another programmer complained, “We started getting ad guys who used to sell shoes and thought it would be a good career move to get into personal computers.”

When work started on computer systems to replace the Apple II, the young programmers found they weren’t invited to contribute their ideas and were excluded from debates about what they felt was the essence of the company. Disenfranchised, they were understandably hurt and offended. Without degrees or doctorates they became something of an underclass and were acutely aware of the change. Randy Wigginton, one of the more abrasive of the crew, said, “The other guys thought small computers weren’t useful. They thought, ‘The Apple II isn’t a real computer. It’s a joke.’ Their attitude was: ‘You guys really don’t know how to do a company. We’ll show you how to do it right.’” A few of the programmers took to calling one of their new supervisors a Software Nazi because he was steadfastly opposed to revealing details about the internal mechanisms of the machine. But the complaints weren’t limited to the engineers. When more experienced financial managers, lawyers, public-relations specialists, and personnel staff began to arrive, even the mild-mannered accountant Gary Martin was moved to note, “We started getting people who were trying to make Apple sound and smell like IBM.”

As the employee count lengthened, it became increasingly difficult for Apple to tolerate quirks and idiosyncracies, although some of the demands were extravagant. (One employee, for example, was gravely upset when Apple failed to fulfill a promise to install his eighteen-foot-high, twenty-six-ring pipe organ in one of the office buildings.) In executive staff meetings Rod Holt came to be viewed by some as a disruptive influence while Steve Wozniak became the most notable casualty of growth. After he completed the controller for the disk drive, Wozniak worked on the design of a lower-cost Apple II but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t enjoy the tugs of management, the meetings, committees, memos, and long discussions. “I was lucky to have two hours a day to myself.”

He still indulged in pranks and, at one time or another, covered other people’s clothes in a soluble green slime, filled sodas with a fizzing compound, and pinned tablets of Alka Seltzer to the menus at a nearby Bob’s Big Boy—accompanied by the message “For your convenience.” When mice started to invade the engineering laboratory he showed his colleagues how the creatures would always scamper into paper bags because they mistook the dark opening for the safety of a hole.

However, Wozniak’s rebellious side began to emerge and he became a manager’s nightmare. His position in the company and all the kudos and status that gradually came to be associated with the Apple II converted him into one of the corporate untouchables. Instead of pursuing an assignment he would find a more interesting diversion like computing
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to one hundred thousand places. (He calculated that it would take three days to compute and four months to print.) For some weeks he tried to copy diskettes with an electric hand iron, hoping that the heat would cause the magnetic patterns to shift from one diskette to another. He also began to take long weekends to go gambling at casinos in Reno. Dick Huston, a programmer who had watched Wozniak cope with the disk drive, formed his own conclusion. “Woz lost the challenge. People stopped telling him that what he was doing was bullshit. He acquired the status of being a wizard and after a while he believed it. He knew better in his heart but he loved the role. So when someone got on his case he’d get temperamental.” Randy Wigginton looked at his friend and thought, “He didn’t have the same amount of individual importance. He preferred being the Messiah.”

 

The newcomers brought their own strands and strains. During the first couple of years Apple recruited heavily from Hewlett-Packard, National Semiconductor, and Intel, and the habits and differences in style among these companies were reflected in Cupertino. There was a general friction between the rough and tough ways of the semiconductor men (there were few women) and the people who had made computers, calculators, and instruments at Hewlett-Packard. Part of this was simply due to the different nature of the business. The primary drive of the semiconductor men was to manufacture high volume at low cost. Hewlett-Packard, on the other hand, had not been in a high-volume business until its calculators became popular and even then had steadfastly refrained from chopping prices to gain market share. The recruits from National Semiconductor were more inclined toward sales and opportunism and came from a company that made a religion out of its disdain for luxury and comfort. The Hewlett-Packard crowd tended to favor planning and believed in serving the customer and in some of the statelier aspects of corporate life.

Some of the Hewlett-Packard men began to see themselves as civilizing influences and were horrified by the uncouth rough-and-tumble practices of the brutes from the semiconductor industry. They came to believe that semiconductor men were hopeless male chauvinists—an impression that wasn’t dispelled when Markkula warmed up a managers’ meeting with the rhetorical question “Why did God invent women? Because he couldn’t teach sheep to cook.” The knights from Hewlett-Packard muttered that Apple’s directors were opposed to contributions to charities like the United Way, that the company had no commitment to affirmative action, underpaid its secretaries, and was, at least during the first two or three years, a difficult place for women to gain promotion. So it was no wonder that cartoons of Mollard, the one-time National Semiconductor manufacturing man, appeared with him outfitted in Gestapo regalia and armed with a swagger stick.

Those who were either from, or shared the sympathies of the people from, Hewlett-Packard were surprised at stories that some National managers bounced expense reports. One of the daintier managers looked at the pressures to ship that built up toward the end of every quarter as an effort was made to meet planned targets, have a “big push,” and “make the number,” and felt that the National managers kept their own code. “There was a real sense that they were going to ship this shit one way or another and they were going to get the dealers to fix it. They more or less said, ‘We’re going to ship this sucker, to hell with the customer.’” Another summed up the approach his National colleagues took toward suppliers and others who stood in the way, and talked of them as if they were hoods. “Their style ran like this, ‘We’d like to kill those sonuvabitches legally if we can. But if we cannot we’ll still have to kill ‘em.’”

Many of the men from National Semiconductor and other stern backgrounds harbored a similar contempt for the Hewlett-Packard recruits. They came to look on them as prissy fusspots. They didn’t question their professionalism; they just seemed to feel that they were too professional. Rod Holt felt, “The Hewlett-Packard types . . . spend more time writing down what they are supposed to do and what their subordinates are supposed to do than they do doing anything.” Someone else characterized a colleague as “another one of those country-club H.P. types,” and Michael Scott complained, “They’re not penny pinchers. They gloss over things.”