Revolution in The Valley [Paperback] Page 14

  Andy van Dam cleared his throat and looked right at Steve. “Well, its really impressive, Steve, and of course we’ll want to join your program. But it’s not exactly what we’ve been waiting for.”

  Steve looked a little angry. “You’re going to have to wait a long time to find something better than the Mac!”

  “Well, 128K isn’t nearly enough memory to do what we want, not even close, and the screen is just too small. We’re waiting for a 3M machine, and most of the other colleges are, too.”

  “A what?”

  “A 3M machine. There was a recently published paper that coined the term. You know, a workstation with at least a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and a megaflop of computational horsepower. We believe that’s what we need for an effective educational workstation.”

  A megaflop was the ability to execute one million floating-point operations per second. The Mac didn’t have any floating-point hardware, so it was off by an order of magnitude. In fact, we were off by around a factor of 10 in each of the 3 dimensions.

  “Oh, we believe in that, too,” Steve shot back, without skipping a beat. “Apple will have an affordable 3M machine before anyone else. I only have one question. What’s a megaflop?”

  Credit Where Due

  January 1983

  Why the Mac design team got credit for their work

  Every six months or so starting in January 1982, the Macintosh team held a series of off-site retreats. A retreat usually lasted two full days, including an overnight stay. We’d travel by bus to a naturally beautiful resort within an hour or two of Apple’s offices in Cupertino. Every employee on the team would be invited, as were folks from other parts of the company who were contributing to the project. The retreats were a mixture of a divisional communications meeting, an inspirational pep talk, and a company party, featuring chats with industry legends like Robert Noyce (inventor of the integrated circuit) or Ben Rosen (the VC who funded Compaq and Lotus), and entertainment from Wyndham Hill artists such as Liz Story.

  The third retreat was scheduled for January 27th and 28th, 1983, at the La Playa Hotel in Carmel, and it came at a pivotal time for the project. The Lisa was just introduced the previous week, after four years of development, on January 19th (although it wouldn’t actually ship for another five months), and it was becoming increasingly clear that it was time for the Mac team to shift gears, buckle down, and change our focus to doing whatever it took to finish up and ship.

  After the two-hour bus ride from Cupertino, we gathered in a large meeting room to hear Steve Jobs’s opening remarks, which set the agenda for the retreat. Steve was fond of summarizing the themes of the day into a few succinct aphorisms, which he called “Quotations from Chairman Jobs.” The sayings from the previous retreat, held in September 1982, were “It’s Not Done Until It Ships,” “Don’t Compromise!” and “The Journey Is The Reward.” This time, they were “Real Artists Ship,” “It’s Better To Be A Pirate Than Join The Navy,” (see “Pirate Flag” on page 166) and “Mac in a Book by 1986.”

  The first day of the retreat was focused on engineering, and it went by quickly, as each member of the engineering team gave a short talk about their recent and upcoming work in the form of panel discussions, moderated by engineering manager Bob Belleville. At 4 P.M., the formal part of the meeting ended for the day, and we had a couple of hours of free time to enjoy before dinner. I was about to join a group going for a walk on the nearby beach when I was pulled aside by Bill Atkinson. It was obvious that something was bothering him.

  Even though he was technically a member of the Lisa team, Bill attended the Macintosh retreats. Actually, now that the Lisa was finally completed, he planned to shift to working full-time on the Mac, to create a killer graphics application to be bundled with every machine (see “MacPaint Evolution” on page 171). He was going to start working on it soon, and we were all excited to see what he would come up with.

  “Do you have a minute?” Bill asked me urgently, looking kind of somber. “I want to show you something privately.” We picked one of the small conference rooms, went inside, and closed the door.

  Bill was carrying three magazines, which he laid out in front of me on the table. Two of them were very recent issues of personal computer magazines, such as Byte and Popular Computing, while the third was more business-oriented. They all contained articles about the recently introduced Lisa. He opened one of them and showed me an article, with a sidebar entitled “An Interview with Lisa’s Designers.”

  “Hey, that’s cool,” I told Bill, “You made it into Byte!”

  “Look closer,” Bill told me, with a pained expression on his face.

  I started to browse the article and noticed it interviewed engineering manager Wayne Rosing, software manager Bruce Daniels, and applications group manager Larry Tesler. I finally saw why Bill looked so upset; he wasn’t included as one of Lisa’s designers, which was absurd, since he did more of the design than everyone else combined.

  All three magazine articles featured quotes from Wayne, Bruce, and Larry, as well as Steve Jobs and John Couch, the top Lisa executive, but apparently no one thought to include Bill, possibly because he wasn’t a manager. He was very disheartened, especially because something like this had happened to him once before.

  Bill told me that he was haunted by a similar incident that had occurred six or seven years earlier. He had done some groundbreaking work to create a detailed 3D animation of the human brain. He’d scanned a series of brain slices, and then written software to reconstitute them in an animated sequence, rendering them frame by frame to produce a spectacular movie depicting important brain structures in stunning detail. The movie won various awards, and a frame from it had graced the cover of the October 1978 issue of Scientific American, but one of the professors he was working for received most of the credit, acknowledging Bill as only a minor collaborator in the published papers. Now it seemed to be happening all over again.

  I tried to cheer him up, telling him the press was usually wrong about everything anyway, and that everyone at Apple understood his leading role in both the Lisa and Macintosh projects. I said there would be plenty of opportunities to talk with the press in the future. He told me that he was so upset he was thinking about quitting unless Apple rectified the situation somehow. We both knew he needed to talk with Steve Jobs about it, but he was nervous about bringing it up. I told him I thought he was completely justified, and that Apple ought to try to make it up to him.

  Quotations from Chairman Jobs

  “IT’S NOT DONE UNTIL IT SHIPS”

  “DON’T COMPROMISE!”

  “THE JOURNEY IS THE REWARD”

  A few hours later, after dinner, Bill told me he had arranged to meet with Steve in private early the next morning, before the day’s meetings commenced. He then surprised me by asking me to accompany him. I told him it wasn’t my business and that I felt it was inappropriate for me to attend, but Bill insisted, telling me he needed my support, if only to have someone else present to help ground Steve’s infamous reality distortion field (see “Reality Distortion Field” on page 24). Even though I knew it would be awkward, I told him I’d do it.

  We were both nervous as Bill knocked on the door of the small office Steve was using during the retreat. Steve opened the door, looking angry when he noticed I was present.

  “What is he doing here?” he asked Bill, before turning to face me. “Go away. This isn’t any of your business!”

  “No, I need Andy here,” Bill intervened. “He didn’t want to come, but I asked him to be here to support me.”

  Steve shrugged and decided to continue as if I weren’t there. “Okay, let’s hear it. And you need to be quick, because we have to start the meeting soon. What’s the big problem?”

  Bill explained how upset he was that he hadn’t gotten any recognition for his work on Lisa. His voice was hesitant at first but picked up conviction as he started to get emotional. He told Steve that he was thinking about
leaving Apple, because he was treated so unfairly.

  “REAL ARTISTS SHIP”

  “IT’S BETTER TO BE A PIRATE THAN JOIN THE NAVY”

  “MAC IN BOOK BY 1986”

  Even though Steve had enormous respect for Bill, he began to get annoyed, although you could tell he was trying not to.

  “Hey, listen, I’m sorry. But you’re over-reacting and blowing things out of proportion,” Steve replied in a dismissive tone. “Who cares about a couple of magazines? You should have been included, but you weren’t. Someone made a mistake. It’s not such a big deal.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Bill retorted, upset at the lack of sympathy. He raised his voice, which was by now full of emotion. “I’m serious. I’m not going to work here anymore if you don’t appreciate what I’ve done and treat me fairly.”

  Steve took a step toward the door. He seemed impatient. “I don’t have time to deal with this now. We’ll straighten it out when we get back. I have 60 other people out there who are pouring their hearts into the Macintosh, and they’re waiting for me to start the meeting.” He opened the door and left the room without saying another word.

  Bill and I remained behind, unable to speak. I think we were both emotionally exhausted from the intense encounter. After a few minutes, we heard a loud cheer coming from the main meeting hall as Steve made a number of announcements to kick off the second day of the retreat. Bill sighed, and we left to join the others.

  The following week, Steve arranged for Bill to meet with Apple’s HR team to discuss what was bothering him. Bill reiterated that his main complaint was not getting recognition for his work. After more discussions with Steve, they came up with a solution that was mutually acceptable to everyone.

  The company appointed Bill as an Apple Fellow in recognition for his work on the Lisa. Apple Fellow was the most prestigious technical position at Apple and had only been awarded to two other employees: Steve Wozniak and Rod Holt. There would now be two more, Bill Atkinson and Rich Page, for their seminal contributions to Lisa. A fringe benefit of being appointed an Apple Fellow was a fresh pile of stock options, which could be quite valuable if Apple’s stock price continued to rise.

  But most importantly of all, Steve promised Bill he would receive public recognition for his work on the Macintosh. Mac programs had an “About Box,” a descriptive dialog box invoked by the first command in the leftmost menu, which would display Bill’s name. Furthermore, Bill could display his name in the title bar of the main window each time his graphics application was launched. Finally, Steve promised that the Macintosh introduction would acknowledge the folks who actually created the design, rather than the managers who supervised them.

  Steve was true to his word, and the seven people he designated as the “design team” were featured in various ways during the Macintosh launch. Our advertising firm, Chiat-Day, even filmed us for a series of television commercials, but those never aired because they were deemed too self-congratulatory. It was fun to get our pictures in the national press (see “Can We Keep The Skies Safe?” on page 226), but it was also problematic, because there wasn’t a fair way to draw the line. At least a dozen individuals made crucial contributions to the design, so there were some hard feelings from the people who didn’t make the cut.

  In fact, Steve eventually decided that giving recognition to the designers was a bad idea. Nowadays, Apple has abolished programmer names in the “About Box,” and closely guards the names of their designers, allowing only a select few employees to interact with the press.

  Too Big for My Britches

  February 1983

  My belated performance review is delivered verbally

  It was Apple’s HR policy that every employee should receive a performance review every six months. These reviews, conducted by departmental managers, would then be used to help determine salary increases or the award of additional stock options. But as the end of 1982 approached, I hadn’t received a review for more than eight months.

  This wasn’t too surprising, since my boss, Bob Belleville, was not getting along very well with the software team. He thought some of us were intrinsically unmanageable and that we didn’t sufficiently respect him. Bob had replaced Rod Holt as the overall engineering manager in August. He was responsible for both hardware and software and had just hired a new software manager, Jerome Coonen (who was slated to begin in January) so Bob could further distance himself from the software team. But he still had to deal with us directly one last time to write our reviews for 1982.

  By the end of January, everyone on the team had received a review—except for me. Others mentioned that Bob had acted somewhat strangely during their reviews, making cryptic remarks they didn’t understand, so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to mine. I occasionally had to interact with Bob, but he was reticent around me, not saying much, seemingly hiding behind his enigmatic, tight-lipped smile. Finally, in mid-February, Bob’s secretary called me to arrange an appointment, presumably for my belated review.

  The meeting was scheduled for 5 P.M. on a Thursday afternoon. Bob was waiting for me when I entered his corner cubicle. I asked him what was up. He said he didn’t want to get into it in the office and suggested we take a walk around the block. Everyone knew that walks around the block were usually reserved for firing or demoting someone, or to talk someone into staying after they had quit. I was even more apprehensive than before.

  Bob waited until we were a full block away from Bandley 4 before starting to speak. “Well, Andy, you’re not going to like hearing this, but you’re a big problem on the software team and I’m giving you a negative review for the last six months of 1982.”

  I knew Bob disliked me, but I was nevertheless shocked. All my previous reviews from Apple had been extremely positive, including the last one from Bob, so this was new to me. I had been working my heart out seven days a week for more than two years, devoting my life to the Macintosh, holding the project together after Bud returned to medical school.

  I was really doing the equivalent of two full-time jobs, writing the Mac Toolbox in assembly language by night and helping everybody else by doing whatever was necessary each day.

  “How can you say that?” I responded. “I accomplished everything I was supposed to, and a lot more besides.”

  Bob unfurled his mirthless grin. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I think your technical work has been perfectly adequate during the review period, and I don’t have a single criticism of it. That’s not your problem area.” He paused for a moment to take a deep breath, and then continued. “The problem is with your attitude, and your relationship with management. You are consistently insubordinate, and you don’t have any respect for lines of authority. I think you are undermining everybody else on the software team. You are too big for your britches.”

  At this point, I broke down into tears. The Macintosh was at the center of my life, but I couldn’t work for somebody who was saying this, no matter how much the project mattered to me. It was suddenly clear that I was going to have to quit.

  Perhaps a bit taken aback by my tears, Bob tried to soften things a bit. “Listen, this could be a very expensive conversation. It could turn out to be either very good or very bad for both of us. I’m trying to get you to see how, if you listen to me, things could turn out very good for both of us.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, or how a bad review could possibly be good for me. “What do you mean, undermining the team?” I managed to choke out, “I’m always trying to help everybody else on the team. Give me one example of someone who I’ve undermined.”

  “Larry Kenyon,” Bob replied. “You’re stifling Larry Kenyon. Now he is someone with a good attitude, and you’re keeping him from realizing his potential.”

  I’d always thought I’d gotten along really well with Larry. I had recruited him to the Mac team after working with him on Apple II peripheral cards in 1980, and then handed off the low-level OS stuff to him while I worked on the Toolbox. I th
ought Larry was a terrific programmer and a great person. I treated him with the highest respect and always enjoyed working together. The only thing I could think of was that I had reacted poorly a few months earlier when Bob appointed Larry as temporary manager when he was away on a short trip. I thought he’d done it just to irk me.

  By this point I was crying even harder, and it looked as if Bob might start crying at any moment, too. We were pretty far from Bandley 4 by now, and it was starting to get dark. The tone of the conversation seemed to shift as we both realized that we should start heading back.

  “This doesn’t have to be that bad,” Bob said as we turned around. “All you have to do is listen to me and things will work out fine.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You need to show more respect to authority. It’s not just me. Jerome is still new, but he’s your boss now, and you need to show him respect and let him do his job. But that’s not the main problem. What you really have to do is stop talking to Steve Jobs.” Bob paused and flinched slightly, as if just mentioning Steve was difficult for him.

  “Whenever there’s something you don’t like, even little things, you go running straight to Steve, and he interferes. I don’t have any authority with the software team because they always hear everything from Steve before I do, and he always hears everything about the software straight from you. It’s making it so I can’t do my job. You should communicate through the proper channels. I can’t tell Steve what to do, but you work for me, so I can tell you.”

  I did respect Jerome, and I was trying to make an extra effort to support him as our manager because I knew we really needed him. Jerome was a very smart guy and a passionate genius when it came to numerical software; I loved to hear him elucidate the intricacies of his beloved floating-point routines. But I did consider him to be more of a partner than a boss, just as I did everyone else on the team, and I didn’t think that he had a problem with that. Apparently Bob did.