• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 432 0

very short leash.” Martin, who had once worked for a freight company that went bankrupt after turning its accounts receivables from fact to fiction, also tended to veer toward the conservative. His natural impulses and the need to give Apple a respectable seal helped him select auditors from one of the country’s largest accounting firms. Like other accountants in Silicon Valley, the people from Arthur Young offered a discount on the cost of their first year’s work. Apple and its accountants also took full advantage of Uncle Sam. By deciding to end Apple’s first fiscal year on September 30, 1977, they effectively received a fifteen-month interest-free loan from the government for the tax owed in the final calendar quarter, which was always the consumer industry’s largest quarter.

Wigginton watched Apple’s president at work and decided “Scott’s motto was let’s make some money. Let’s get something out the door.” Scott didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. He would happily muck about in the manufacturing area helping pack computers into shipping cases. After the computers were packed, he often took them in the back of his car to the local UPS office. When cassettes had to be duplicated, Scott operated the tape recorders. Whenever production outran orders, Scott stacked piles of printed circuit boards behind Markkula’s desk to make his point.

When it became clear that Jobs’s plan to ship a polished manual with the computers would cause a long delay, Scott started to assemble his own. All along he had favored distributing plain data sheets, so Apple’s first manual contained listings of codes and instructions for hooking up the computer. It was copied by a duplicating service in a local shopping mall. The instructions were then slipped between report covers purchased at McWhirter’s stationery store in Cupertino and packed with the computer. Some months later Scott cobbled together a slightly more elaborate manual which Sherry Livingston typed. Wozniak recalled, “We just decided to include as much as we could because we didn’t have much.” Devotees who couldn’t find the answer in either manual and made inquiries were sent a bulky package of routines and listings known as The Wozpack, which sprang from Wozniak’s insistence that the sort of information he had been sent when he investigated minicomputers should be available to Apple owners. The rush to ship was evident in the opaque explanation that accompanied a demonstration Star Trek program. It contained the single line of instruction cOO. FFR. LOAD. RUN.

Gradually, as 1977 progressed, a sense of community began to develop. It was certainly helped by the fear that acted as a strong social glue when, five months after the formal introduction of the Apple II, the business came close to folding. The subcontractor who had turned out unsatisfactory cases for the West Coast Computer Faire continued to do so. Part of the fault lay with Jobs’s decision to rely on soft tooling, but most of the trouble was caused by the men who manufactured the cases and who were, in Holt’s acerbic view, “a bunch of plumbers.” The lids continued to sag and the lid from one case wouldn’t fit another. The paint refused to stick.

In September 1977 the main tooling broke, and customers who had placed orders were beginning to get impatient. Apple was within inches of earning a reputation for being unable to meet its commitments. Dozens of printed circuit boards started to pile up, suppliers demanded normal payment, and Apple’s thin cushion of cash was running low. Without tools Apple would have been stuck without any revenue for about three months. There were a few rumors that Apple would close and Holt even delayed hiring Cliff and Dick Huston, a fraternal combination of engineer and programmer, until he was certain that Apple would be able to issue paychecks. “It was life and death for us,” Scott recalled. “We’d have had a good product and not been able to ship it.” Jobs scurried off to a Tempress firm in the Pacific Northwest that specialized in producing molds for clients like Hewlett-Packard. He explained