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By Root 541 0

Jobs to Atari to find some modulators, little devices that connected a computer to a television set. It was Holt who clipped an oscilloscope to the computer to check the signals running from the microprocessor to the memory chips and the cassette recorder. It was Holt who insisted, after Wozniak had dreamed up some new approach, that he explain, demonstrate, and draw diagrams of the design. Holt said, “I hardly ever trusted Woz’s judgment.” Holt also discovered the way to Wozniak’s heart. “The only real trick to get Woz working on something was to become his audience or get him an audience.”

Meanwhile, Markkula and Scott had exerted his own pressure on the engineers and programmers. When the young programmers were more interested in cobbling together short demonstration programs to illustrate the power of the computer, Markkula insisted that they start work on programs people could use. To show the depth of his concern, Markkula did much of the tedious work on a program that would let people balance their checkbooks. He also brought a quieter style. When Wozniak was compiling a scoring system for Breakout and wanted to include BULLSHIT as a comment for low scores, Markkula persuaded him that there was a call for something more refined. When the first computers were ready to ship, Scott forced the youngsters to tack together an abbreviated version of BASIC so that Apple could start to ship machines accompanied by a computer language.

Scott had similarly unsentimental ideas about both production and finance. He had a strong dislike for automated manufacturing and expensive test machinery. He was also determined that outsiders should help pay for Apple’s growth and that they should suffer the discomforts of swings in business. His ideas about the growth of the company were the equivalent of Wozniak’s ideas about the chips in a computer. Both were talking about productivity. Scott wanted to design a company that did the most amount of work with the least number of workers. “Our business,” he said, “was designing, educating, and marketing. I thought that Apple should do the least amount of work that it could and that it should let everyone else grow faster. Let the subcontractors have the problems.” Scott had an undying commitment to letting outside manufacturers make anything that Apple couldn’t produce more cheaply. He also felt that a fast-growing business had no time to master some of the rudimentary skills needed to produce reliable components. It was easier, for example, to expand the quality tests for printed circuit boards stuffed by outside suppliers than to contemplate expanding the work force and mastering all the techniques needed for production of decent boards.

So for help with board stuffing Scott relied partly on Hildy Licht, a Los Altos mother and the wife of one of Wozniak’s acquaintances from the Homebrew Club. Licht operated a cottage industry. Parts were delivered to her home and she distributed them to hand-picked assemblers scattered around the neighborhood, tested the finished work, and returned it to Apple in the back of her brown Plymouth station wagon. She was flexible, could make revisions on boards, and offered overnight service. Scott also turned for help to a larger company that specialized in turning out larger quantities of printed circuit boards. Both were the sort of services designed to relieve small companies of time-consuming chores.

Scott also kept a close eye on Apple’s cashbox. He arranged for Bank of America to provide a payroll system to relieve Apple of the chores of withholding tax, deducting Social Security payments, and issuing paychecks. Along with Gary Martin, who acted as his fiscal fist, Scott monitored the most expensive components like the 16K memory chips. The pair arranged to buy the chips on forty-five days’ credit and the keyboards on sixty days’ credit. Meanwhile, they tried to collect money from customers within thirty days of all sales. Martin paid close attention. “My job was to collect money from customers before we paid our vendors. We kept our customers on a