Revolution in The Valley [Paperback] Page 4

  part two

  Hell, there are no rules here—we’re trying to accomplish something.

  Thomas Edison

  Reality Distortion Field

  February 1981

  Bud defines Steve’s unique talent

  I officially started on the Mac project on a Thursday afternoon, and Bud Tribble—my new manager and the only other software person on the project—was out of town. Bud was on leave of absence from an M.D./Ph.D. program, and he occasionally had to return to Seattle to keep up his standing in the program.

  Bud usually didn’t come into work until after lunch, so I met with him for the first time the following Monday afternoon. We started talking about all the work that had to be done, which was pretty overwhelming. He showed me the official software development schedule that had us shipping in about 10 months, in early January 1982.

  “Bud, that’s crazy!” I told him. “We’ve hardly even started yet. There’s no way we can get it done by then.”

  “I know,” he responded in a low voice, almost a whisper.

  “You know? If you know the schedule is off-base, why don’t you correct it?”

  “Well, it’s Steve. Steve insists that we’re shipping in early 1982 and won’t accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field.”

  “A what?”

  “A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. And there are a couple of other things you should know about working with Steve.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, just because he tells you something is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he’s really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.”

  I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adapting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.

  Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed. We would often discuss techniques for grounding it (see “Are You Gonna Do It?” on page 253), but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.

  “In his presence, reality is malleable.

  He can convince anyone of practically anything.”

  Texaco Towers

  January 1981

  The office where the Mac became real

  The main Apple buildings on Bandley Drive in Cupertino had boring numerical appellations—Bandley 1 and Bandley 3—but from the beginning, the Lisa team gave the buildings they inhabited interesting names. The original office for the Lisa team was adjacent to a Good Earth restaurant (in fact, it was Apple’s original office in Cupertino), so it was called the Good Earth building. When the team grew larger and took over two nearby office suites, they were designated as Scorched Earth (because it housed the hardware engineers, who were all smokers), and Salt of the Earth (for unknown reasons).

  The Lisa team moved to a larger, two-story office building a couple of blocks from the main building on Bandley Drive when they became a separate division in 1980. Everyone was so impressed at their having two stories (all the other Apple buildings were single story) that the building was dubbed Taco Towers, although I’m not sure where the “Taco” part came from.

  In December of 1980, the embryonic Macintosh team resided in the Good Earth building, which had been abandoned by the Lisa team for Taco Towers earlier in the year. When Steve Jobs took over the Macintosh project, he moved it to a new building a few blocks away from the main Apple campus at the southeast corner of Stevens Creek Boulevard and Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road. It was large enough to hold about 15 or 20 people.

  There was a Texaco gas station at the corner and a small, brown, two-story, wood-paneled office building that might house some accountants or insurance agents behind it. Apple rented the top floor, which had four little suites split by a corridor, two on a side. Because of the proximity of the gas station and the perch on the second story, as well as the sonic overlap between Taco and Texaco, the building quickly became known as Texaco Towers.

  Burrell Smith, Dan Kottke, and Patti Kenyon at a reunion in January 1990

  Burrell Smith and Brian Howard took over the side of the building closest to the gas station and built a hardware lab, while Bud Tribble and Jef Raskin set up shop on the other side and installed desks with prototype Lisas to use for software development. Bud’s office had four desks, but he was the only one occupying it at first. Steve didn’t have an office there, though he usually came by to visit in the late afternoon.

  The Macintosh analog board, which contains the power supply and video generation circuitry

  In the corner of Bud’s office, on one of the empty desks, was Burrell’s 68000-based Macintosh prototype. Wire-wrapped by Burrell himself, it was the only one in existence, although both Brian Howard and Dan Kottke had started wire-wrapping additional ones. Bud had written a boot ROM that filled the screen with the word hello, rendered in a small bitmap that was 32 pixels wide for easy drawing, which showed off the prototype’s razor-sharp video and distinctive black-on-white text.

  When I started on the project in February 1981, I was given Jef’s old desk in the office next to Bud’s. Desk by desk, Texaco Towers began to fill up as more team members were recruited, like Colette Askeland (who laid out the PC boards), or Ed Riddle (who worked on the keyboard hardware). When George Crow started, there wasn’t an office available for him, so he set up a table in the common foyer and began the analog board design there.

  Burrell and I liked to have lunch at Cicero’s Pizza, which was an old Cupertino restaurant just across the street. They had a Defender video game we’d play while waiting for our order. We’d also go to Cicero’s around 4 P.M. almost every day for another round of Defender. Burrell was getting so good he would play for the entire time on a single quarter (See “Make a Mess, Clean It Up!” on page 168).

  In May of 1981, Steve Jobs complained that our offices didn’t seem lively enough, and gave me permission to buy a portable stereo system for the office at Apple’s expense. Burrell and I ran out and bought a silver-colored cassette boom box before he could change his mind. After that we usually played cassette tapes at night or on the weekends when there was nobody around to bother.

  By the spring of 1982, the Mac team was overflowing Texaco Towers, and it was obvious we’d soon have to move to larger quarters. Steve decided to move the team back to the main Apple campus, into Bandley 4, which had enough space for more than 50 people. The 68000-based Macintosh was born in the Good Earth building, but I still think of Texaco Towers as the place where it came of age, transitioning from a promising research project into a real, world-changing commercial product.

  The “Taco” part of the Taco Towers name was given because the brick facing of the building roughly paralleled the architecture of Taco Bell franchises being built around the same time. Or so we were told when we visited the building from one of the boring-numbered Bandley Drive offices.

  Steve Hix

  More Like A Porsche

  March 1981

  The design of the Macintosh case

  In March of 1981, I had been working on the Mac team for only a month. I was used to coming back to the office after dinner and working for a few hours. Even though
many of the early Mac team members often worked late and went out to dinner together, I was by myself one evening when I returned around 8 P.M. to Texaco Towers. As soon as I entered the building I heard loud voices emanating from Bud’s office, which was adjacent to mine.

  “It’s got to be different, different from everything else.” I recognized Steve Jobs’s voice before I saw him as I passed by the door of Bud’s office. He was standing near the doorway, near our only working prototype, conversing with someone I didn’t recognize. Steve introduced him to me as James Ferris, Apple’s Director of Creative Services. “James is helping me figure out what the Mac should look like,” he said.

  The plan of record for the Macintosh industrial design was still the one conceived by Jef Raskin, which was a horizontally oriented, lunch-box-type shape, with the keyboard folding up into the lid of the computer for easy transportability. It was kind of like the Osborne I, though we weren’t aware of it at the time. But Steve had a real passion for industrial design and never seriously considered following Jef’s recommendations.

  I went into my office and continued working on improving the code that drove the serial link between the Mac and Lisa. But I couldn’t help but overhear the passionate discussion between Steve and James Ferris taking place next door. For some reason they were talking about cars.

  “We need it to have a classic look that won’t go out of style, like the Volkswagen Beetle,” I heard Steve tell James.

  “No, that’s not right,” James replied. “The lines should be voluptuous, like a Ferrari.”

  “Not a Ferrari, that’s not right either,” Steve responded, apparently excited by the car comparison. “It should be more like a Porsche!” Not coincidentally, in those days Steve was driving a Porsche 928.

  I thought it was kind of pompous to compare computers with sports cars, even metaphorically. But I was impressed with Steve’s passion for elegance in the industrial design, and his powers of discrimination continually amazed me as the design took shape.

  “We need it to have a classic look that won’t go out of style, like the Volkswagen Beetle.”

  “The lines should be voluptuous, like a Ferrari.”

  Steve recruited Jerry Manock to lead the industrial design effort. Jerry was the early Apple employee who had designed the breakthrough plastic case for the Apple II, initially as a contractor before signing up as an employee. For the Macintosh, Jerry recruited a talented designer named Terry Oyama to do most of the detailed drafting of the actual design. The hard tooling for the plastic case was the component with the longest lead time, so we had to get started right away.

  A week or so after the car conversation, Steve and Jerry decided the Macintosh should defy convention and have a vertical orientation with the display above the disk drive instead of next to it. This was done in order to minimize the desktop footprint, which also dictated a detachable keyboard. That was enough of a direction for Terry to draft a preliminary design and fabricate a painted, plaster model.

  We all gathered around for the unveiling of the first model. Steve asked each one of us, in turn, to say what we thought about it. I though it was cute and attractive. It looked a lot like an Apple II, but had a distinctive personality all its own. But after everyone else had commented on the design, Steve cut loose with a torrent of merciless criticism.

  “It’s way too boxy. It’s got to be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of the bezel. But it’s a start.”

  I didn’t even know what a chamfer was, but Steve was evidently fluent in the language of industrial design and was extremely demanding about it. Over the next few months, Jerry and Terry iterated the design and produced a new plaster model every month or so. Before a new one was unveiled to the team, Jerry lined up all of the previous ones so we could compare the new one with past efforts. One notable improvement was the addition of a handle at the top of the case that made it easier to carry. By the fourth model, I could barely distinguish it from the third one, but Steve was always critical and decisive, saying he loved or hated a detail that I could barely perceive.

  “It’s way too boxy. It’s got to be more curvaceous. The radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of the bezel.”

  At one point, when we were almost finished, Steve called up Jerry over the weekend and told him that we had to change everything. He had just seen an elegant new Cuisinart at Macy’s and decided the Mac should look more like it. So Terry did a whole new design based on the Cuisinart concept. It didn’t pan out, though, and we were back on the old track after a one-week diversion.

  After five or six models Steve signed off on the design and the industrial design team shifted focus to the laborious engineering work necessary to convert the conceptual model into a real, manufacturable plastic case. In February 1982, it was finally time to release the design for tooling. We held a little party, complete with champagne (see “Signing Party” on page 68) to celebrate sending the design into the world, the first major component of the Macintosh to be completed.

  It is quite obvious that the entire top part of the Macintosh was copied from the French Minitel terminal, especially the handle part. I wonder whether Steve is the one who liked it so much when he saw it in Paris.

  Jean-Michel Decombe

  SQUARE DOTS

  April 1981

  The Lisa had a different screen resolution than the Macintosh

  From the very beginning, even before it had a mouse, the Lisa was designed to be an office machine, and word processing was considered to be its most important use. In the late 70s, the acid test for an office computer (as compared with a hobby computer) was its ability to display 80 columns of text.

  The Lisa team decided to optimize their display for horizontal resolution in order to display 80 columns of text in an attractive font. The vertical resolution wasn’t as important because vertical scrolling works much better for text than horizontal scrolling. The designers decided to endow Lisa with twice as much horizontal resolution as vertical by using a 720 × 360 pixel display with pixels that were twice as high as they were wide. This was great for text-oriented applications like a word processor, but it made things somewhat awkward for graphics applications.

  When Burrell redesigned the Macintosh in December 1980 to use the same microprocessor as the Lisa—the Motorola 68000—it set off shock waves within Apple. Not only was Burrell’s new design much simpler than the Lisa’s, with less than half the chip count, but it also ran almost twice as fast, using an 8-megahertz clock instead of a 5-megahertz clock. Among other advantages was the fact that the Mac’s 384 × 256 pixel display had the identical horizontal and vertical resolution, a feature we called “square dots.” Square dots made it easier to write graphical applications because you didn’t have to worry about the resolution disparity.

  Bill Atkinson, the author of QuickDraw and the main Lisa graphics programmer, was a strong advocate of square dots, but not everyone on the Lisa team felt the same way. Tom Malloy, who was Apple’s first hire from Xerox PARC and the principal author of the Lisa word processor, thought it was better to have the increased horizontal resolution. But Burrell’s redesign moved the debate from the theoretical to the pragmatic by creating a square dots machine to compare with the Lisa.

  The Lisa hardware was scheduled to go through a final round of design tweaks, and Bill tried to convince the Lisa team to switch to square dots. He mentioned his desire to Burrell, who responded by working over the weekend to sketch out a scaled-up version of the Macintosh design that featured a full 16-bit memory bus with a 768 × 512 display and square dots. It would also run twice as fast as the current Lisa design. Bill convinced the Lisa engineering manager, Wayne Rosing, that he should at least consider adopting some of Burrell’s ideas. He arranged for the leadership of the Lisa team to get a demo of the current Macintosh and learn about Burrell’s new scaled-up design.

  Wayne Rosing led a delegation of his top hard
ware and software guys, including Rich Page and Paul Baker and software manager Bruce Daniels, over to Texaco Towers for a demo on a Monday afternoon. Bill Atkinson did the talking as we ran various graphics demos, and then Burrell gave a presentation on the Mac design and his ideas for scaling it up to 768 × 512 display. Everyone seemed pretty impressed and Bill was optimistic that they would make the change.

  After a few days, Bill told us the disappointing news that Wayne had decided there wasn’t enough time to embark on such a radical redesign because the Lisa was scheduled to ship in less than a year. It ended up shipping almost two years later, with the original 720 × 360 resolution. It also had a relatively slow microprocessor that became a problem when Apple decided to offer a Macintosh compatibility mode for Lisa in 1984. The emulation software didn’t try to compensate for the different resolutions, so applications were distorted by the resolution disparity. It was almost like looking at a fun-house mirror. This problem wasn’t resolved until the Lisa was discontinued in the spring of 1985.

  Early Demos

  April 1981

  Various demos showed off what the hardware could do

  Bud Tribble wrote the first demo program for the 68000-based Macintosh as part of the original boot ROM. It filled the screen with the word “hello” more than a hundred times in tiny letters. When the Mac was switched on, it performed some hardware diagnostics, filled the screen with “hello,” and then listened to its serial ports for commands to execute. The “hellos” told us that everything was working OK.