Steve Jobs

That afternoon Scott called in Jobs and Raskin for a showdown in front of Markkula. Jobs started crying. He and Raskin agreed on only one thing: Neither could work for the other one. On the Lisa project, Scott had sided with Couch. This time he decided it was best to let Jobs win. After all, the Mac was a minor development project housed in a distant building that could keep Jobs occupied away from the main campus. Raskin was told to take a leave of absence. “They wanted to humor me and give me something to do, which was fine,” Jobs recalled. “It was like going back to the garage for me. I had my own ragtag team and I was in control.”

Raskin’s ouster may not have seemed fair, but it ended up being good for the Macintosh. Raskin wanted an appliance with little memory, an anemic processor, a cassette tape, no mouse, and minimal graphics. Unlike Jobs, he might have been able to keep the price down to close to $1,000, and that may have helped Apple win market share. But he could not have pulled off what Jobs did, which was to create and market a machine that would transform personal computing. In fact we can see where the road not taken led. Raskin was hired by Canon to build the machine he wanted. “It was the Canon Cat, and it was a total flop,” Atkinson said. “Nobody wanted it. When Steve turned the Mac into a compact version of the Lisa, it made it into a computing platform instead of a consumer electronic device.”1

Texaco Towers

A few days after Raskin left, Jobs appeared at the cubicle of Andy Hertzfeld, a young engineer on the Apple II team, who had a cherubic face and impish demeanor similar to his pal Burrell Smith’s. Hertzfeld recalled that most of his colleagues were afraid of Jobs “because of his spontaneous temper tantrums and his proclivity to tell everyone exactly what he thought, which often wasn’t very favorable.” But Hertzfeld was excited by him. “Are you any good?” Jobs asked the moment he walked in. “We only want really good people working on the Mac, and I’m not sure you’re good enough.” Hertzfeld knew how to answer. “I told him that yes, I thought that I was pretty good.”

Jobs left, and Hertzfeld went back to his work. Later that afternoon he looked up to see Jobs peering over the wall of his cubicle. “I’ve got good news for you,” he said. “You’re working on the Mac team now. Come with me.”

Hertzfeld replied that he needed a couple more days to finish the Apple II product he was in the middle of. “What’s more important than working on the Macintosh?” Jobs demanded. Hertzfeld explained that he needed to get his Apple II DOS program in good enough shape to hand it over to someone. “You’re just wasting your time with that!” Jobs replied. “Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you’re going to start on it now!” With that, Jobs yanked out the power cord to Hertzfeld’s Apple II, causing the code he was working on to vanish. “Come with me,” Jobs said. “I’m going to take you to your new desk.” Jobs drove Hertzfeld, computer and all, in his silver Mercedes to the Macintosh offices. “Here’s your new desk,” he said, plopping him in a space next to Burrell Smith. “Welcome to the Mac team!” The desk had been Raskin’s. In fact Raskin had left so hastily that some of the drawers were still filled with his flotsam and jetsam, including model airplanes.

Jobs’s primary test for recruiting people in the spring of 1981 to be part of his merry band of pirates was making sure they had a passion for the product. He would sometimes bring candidates into a room where a prototype of the Mac was covered by a cloth, dramatically unveil it, and watch. “If their eyes lit up, if they went right for the mouse and started pointing and clicking, Steve would smile and hire them,” recalled Andrea Cunningham. “He wanted them to say ‘Wow!’”

Bruce Horn was one of the programmers at Xerox PARC. When some of his friends, such as Larry Tesler, decided to join the Macintosh group, Horn considered going there as well. But he got a good offer, and a $15,000 signing bonus, to join another company. Jobs called him on a Friday night. “You have to come into Apple tomorrow morning,” he said. “I have a lot of stuff to show you.” Horn did, and Jobs hooked him. “Steve was so passionate about building this amazing device that would change the world,” Horn recalled. “By sheer force of his personality, he changed my mind.” Jobs showed Horn exactly how the plastic would be molded and would fit together at perfect angles, and how good the board was going to look inside. “He wanted me to see that this whole thing was going to happen and it was thought out from end to end. Wow, I said, I don’t see that kind of passion every day. So I signed up.”

Jobs even tried to reengage Wozniak. “I resented the fact that he had not been doing much, but then I thought, hell, I wouldn’t be here without his brilliance,” Jobs later told me. But as soon as Jobs was starting to get him interested in the Mac, Wozniak crashed his new single-engine Beechcraft while attempting a takeoff near Santa Cruz. He barely survived and ended up with partial amnesia. Jobs spent time at the hospital, but when Wozniak recovered he decided it was time to take a break from Apple. Ten years after dropping out of Berkeley, he decided to return there to finally get his degree, enrolling under the name of Rocky Raccoon Clark.

In order to make the project his own, Jobs decided it should no longer be code-named after Raskin’s favorite apple. In various interviews, Jobs had been referring to computers as a bicycle for the mind; the ability of humans to create a bicycle allowed them to move more efficiently than even a condor, and likewise the ability to create computers would multiply the efficiency of their minds. So one day Jobs decreed that henceforth the Macintosh should be known instead as the Bicycle. This did not go over well. “Burrell and I thought this was the silliest thing we ever heard, and we simply refused to use the new name,” recalled Hertzfeld. Within a month the idea was dropped.

By early 1981 the Mac team had grown to about twenty, and Jobs decided that they should have bigger quarters. So he moved everyone to the second floor of a brown-shingled, two-story building about three blocks from Apple’s main offices. It was next to a Texaco station and thus became known as Texaco Towers. In order to make the office more lively, he told the team to buy a stereo system. “Burrell and I ran out and bought a silver, cassette-based boom box right away, before he could change his mind,” recalled Hertzfeld.

Jobs’s triumph was soon complete. A few weeks after winning his power struggle with Raskin to run the Mac division, he helped push out Mike Scott as Apple’s president. Scotty had become more and more erratic, alternately bullying and nurturing. He finally lost most of his support among the employees when he surprised them by imposing a round of layoffs that he handled with atypical ruthlessness. In addition, he had begun to suffer a variety of afflictions, ranging from eye infections to narcolepsy. When Scott was on vacation in Hawaii, Markkula called together the top managers to ask if he should be replaced. Most of them, including Jobs and John Couch, said yes. So Markkula took over as an interim and rather passive president, and Jobs found that he now had full rein to do what he wanted with the Mac division.