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who had developed a disk controller and also the approach employed by a Berkeley start-up, Northstar. But Wozniak only started work in earnest shortly before Christmas, 1977. His tendency to procrastinate made life uncomfortable for Scott who, anxious to ship, said, “Woz would take a product right up to the crisis point and do it. It was almost as if he needed the adrenaline spike of almost being late in order to really create.” But once Wozniak started working on the disk controller he didn’t stop until it was complete. Holt, who again played taskmaster, thought, “It was close to insanity for him to get his mind so close to the machine.” Jean Richardson also kept a maternal eye on him. “He was a ghost that came and went at odd hours. He worked through the night. I would meet him going out as I came in in the morning. Eating and sleeping didn’t seem to matter.” Wozniak worked furiously for a couple of weeks, accompanied by Wigginton who wrote programs to test the drive and Holt who badgered him until he was convinced that the device would really work.

When the drive was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 1978 and subjected to more careful scrutiny some weeks later at the Second West Coast Computer Faire, the reaction was uniform. The disk-controller card used far fewer chips than any competing device and Wozniak considered it “the favorite design of my life.” Fellow engineers also applauded. Lee Felsenstein, who a year before had been so skeptical about Jobs and Wozniak and the computer in a cigar box, took a look at the controller and recalled, “I nearly dropped my pants. It was so clever. I thought, ‘We better keep out of the way of these guys.’” At Commodore Chuck Peddle was guiding a design team that was also working on a disk drive but was beaten to the finish line. He thought about Wozniak’s design in geopolitical terms and said, “It absolutely changed the industry.” Until the drive was announced, Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack had all been working out teething problems with their manufacturing and nothing much separated the companies. Apple also always had computers in stock and when suppliers visited Cupertino they weren’t taken into the part of the building where the inventory was piled up. Once the drive was announced matters changed.

After the design was completed and Apple coaxed the disk drives to life, Scott brought his remorseless pressure to bear. The drives that arrived from Apple’s only supplier, Shugart, which was a Xerox Corporation subsidiary, were unreliable. So the engineers and technicians in the laboratory cannibalized parts to produce working drives and buckled to Scott’s implacable demands. He insisted that Apple start shipping the disk drives even though there hadn’t been enough time to complete a comprehensive manual. The results of Scott’s pressure and the quality of the flimsy leaflet that accompanied the early disk drives were revealed in a complaint that a Southern California customer mailed to Markkula. “You fucking bastards. I bought an Apple with floppy and nobody, I mean nobody, in L.A. or San Diego knows how to use the sonuvabitch for random access files. I really feel ‘ripped off.’ Everybody talks about this great manual in the sky that is coming out soon??? Shit! Shit! Shit! I need this computer now in my business not next year. Fuck you. I hope your dog dies.”

“The Star is an incredible pig,” Hertzfeld said.

An oblique comment on the way of life at a large company was pinned to a notice board in the Mac engineering laboratory. It was one wag’s jaundiced view of the development of a computer and the bureaucracy at Apple. To the rhetorical question “How many Apple employees does it take to change a light bulb?” the anonymous skeptic answered:

One to file the user input report for the bad bulb.

One to revise the user interface specifications.

One to redesign the lightbulb.

One to build the prototype.

One to approve the project.

One to leak the news to the press.

One area associate to coordinate the project.

One project manager.

Two product marketing