Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [109]
Markkula stood between the twin volcanos. He dealt with Jobs much as an uncle would nurture a favorite nephew but he allowed Scott to handle him. Scott and Jobs found it far easier to make tough decisions than did the milder-mannered Markkula. Perhaps helped by the quiet of a family life Markkula was more cordial, punctual, and polite. He avoided tying his fate as closely to the company as Scott and Jobs did. As Apple grew he was prepared to delegate. “If it doesn’t work,” he kept repeating, “fix it.” he was also ready to let people fail. Jean Richardson, who joined Apple in 1978, said, “He didn’t want to come down and beat the heavy hand. He wanted people to work it out among themselves. He would always say, ‘You two go and work it out.’” A programmer said, “He seemed to have a strong desire for people to like him. He was so subtle in the way he worked that it was impossible to pin any bad deed on him.” Others found him imperturbable and a perennial optimist, important qualities in a position where managers usually spent most of their time coping with problems. Trip Hawkins, an Apple marketing manager, recalled, “Markkula absorbed stuff like a sponge. He could also make you see a unicorn in a field.”
As individual characteristics started to become clear, work proceeded on a project that melded all the strains in the business. It was a mini-reprise of the development of the Apple II computer and blended developments in technology with an inventive bent and uncompromising pressure: It was an interface that connected the computer to a disk drive rather than to a cassette recorder.
Disk drives were not new. Mainframe computers had used them since 1956. But as the evolution of electronics led to the microprocessor, so disk drives also got progressively smaller. When they were first used on mainframes the disk had a diameter of about two feet and were stacked inside cabinets the size of dressers. The disk drives were linked to the computer by a device enclosed in a large box known as the controller. Even so, disk drives offered enormous advantages over the reels of magnetic tape that had previously stored information. Instead of waiting for hundreds of yards of tape to pass by a fixed point, information could now be plucked by a little “head” that floated above a rapidly spinning disk. In 1972 IBM announced a further advance in disk-drive technology when it displayed a pliable disk that was no larger than a birthday card and which quickly became known as a floppy disk. The disk drives were boiled down into boxes no larger than a concise dictionary and the controller from a cabinet onto a single-printed circuit board. The floppy disk was an advance that IBM publicists didn’t hesitate to compare to a jumbo jet flying one tenth of an inch above the ground for several miles without scorching its tires.
Cassette tapes hooked to microcomputers had the same sort of deficiencies as the magnetic tapes connected to mainframe machines. They were so slow that loading a language like BASIC could take ten minutes and finding data was a hit-or-miss proposition. By comparison, a disk drive could find data in seconds. Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research, a software company, had written to Jobs and complained about Wozniak’s cassette interface. “The cassette subsystem is particularly frustrating. I used two different recorders and found them both equally unreliable. . . . I must consider the backup storage subsystem as low-end hobbyist grade.”
At Apple there was a united push to hook a disk drive to the computer. Jobs paid weekly visits to Shugart, a Silicon Valley company that was one of the first to make disk drives, and implored its executives to supply Apple. Meanwhile, Wozniak studied the circuitry used by IBM engineers