Valley of Genius Read online

  Trip Hawkins: It was just a rocket ship of a processor: elegant, sleek, fast—a simplified instruction set.

  Andy Hertzfeld: But there was a technical problem. We could not use the 68000 because the 68000 wasn’t able to work with eight RAM chips. It needed sixteen. And Burrell Smith, being the genius that he was, he came up with an incredible way to hook up the 68000 to eight RAM chips, what he called the bus transformer circuit. It was this sort of miracle. No one thought it was possible to hook up the 68000 to an eight-bit bus without losing any performance, to go just as fast. And suddenly when he had that, you had the Macintosh which cost about one-fifth of what the Lisa was projected to cost, and ran twice as fast. So that is lightning in a bottle. That’s an amazing thing. Burrell, in an act of unprecedented genius, was able to do that. And when Steve saw that he thought, Boy, this is the future.

  Dan Kottke: It was kind of like putting a big V8 in a tiny little sports car. It was way overpowered for this tiny little machine.

  Joanna Hoffman: I knew the hardware was amazing. But when Andy joined the soul of the machine started to take shape.

  Andy Hertzfeld: I noticed Steve Jobs peering over the wall of my cubicle saying, “I’ve got great news for you: You’re on the Mac team now!” And I said, “Great! Tremendous!” This was late on a Thursday afternoon. I said, “How about I start Monday morning? Let me just get my DOS 4.0 notes together.” I had worked on a new operating system for the Apple II for three weeks, so why not get it so someone else could pick it up?

  Dan Kottke: Andy and I joined Mac in January of ’81.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Steve got mad. He goes, “The Apple II was going to be dead. Your OS is going to be obsolete before it’s finished!” And then he said something like, “The Macintosh is the future of Apple and you are going to start now.” I just wanted one day, really. It was Thursday afternoon. I said “Monday” because Monday seems to be a good time to make a new start. But he goes, “No! You’re going to start on it now!” And he went and he pulled the plug on my Apple II, which had my code not saved. I was right in the middle of working on it. He just yanks the plug out, and then without pausing he picks up the Apple II and starts walking away.

  Steve Jobs: We were on a mission from God to save Apple.

  Andy Hertzfeld: I had no choice: I had to follow my computer. I couldn’t work without it. That’s why he took it, because he knew I needed it to do any work. So he just took it and he walked away! He goes outside—his car is always parked in the handicapped space so that it’s close to the door—and he plops it into his trunk and goes, “We’re going to the Mac building.”

  Bill Atkinson: We had a place that was behind the Good Earth Restaurant. And so they called it Salt of the Earth.

  Dan Kottke: Burrell Smith had put a sign on the door that said “Danger! Contagious Algorithm Research Area!” That was Burrell’s sense of humor.

  Andy Hertzfeld: The Mac office looked like it should be a dentist office or something: wood paneled, but cheap. And he drops my computer on a desk and he says, “This is your new desk. Welcome to the Mac team.” And then he walks out. I open the drawers at my new desk—the desk he put me at—because I don’t even have my stuff, I just have my Apple II. And the drawers were all full. It was someone else’s occupied desk. And I’m thinking, “What’s going on?”

  Randy Wigginton: Jef got shipped off to Siberia—you know Hooli? The roof? Jef was on the roof with the BBQ.

  Andy Hertzfeld: I find out that it was Jef Raskin’s desk, who was just exiled the previous day, he hadn’t had time to get his stuff. That was my first day. At that point Lisa was still two or three years away from shipping.

  The Macintosh group was a classic skunkworks operation: a breakaway engineering team tasked with the research and development of an alternate future. It’s the engineering equivalent of a special forces unit being sent on a long-range reconnaissance mission.

  Randy Wigginton: We had just gone through the horrible, abysmal Apple III. And Lisa just appeared to be going nowhere. So that’s why we sort of went off the grid. We were our own ragtag group of people, and you know we just wanted to go off and do our own thing.

  Dan Kottke: There was this whole thing that Apple was becoming bureaucratic, and so we were the renegade pirates.

  Bruce Horn: Steve said, “We’d rather be pirates than join the Navy.” Right? We’d rather steal great things than be bureaucratic and lockstep and follow the rules.

  Randy Wigginton: We were not in the Navy. We hated the Navy, we hated the official establishment.

  Dan Kottke: They made a pirate flag and they put it on top of the building.

  Andy Hertzfeld: I was a lookout for installing the pirate flag. On a Friday evening we cased it. We climbed up onto the roof and looked around and on Sunday evening we put it there. But the most fun part was just seeing how people would react the next day. Steve loved it. But some other parts of Apple thought it was extremely arrogant.

  Randy Wigginton: We were trying to be very counterculture even within Apple.

  Bruce Horn: We were the rebel group, a little bit more willing to try crazy things.

  Steve Jobs: Why can’t we inject typography into computers? Why can’t we have computers talking to us in the English language? Looking back, this seems trivial. But at the time it was cataclysmic in its consequences. The battles that were fought to push this point of view out the door were very large.

  Bill Atkinson: I remember an interesting incident on the icons for the Lisa. We needed a way to show whether there was something in the trash: if you say “Empty the trash,” is there something to empty? The very first version of the trash can that I wrote had little flies buzzing around it, but they got sanitized out. The Lisa user interface was a little bit hampered by who we thought it was for. We thought we were building it for an office worker, and we wanted to be cautious not to offend.

  Randy Wigginton: On the Mac, we had the Cookie Monster in the trash can. When you dropped a file onto the trash can, all of a sudden the Cookie Monster would come up and go “munch munch munch” and then back down. Andy Hertzfeld and Susan Kare just did that as a demo. Everybody who saw it thought it was great.

  Dan Kottke: The Mac was a very radical thing, because this was the age of CRT screens and big boxes, right? The Mac was going to be a computer you would take to bed with you, like you would sit on your bed to do your work.

  Bill Atkinson: When the Mac was designed, we had a pretty clear picture of a fourteen-year-old boy using this thing, and we knew what they were like, and so we were going to have fun with that.

  Bruce Horn: We were all young. Andy was in his late twenties. I was in my early twenties. Steve was maybe twenty-six or something. And we were motivated by this passion to make the life of everybody using computers much more fun, much more productive, and to give them a certain amount of creative license.

  Andy Hertzfeld: That was why we were there. It’s what we wanted. And the pressure wasn’t external pressure, it was our purpose to make something great. The people working on it believed in it.

  Bruce Horn: And that’s how Steve was motivated. He thought of it as an artistic tool, among other things.

  Dan Kottke: At the point of time when we were finalizing the custom plastic case, the Mac team was maybe only fifty employees.

  Randy Wigginton: And everybody signed different places on the case diagram.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Steve explicitly said, “We are signing the Macintosh because artists sign their work. We are artists.”

  Dan Kottke: Then Jerry Manock, the lead designer, shrunk it down and actually put it into the die for the case of the Mac, so that we all had our signatures in the plastic.

  Randy Wigginton: Steve wanted us to be personally invested, he wanted us to be attached to it, and he felt that by having our signatures inside the case, we would be. It was pretty cool.

  Andy Hertzfeld: But it wasn’t until the fall of 1982 that the rest of Apple cared about the Mac at all. So the Mac, Apple bega
n to take it seriously in 1982, once we had prototypes built. But then by the spring of ’83, it became clear to everyone that the Mac was the future.

  Mike Murray: Because the Lisa, which came out in January of 1983, was pretty much a failure.

  Butler Lampson: It was a bust. It was too high-end, tried to do too much stuff, and it cost too much.

  Trip Hawkins: Then Lisa basically gave birth to the Mac. Again this is a somewhat untold story, because Steve didn’t want this to be known. Steve basically took all the bright ideas from Lisa and all the best people from Lisa. There were a whole bunch of huge pieces of Lisa that pretty much just shifted right over to the Mac.

  Steve Jobs: Apple II was running out of gas, and we needed to do something with this technology fast or else Apple might cease to exist as the company it was.

  Dan Kottke: The Apple II was paying the bills, but by ’83 that was kind of the old generation and now the Mac was coming.

  Andy Hertzfeld: If the Mac failed, Apple would fail.

  Bruce Horn: There was a ton of pressure.

  Andy Hertzfeld: We’d have retreats every six months and Steve would begin the retreat, with quotes. And for the January 1983 retreat one of the quotes was “Real artists ship,” which meant “Hey, we’ve spent enough time developing.” It was time to ship.

  Bruce Horn: Steve Capps and I were working on the Finder. When you boot the system, you boot into the Finder. So it’s the first thing you see. Capps and I worked all the time. I was twenty-three and I had just gotten braces and I’d have my headgear on at night, and Capps and I would sit and work at night. He was the only person who ever saw me with headgear. And we would listen to Violent Femmes and just hack all night. We had sweatshirts that said NINETY HOURS A WEEK AND LOVING IT.

  Burrell Smith: Back then it was the joy of being absorbed, being intoxicated by being able to solve this problem. You would be able to take the entire world with its horrible problems and boil it down to a bunch of microchips.

  Andy Hertzfeld: During the fall of 1983 the IBM PC came into its own and started selling. The IBM PC was introduced in the summer of ’81. So it took two and a half years, but by the fall of ’83 it was clear that it was an existential threat to Apple. That’s when IBM came into focus as major competition to Apple.

  Randy Wigginton: It was ninety hours and then it turned into a hundred hours, and we were getting really, really tired.

  Bruce Horn: It was very intense because every time we needed to do something it would take a little bit more memory space. And then we would have to steal a little bit more from maybe the stack or something. And every once in a while it would break something.

  Charles Simonyi: The first Mac, and it’s not very much appreciated, was a little bit overpowered, so the performance was very high, but the memory was really low, it had 128K memory in the first version, but a lot of that was taken up by the bitmap and by the operating system, so the actual space for the application was pretty much minimal.

  Bruce Horn: MacPaint would crash because MacPaint was like that, too. We were just trying to squeeze it in as tightly as possible and working up to that deadline date and just hoping we’d get there. Everybody was exhausted. I gave it one last push.

  Randy Wigginton: It was truly insane pressure. I basically lived at the office for about three weeks before it shipped. I had a sleeping bag there and would go home and shower every so often, but it was terrible. It was not healthy. We were stupid—drunk tired—and at two o’clock in the morning when we integrated everything to prepare the release, literally nothing worked. I just lost it, I went totally hysterical, I just started laughing and couldn’t stop. I had to walk out of the building and literally walk around the block just to get a grip, because it was not looking good. I mean the two o’clock release was just abysmal and we only had until six a.m. At that point we were like, “Okay, well, let’s not try to do all that, let’s roll back to stuff that works.” And so we did, and it was a shockingly good release. God is good to idiots.

  Andy Hertzfeld: There were actually two run-ups with huge pressure. The software that was in ROM—the system software—had to be finished before the end of September ’83. So there was a crescendo there and then a party at Woz’s house the day after the ROM was frozen. And then around the beginning of October came the buildup for finishing the disc-based software. And then the publicity had a similar thing, because the publicity was designed to reach a crescendo on the day of the announcement.

  As the Macintosh was being finished—the circuit boards printed, the ROMs burned, the software debugged—Jobs’s attention turned toward the marketing push that would accompany the computer’s launch.

  Lee Clow: Steve Jobs’s simple challenge was, “I think Macintosh is the greatest product in the history of the world and I want an ad that’s that good.”

  Mike Murray: In 1983 Chiat/Day had come up with this Big Brother/George Orwell idea and they were shopping it to their clients. All good advertising agencies have a car company, a soda company, and, you know, a high-tech company. So they went to each one and then they came to us with some storyboards that showed this rough idea and I remember Steve just liking it, and I liked it immediately. We said, “That is great.”

  Lee Clow: Getting the spot approved wasn’t that hard. I guess the biggest hurdle was that it required a pretty big budget. They had never spent one million dollars on a commercial before. But Steve loved it and John Sculley had just joined from Pepsi.

  Dan Kottke: John Sculley was the celebrity CEO that Jobs had hired. He was like this glitzy marketing guy.

  Lee Clow: John Sculley wanted to show off and prove that he was really smart, so he said, “Well, I love it too, because we used to do spots like that at Pepsi.” He really never did but that’s what he always said. Steve in his classic way basically said, “Go make it great.” He didn’t want to come to preproduction meetings or script consultations or casting or the shoot. He just said, “Go make it great.”

  Mike Murray: And they hired Ridley Scott.

  Ridley Scott: When I first saw the boards, I thought, My God, they are mad! It was such a dramatic idea that it would either be totally successful or we’d all get put in the state pen.

  Lee Clow: Ridley Scott had just finished doing Blade Runner, and so we were using a famous director and we were going to do something really special.

  Ridley Scott: From a filmic point of view it was terrific, and I knew exactly how to do a kind of pastiche on what 1984 maybe was like in dramatic terms rather than factual terms.

  Mike Murray: It was the first time that a filmmaker—a moviemaker—had been hired to make a commercial, because in those days that was considered dipping way down and becoming very commercially crass.

  Ridley Scott: So I’ve always looked at each commercial as a film, as a little filmlet.

  Lee Clow: Ridley is an amazing professional. We had some great discussions about everything from wardrobe to where the spot should be. At one point we were talking: “Maybe they should be marching through the mud from Quonset huts?” And that gave way to what you ultimately saw in the film.

  Ridley Scott: Those two big black walls at the back of the main auditorium? We hauled in two huge 747 engines and just hung them on the wall. And they looked like… what did they look like? I don’t know, they looked like ducts. So that is to me what I call “good dramatic bullshit.”

  Mike Murray: I remember Jay Chiat from Chiat/Day went over to London, and during the filming he sequestered himself behind a whole bunch of cardboard boxes because he was frightened. Because those guys in the ad who look like they’re skinheads? They were.

  Ridley Scott: We organized one of these rather frightening casting sessions where there were about three or four hundred youths, and we chose 150 skinheads out of that group.

  Mike Murray: And whenever they’d have breaks in the filming these guys would all go out and get these bags with glue and they’d be sniffing glue! They were truly scary, scary people. So Jay told me afterward
that he hid during the filming of this very famous commercial because he was afraid they were going to come and get him.

  Lee Clow: It ended up being what it’s become—a legendary commercial. The commercial’s been talked about so many times over the years with different people ascribing as to what the genius of it was. I always suggested that it was a lot of things all happening just right with some serendipity thrown in: an amazing product, a client that wants an amazing commercial, a great director, and then the Apple board…

  Mike Murray: So we get it done and we are told that we need to show it to the board of directors, and Steve is chairman of the board. It was Phil Schlein and Mike Markkula and Art Rock and Henry Singleton, and Steve and maybe one or two others. I remember very clearly going into that board meeting. We had a TV on one of these rolling carts and we send it out and we show it.

  They roll tape: Big Brother is on a television of enormous size addressing a crowd of zombified skinheads. Suddenly a beautiful young blonde wearing a Macintosh-branded tank top and red hot pants runs to the front of the crowd while swinging a hammer. She throws it at the looming image of Big Brother. It’s a bull’s-eye, and the giant television explodes. As the action fades out, the words fade in: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

  Mike Murray: Phil Schlein has his head down on the desk, on this big boardroom desk, head down and he’s pounding on the desk: Boom! Boom! Boom! And I think, He got it! He’s with us! That’s one vote! And then Markkula turns to Jobs and says, “You really want us to run that?”

  John Sculley: Then they all turned and looked at me because I was the adult supervision. “You are not going to really run that thing?”

  Lee Clow: John Sculley—who originally approved it—then decided that he hated it because the board hated it.

  Mike Murray: And it was such a horrible feeling, though, because all of us knew it was the epitome of the greatest ad of all time, and it was such a huge disconnect between us and our board, who were then on from our own point of view just a big bunch of schmucks.