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Jobs had his own troubles. In the summer of 1977 he, Dan Kottke, and his high-school flame, Nancy Rogers, toured Cupertino, inspecting houses and giggling at the types they called Rancho Suburbio. Eventually they found a four-bedroom house belonging to a Lockheed engineer, which was scarcely a fifteen-minute walk from Apple. It was a Rancho Suburbio Special with wall-to-wall beige shag carpeting, aluminum windows, and an all-electric kitchen. Jobs moved his belongings, which consisted of a mattress and meditation cushion, into the master bedroom while Kottke slept in the living room on a foam pad next to an old piano. It wasn’t an entirely conventional existence. Kottke filled a small bedroom thigh-deep in fist-size chunks of foam packing material and let the neighborhood children romp in the stuff.

Nancy Rogers was unsettled. “I was really insecure and young men in their early twenties are not very good with women. They need to prove themselves. I was afraid to go out. I didn’t have enough money. I didn’t paint.” Rogers took to calling Jobs at the office, asking him to return and help fix broken light sockets. She hurled plates at Kottke and Jobs, toppled books off shelves, scrawled obscenities with a charcoal briquette on Jobs’s bedroom walls, and slammed a door so hard it punctured a hole in a wall. She became pregnant, took a job at Apple helping with assembly, spurned an offer from Holt to learn drafting, and finally left Apple and moved out of the house. “Steve didn’t care that I was pregnant. I had to get away from Steve, Apple, and people’s opinions.”

For Jobs it was a difficult time and Holt reacted to the emotional whirlgig. “Sometimes I felt like his father; sometimes I felt like his brother.” Jobs, who had always tried to mimic a surrogate elder brother, was also starting to understand that he didn’t have to pattern his behavior on another person. “I saw Mike Scott and I saw Mike Markkula and I didn’t want to be like either one and yet there were parts of them that I admired a lot.” He was coming to grips with the difference in pace that exists between a garage operation and even a small business. The discomfiting fact was that the output of a dozen people (let alone one hundred) wasn’t predictable and such imperfection, for somebody who always demanded the best, was enormously difficult to tolerate.

Jobs was also adjusting to the idea that computers and software could not be completed in a few weeks and that progress was not something that could be easily measured. Like managers in other companies whose future revolved around taming technology, he found that progress was invisible until it could be made to work on a tabletop. When Wozniak started writing a floating-point version of BASIC, he felt the tension. “Steve had no idea what it takes to write that sort of code. If something seemed wrong, he’d quickly go and make a change. He would always want to have an influence and change whatever came up.”

Yet Jobs contributed much. He was always the company dynamo and the house personality. He started adding zeroes to Apple’s gross sales before some of the others were even thinking in hundreds, and started to talk about millions before his colleagues had contemplated thousands. When Markkula thought that color logos on the cassettes were too expensive, Jobs won the day. When Scott threw up his hands in horror at the notion of offering a one-year warranty on the computer when the industry standard was ninety days, Jobs burst into tears, had to be cooled off with what became a standard ritual (a walk around the parking lot), but eventually won his way. When Gary Martin discovered a $27,000 check that had been forgotten, Scott wanted to use it to buy a new mold, Markkula wanted to spend it on an advertisement in Scientific American, and Jobs wanted to do both. Apple bought a mold and an advertisement.

Jobs’s and Scott’s squabbles and arguments were such a constant in Apple’s life that they became known as The Scotty Wars. But the quarrels also took whimsical turns. On