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By Root 448 0

Before Scott’s arrival Jobs had done anything he wanted. After Scott became president, Jobs found his boundaries were prescribed. The pair approached life from different angles. Scott thought experience was more valuable than native wit while Jobs was convinced that most problems could be solved with a proper application of intelligence. Scott admired Jobs’s optimism, his exuberance and energy and gradually learned to appreciate his sense of style. But he also decided, “Jobs cannot run anything. He doesn’t know how to manage people. After you get something started he causes lots of waves. He likes to fly around like a hummingbird at ninety miles per hour. He needs to be sat on.” Scott squelched Jobs at every turn and one of the earliest mechanical chores provoked a clash. Scott handed out official employee numbers to go along with some laminated-plastic security badges. Since, in Scott’s mind, the computer gave birth to the business he assigned Wozniak number one, Jobs number two, Markkula number three, Fernandez number four, Holt number five, and Wigginton number six, reserved number seven for himself, and gave Espinosa number eight. Everybody, apart from Jobs, was satisfied with the order.

“Am I number one?” he asked Scott.

“No. Woz is number one. You’re number two.”

“I want to be number one,” Jobs insisted. “Can I be number zero? Woz can be number one. I want to be number zero.”

Number Zero and Number Seven also found much to differ about in the diurnal flow. Wigginton watched from the sidelines. “Jobs had strong ideas about the way things should be done, and Scotty had the right way, which didn’t happen to be Jobs’s and there was the inevitable fight.” They differed over the way materials should be moved from one section to another, how the desks should be positioned, and what color laboratory benches should be ordered. Jobs wanted white because he felt it would be better for the technicians and engineers. Scott wanted gray because he knew those benches would be cheaper and easier to get. Gary Martin, the accountant, watched another spat shortly after he joined Apple. “They got into a roaring argument over who should sign some purchase orders. Jobs said, I got here quicker than you. I’ll sign them.’ Then Scotty said, I’ve got to sign them,’ and then he threatened to quit.”

In the quieter moments following Scott’s arrival Jobs looked after purchasing and some of the fixtures and continued to press for quality. When an IBM salesman delivered a blue Selectric typewriter instead of the neutral color he had specified, Jobs erupted. When the phone company failed to install the ivory-colored telephones Jobs had ordered, he complained until they were changed. As he arranged delivery schedules and payment terms, Jobs humiliated a lot of suppliers. Gary Martin watched. “He was very obnoxious to them. He had to get the lowest price they had. He’d call them on the phone and say, That’s not good enough. You better sharpen your pencil.’ We were all asking. ‘How can you treat another human being like that?’”

Elsewhere a natural division occurred between the older engineers with experience of some of the headaches of manufacturing and the younger ones who were eager to get a prototype running and content to leave the duller polishing and finishing to others. One programmer recalled, “There wasn’t any sense of fear. Anybody could call anybody an asshole. It wasn’t assumed we were doing the right thing. We had to prove we were doing the right thing.” Wozniak never had much of a reputation for finishing the last part of anything. For him and some of his younger accomplices the difference between a prototype dangling cords and trailing wires and a completed machine verged on the academic. Anyone worth his salt, they argued, would obviously be capable of fixing a computer that was a little bit flaky.

Holt, on the other hand, was like a mother hen, pecking and scratching until he was convinced everything worked and he knew what it would cost to build. It was Holt who insisted everything be “up to spec.” It was Holt who accompanied