Revolution in The Valley [Paperback] Page 13

  In August 1982, the Mac was redesigned with much better sound quality, so we had the possibility of a better boot sound, since we now had 8-bit samples to play with. I started experimenting to see if I could come up with something better.

  Around this time, Charlie Kellner decided to transfer to the Mac group from the Apple II group. Charlie was a brilliant Apple II programmer as well as a multitalented, meticulous perfectionist who wrote a classic hi-res bowling game for the Apple II before he started work at Apple. As a side project, he designed a music synthesizer for the Apple II called the AlphaSyntauri that was the basis for a small startup company. For some reason he grew bored with the Apple II and wanted to try working with the Mac team.

  Charlie saw me messing around with sounds for the new boot beep and said he knew of a simple algorithm that might work pretty well. He asked me to fill the sound buffer with a simple square wave, but then make successive passes on it, averaging adjacent samples until everything reached the same level.

  I coded it up and we tried it. Sure enough it had a pleasant, distinctive chiming quality. With a little bit of tweaking, it became the famous sound the Mac made when it powered up and lasted until the Mac II, which had even better sound capability, in 1987.

  Charlie was pleased he was able to make a significant contribution in his first week on the project. Inspired, he asked if he could take a prototype home over the weekend for testing. The next Monday he came into work very excited.

  “I knew something wasn’t right!” he exclaimed. “The sound is being completely muffled by the case! But I know how to fix it.”

  He had done a series of experiments with the Mac he had taken home over the weekend and found that the Macintosh’s case was baffling and distorting the sound. He even printed out graphics showing the results of his measurements. Then, after analyzing the data, he drilled a hole about the size of a dime in a strategic place, which caused the measurements to improve dramatically.

  He started demoing his modified prototype, showing how the hole improved the sound quality. The difference didn’t sound that significant to me, but it definitely was an improvement. He showed it to Terry Oyama, who designed the case, and asked him if he could add the hole.

  The next day, Steve Jobs came by in the afternoon and asked to hear Charlie’s demo. He listened to the two Macs and decreed, “There’s not enough improvement! There’s no way we’re going to put an ugly hole in the case! Just forget about it!”

  Charlie was pretty disappointed and never got very enthusiastic about the Mac after that. He transferred back to the Apple II group a couple weeks later, leaving the boot beep as his only legacy.

  Sound by Monday

  September 1982

  Steve threatens to remove Mac’s sound capability

  When Burrell redesigned the Macintosh digital board in August 1982 after the Integrated Burrell Machine effort fell apart, one of the most significant improvements involved the sound generation capability. The extra logic available in the IBM chip allowed Burrell to implement four simultaneous channels of sound, each using a custom wavetable. That required too much silicon to keep without the custom chip, but he was able to maintain the fundamental capability, which was DMA-fetched sound using 8-bits per sample and a clever, pulse width−modulated digital to analog converter.

  Burrell figured out the Mac could still have the four simultaneous voices he had envisioned for the Integrated Burrell Machine, only now most of the work would be done in software instead of hardware. Burrell promised Steve the redesign would feature great sound, including a four-voice synthesizer. Steve approved spending an extra dollar on an improved amplifier in order to better match the improved sound generation capability.

  But there were an enormous number of different projects to complete in the summer of 1982, including getting the Mac Toolbox into good enough shape for developers to start writing applications. Burrell bugged me about writing a sound driver, including his cherished “four-voice engine,” but I wasn’t able to get around to it right away.

  Steve Jobs grew impatient to hear our new sound capability for himself. Finally, he pulled Burrell and myself aside late on a Friday afternoon.

  “You told me the new sound capability would be really great, right?” he asked Burrell. “Well, if I don’t hear great sound coming out of that prototype by Monday morning, we’re going to remove the amplifier. “

  Then he looked at me. “You’ve had long enough to get the sound going. I want to hear great sound on Monday, or else.” Then he stormed off, leaving Burrell and me to figure out what to do.

  “I think he’s bluffing,” I told Burrell. “But what if he’s not?”

  Burrell didn’t seem very upset. In fact, he seemed kind of excited. I think he was pleased Steve was on our case about the sound, especially since he really wanted me to write the sound routines as soon as possible anyway. He promised to buy me meals all weekend while we stayed at Apple to get the sound going.

  “You’ve had long enough to get the sound going.

  I had already written a basic diagnostic that generated a simple square wave. It certainly didn’t meet anyone’s criteria for great sound, but at least it told us the hardware was working and that we’d worked out the basic details of controlling the hardware. Burrell wanted me to get to work right away on the four-voice synthesizer because he wasn’t sure we could actually make it work.

  As usual, Burrell’s new design was very clever. The Macintosh was already continuously fetching data from memory to drive the video display, interleaving memory bandwidth between the display and processor in a similar fashion to the Apple II. But every 44 microseconds there was a “horizontal blanking interval” where no video data was needed. Burrell used that time to fetch data for the sound. That gave us a sample rate of 22 kHz, which would allow us to do frequencies up to 11 kHz, which wasn’t too bad.

  The sound driver worked at the interrupt level, so sound generation could proceed in the background while the driver performed some other task. The driver arranged to receive control at the beginning of the vertical blanking interval, which occurred every 16 milliseconds. It needed to generate all the sound data for the next 16 milliseconds, which worked out to 44 microseconds for every successive sample. If our calculation took 22 microseconds per sample, for example, the sound generation would soak up half of the available processor cycles.

  It only took a few hours to write a driver with a simple sound generation loop. It could do two voices well, but it didn’t run nearly fast enough to do four. It took too long to generate each sample, which caused audible glitches and made everything else run like molasses. Burrell took a look at my code and saw that I was using some memory locations during the sound calculation.

  “Memory? Are you kidding? You can’t hit main memory. You’ll never make it that way. You’ve got to do everything in the registers!”

  “Registers” are special locations that are part of the processor chip itself and are where the action really happens. In the Macintosh’s 68000 chip, they could be accessed four times faster than the bulk of memory, which was in separate memory chips. The problem was that there were only 16 registers. For each voice of sound, we needed a frequency, a waveform pointer, a position within the waveform, and amplitude, plus some housekeeping data. There weren’t enough registers to do four voices.

  I want to hear great sound on Monday, or else.”

  I was able to rewrite the routine without touching main memory, but I was only able to get three voices since I ran out of registers. But that wasn’t good enough for Burrell. By now it was late on Saturday evening and I wanted to go home, but he felt we had to get the fourth voice done before “head hits pillow,” as he liked to say, or we’ll never get the fourth voice.

  Finally, I was able to leverage the fact that the registers were 32 bits long. We were only doing 16-bit calculations in some of them in order to hold two different values. Each sample took about 22 microseconds to calculate, so we were using roughly ha
lf of the CPU to get the four voices at the maximum sample rate. The basic four-voice capability was implemented, but we still needed an impressive demo to show it off. We went home to sleep at around midnight, after agreeing to come back around noon to work on the demo.

  The next day, we decided to write a demo called “SoundLab” that would let the user control the pitch and waveform of the four independent voices. You could specify or edit a waveform by drawing it with the mouse, and control the frequency of each voice with a scroll bar. The results didn’t sound like music because there was no envelope shaping, but you could make very eerie noises, which we deemed impressive enough. And it was fun to be able to hook an oscilloscope up to the sound output, draw a waveform with the mouse, and then see it on the scope.

  When Steve came in on Monday, he was pleased we could demonstrate the four-voice capability, and impressed he could edit a waveform with the mouse and see it on the scope. But I don’t think he was satisfied because he wanted high-quality music. There was a lot of potential in the Mac sound capability, but it would still take years and the efforts of many third-party developers to fully exploit it.

  The Little Kingdom

  December 1982

  Steve Jobs was almost 1982’s Man of the Year

  The cover of the February 15th, 1982 edition of Time magazine featured none other than Steve Jobs, appearing in an article entitled “Striking It Rich: America’s Risk Takers.” Steve was depicted in a drawing with a red apple balanced on his head that was pierced by a zigzag bolt of lightning emanating from an Apple II.

  The article inside focused on a number of high tech startups, but there was a long sidebar by a young business reporter named Mike Moritz that told the story of Apple’s meteoric rise. It was a bit critical in places (“As an executive, Jobs has sometimes been petulant and harsh on subordinates”), but it was generally positive about the company and its prospects.

  Macintosh development was shrouded in secrecy, even within Apple, so we were surprised one day a few months later when Steve appeared in the software area of Bandley 4 accompanied by the Time reporter, Mike Moritz. Steve requested I give him a demo of the Macintosh and answer all of his questions. Apparently, Mike wanted to write a book about Apple and managed to convince Steve to give him total access to the company, including the Macintosh team.

  “Mike’s going to be our historian,” Steve informed us, “so you can tell him everything. Treat him like he’s a member of the team because he’s going to write our story for us.” The previous year, a development team at Data General was immortalized by Tracy Kidder’s best-selling book, The Soul of a New Machine, about the ups and downs of developing a new minicomputer. Now it seemed that Mike Moritz was going to do something similar for the Mac team.

  Mike Moritz, Apple historian

  Over the next few months, Mike spent lots of time hanging around the Mac team, attending various meetings and conducting interviews over lunch or dinner, to learn our individual stories. Mike had grown up in South Wales and attended Oxford before moving to the U.S. for grad school and obtaining an MBA from Wharton. He was in his mid-20s, about the same age as most of us, and was very smart. With a sharp, cynical sense of humor, he fit right in, and he seemed to understand what we were trying to accomplish.

  In December 1982, word somehow got around that Time magazine was considering awarding Steve Jobs its prestigious “Man of the Year” designation for 1982. Mike Moritz, who was by now Time’s San Francisco Bureau Chief, came down to Apple for another round of interviews to gather background for the lengthy “Man of the Year” story. But we were in for a surprise when the award was announced the last week of the year.

  Instead of crowning Steve Jobs as the Man of the Year, Time’s editorial staff declared 1982 to be the “year of the computer” and explained “it would have been possible to single out as Man of the Year one of the engineers or entrepreneurs who masterminded this technological revolution, but no one person has clearly dominated those turbulent events. More important, such a selection would obscure the main point. TIME’s Man of the Year for 1982, the greatest influence for good or evil, is not a man at all. It is a machine: the computer.”

  The cover story did include another profile of Steve Jobs, which contained some comments that were less than complimentary. One unspecified friend was quoted saying, “something is happening to Steve that’s sad and not pretty.” But the best quote was attributed to Jef Raskin: “He would have made an excellent King of France.”

  Steve became quite upset when he read an advance copy of the piece and even called up Dan Kottke and Jef Raskin early on New Year’s Day to complain about it. Soon, Mike Moritz was no longer welcome on the Apple campus. In fact, Steve told the software team, “If any one of you ever talk to him again, you’ll be fired on the spot!”

  But some of us talked with Mike again surreptitiously as he was putting the finishing touches on his book, around the time of the Mac introduction. The book, entitled The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer, was published in fall of 1984; twenty years later it remains one of the best books about Apple ever written.

  Perhaps inspired by the example of Steve Jobs and Apple, in 1986 Mike Moritz switched careers and became a venture capitalist. He went to work for Don Valentine at Sequoia, one of the original investors in Apple. Mike became the original investor in Yahoo! in April of 1995, convincing Jerry Yang and David Filo to commercialize their web directory, and today is one of the most respected VCs in the industry.

  “He would have made an excellent King of France.”

  Jef Raskin

  “TIME’s Man of the Year for 1982, the greatest influence for good or evil, is not a man at all. It is a machine: the computer.”

  What’s a Megaflop?

  January 1983

  We visit my alma mater to try to sell them Macs

  Apple always had a natural affinity for education, and, almost from its inception, the Apple II was very successful in the K-12 education market. In the late 1970s, Steve Jobs initiated a marketing program called “Kids Can’t Wait” and personally paced the halls of Congress in Washington for three weeks, lobbying for legislation granting tax breaks for donating computers to schools. Even though the national legislation was stymied by politics (it got blocked by Bob Dole), California eventually passed a similar bill and Apple soon donated almost 9,000 computers, one to every school in California.

  In early 1982, Joanna Hoffman was still the only marketing person on the Mac team, and she was thinking about which market segments were likely to be early adopters of the Macintosh. She realized that the Mac was almost perfect for college students, and thought it would be worthwhile to put together a plan for selling Macs to higher education.

  A few months later, after conferring with a number of consultants who understood the college market, a plan began to emerge. One of the words the consultants reiterated was “consortium”; it seemed as though colleges loved to band together into various consortiums. We knew that the paucity of software at launch would be a barrier to initial acceptance, but maybe not if we could get the colleges to form a Macintosh consortium whose members received steeply discounted Macs for students and faculty. All we had to do was sign up a few of the most prestigious schools and, we figured, many others would follow.

  Mike Murray (who was now the permanent interim Macintosh marketing manager) and Joanna realized they needed a superb salesperson to take charge of recruiting customers for our consortium-to-be. The best salesperson Joanna knew on the Lisa team was Dan’l Lewin, a handsome, personable, ivy-educated ex-competitive swimmer who was frustrated with his current job of selling the Lisa to corporations. Dan’l was intrigued, and, after some negotiation, was soon barnstorming around the country visiting the leading universities, with Mike Boich in tow to run the demo and answer technical questions, trying to convince universities to sign up with Apple and buy discounted Macs by the thousands.

  Some of the universities, like Drexel University in P
hiladelphia, were easy sells because they were already thinking about buying a computer for each freshman, and the Macintosh consortium was the answer to their prayers. But others weren’t as enthusiastic and required lots of handholding to coax them into the fold. But slowly Dan’l was able to build up a fairly impressive roster.

  Toward the end of January 1983, I was asked to accompany Dan’l and Mike on one of the more unusual sales calls, to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, because Brown was my alma mater. I hadn’t been back there since I graduated in 1975. Brown had a strong computer science program, especially in computer graphics, and was considered to be rather influential with the other universities. They had recently splurged, buying dozens of powerful Apollo workstations, costing tens of thousands of dollars apiece, so we were afraid they’d think the Mac was underpowered. Convincing Brown to sign on was thought to be so important that even Steve Jobs agreed to come along on the sales call.

  The most influential decision maker on the Brown faculty was a computer science professor named Andy van Dam. I was one his teaching assistants during my senior year, so I got to know him pretty well. He was high strung and hard driving, and a little bit like Steve in his tendency to think that the universe revolved around him. I thought it would be interesting to see how they interacted.

  Introductions were exchanged, and we were taken for a tour of the Brown Computing Lab where they proudly showed off their brand new Apollo workstations. Then we were ushered into a conference room where Dan’l talked about the consortium while we set up the Mac. We put it through its paces for the benefit of a half-dozen faculty members and grad students, with Steve doing most of the talking, eliciting oohs and ahhs in all the right places. Finally, the demo was over and Steve asked them what they thought.