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of the work. “Each day there was something different to do. Since everything was new there were no real routines.” When a demonstration program was completed or some quirk in the computer had been pinned down, the entire entourage would inspect the progress. Wigginton recalled, “There would be a big brouhaha and everybody would get excited.” Scott, who took special delight in the absence of a formal bureaucracy, explained, “There was no time for paperwork. We were so busy running just trying to keep up.” Apple’s anonymity also tended to strengthen ties and provoked blushes for the likes of Don Bruener. “I told my friends I worked at this little company called Apple and they laughed.”

There were also the amusing peculiarities of regular visitors. One of the most frequent callers was John Draper who had emerged from a minimum-security prison in Lompoc, California, after being convicted for phone phreaking. At Apple he soon arrived at a casual arrangement with Wozniak to design a printed circuit board that could be plugged into one of the slots of the Apple and turn the computer into a grand, automatic telephone dialer. It was nicknamed The Charlie Board, was capable of producing dial tones, and could be left overnight to scan banks of toll-free telephone numbers and match them with customer code numbers. The codes could then be used to charge calls. The results of these laborious tests were typed out on a printer. Wozniak thought “it would have been one of the great products of all time” and programmed an Apple to remorselessly dial a friend’s house. Though Wozniak helped modify the design, Markkula, Scott, and Jobs didn’t want anything to do with Draper who concluded, “They were chickenshit and paranoid about having me on the premises.” There was good reason. Draper took an Apple and a plug-in board to Pennsylvania and was arrested. He eventually pleaded guilty to stealing over $50,000 worth of telephone calls and was jailed again.

The utilitarian setting formed a backdrop for a business that filled some emotional need for many of the employees. For the teenagers, the computer held the main allure. Wigginton, who spent most of his time working on software with Wozniak, kept the nocturnal hours of a youthful engineer. He worked between 3 A.M. and 7 A.M., disappeared for school and a sleep, and returned to Apple late in the evening. “My parents weren’t super-crazy about it but they were starting to split up. Apple definitely replaced my family.” When he graduated from high school a year early, in June 1977, almost the entire company took the afternoon off to attend his graduation and present him with a fifty-dollar gift voucher.

Chris Espinosa, meanwhile, started to cut Homestead classes and graduated with a grade-point average barely adequate for entrance to a decent university. He abandoned his paper-delivery route, which paid one cent a paper, in favor of three-dollar-an-hour part-time work at Apple. After one of his first all-night sessions working on some software with Wozniak, his mother (who herself later joined Apple) forbade him to work for a while. Espinosa soon returned, helping Markkula demonstrate the computer at nearby stores and deciding that when he needed a new pair of spectacles, they would be rimless like Markkula’s.

For Wozniak and Jobs, Apple also was a refuge from private turmoil. Wozniak, who was either working on his computer in the office or on another at home, saw little of his wife. The pair went through a couple of trial separations and Wozniak took to sleeping on a couch at the office. Eventually talk of separation turned to talk of a permanent split, and Wozniak, for whom divorce was a miserable blot, found himself unable to work until he resolved some critical matters. “I didn’t want my wife to have stock. I just wanted to buy it out.” He turned for guidance to Markkula, who steered him toward a lawyer who drew up a separation agreement giving Wozniak’s wife of seventeen months 15 percent of his Apple stock. Alice felt ostracized. “Steve was told not to bring me to Mike Markkula’s home