Steve Jobs

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.