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With its corporate logo on the spoof and a coupon offering prospective customers trade-in allowances on their Altairs, the MITS management was not amused. It frantically stamped FRAUD and NOT REAL on all the brochures it could find. Finally, despite the $400 he had sunk into the prank, Wozniak began to get nervous, and worried that thousands of computers would be returned to MITS, he and his accomplices dumped cartons of dummy ads down stairwells.

Jobs picked up one of the advertisements and started to examine the details of the surprising new competitor—which Wozniak had plotted in a chart against machines like the Sol, IMSAI, and Apple beneath the line: “The mark of a microcomputer champ is performance.” Wozniak and Wigginton, who couldn’t smother their giggles, slid out through a side door, leaving Jobs inside gasping, “Oh, my God! This thing sounds great.” Jobs looked at the detailed rankings given in a performance chart on the back, discovered that the Apple II ranked third behind the Zaltair and the Altair 8800-b, and with an air of intense relief, sighed, “Hey, look! We didn’t come out too bad.”

UP TO SPEC

The spray of a public splash is made of facades, gestures, and illusions. At the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977 Apple Computer, Inc., appeared a lot larger than the actual little business that moved out of the Jobses’ garage into a shingled office building at 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino. The office, Suite E-3, was smaller than a tract home and was barely a mile from the homes of Jobs’s and Wozniak’s parents. It was separated from Homestead High School by Interstate 280 and was a stone’s throw from the crossroads where the Cali Brothers’ muddy-colored silos were corralled by stores and subdivisións. Apple’s neighbors were a Sony sales office, an employment agency, a weight-loss clinic and a teachers’ organization. A plasterboard wall was run down the center of Apple’s rented quarters to separate half a dozen desks from the lab and assembly area. It was in these cramped surroundings, two hundred feet from the Good Earth Restaurant, that Apple’s founders and their hired hands turned their attention from the cosmic to the parochial.

For almost a year the men in Cupertino concentrated on controlling Apple’s bodily functions. They were building everything from scratch and had to settle on details and procedures which they had either never encountered or had always taken for granted. To provide some sort of framework, Markkula, for the first three months of 1977, concentrated on Apple’s business plan.

He turned for guidance to John Hall, a group controller at Syntex, a Palo Alto pharmaceutical company. Markkula and Hall were casual acquaintances. They had met at a couple of parties, shared some common friends, and bumped into each other on ski slopes in the California Sierras. Markkula knew that Hall had helped other young companies with their business plans and he asked him to do the same for Apple. Hall took a two-week vacation from Syntex and holed up with Apple’s principals for hours of meetings at the local eateries: the Good Earth Restaurant and Mike’s Hero Sandwiches. Scott helped Hall cost out a bill of materials and project manufacturing costs. Jobs provided details of contracts with parts suppliers and Wozniak and Holt were consulted for advice on engineering matters.

For grander marketing strategy Hall and Markkula rubbed a hazy crystal ball and decided that the Apple II would launch a three-pronged assault. They thought the machine would be sold to home-computer hobbyists and to professionals like dentists and doctors who had previously shown a weakness for gadgets like programmable calculators. They also planned to develop the Apple as a control center for the home, linked to comforts like automatic garage doors and lawn sprinklers. Hall recalled, “We felt that we needed three tenets for a business plan. But I didn’t believe the business plan and Mike Markkula didn’t believe it. I