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McKenna arranged for several busy two- and three-day trips to New York with Apple and endured plenty of snubs and disappointments. He, Markkula, and Jobs visited what they called the “verticals”—magazines that appealed to a narrow audience—and “horizontals”—magazines that had a general readership. They carted an Apple about New York, plodding from magazine to magazine, waiting in lobbies, lugging the computer up elevators, snatching quick breakfasts with journalists from one magazine before dashing off to keep morning and lunch appointments. It was exhausting, tiresome, repetitive work that didn’t lead to many immediate payoffs.

Apple’s early, favorable press coverage had more to do with the inescapable elegance of the computer than with any minutely planned public-relations campaign. There was no stronger advertisement than satisfied owners and quietly, almost imperceptibly, whispers and rumors about the performance of the Apple II began to spread. Daniel Fylstra, the head of what was then Personal Software, a small software company in Boston, talked to other hobbyists and was surprised at what he found. “I began to find people who bought Apple computers and the things actually worked. They worked right out of the box!” Some squibs about the Apple started to appear. In January 1978 Penthouse magazine, in a review of personal computers, noted, “The Apple II is, in many people’s opinion, the Cadillac of home computers.”

Three months later, in the first major review of the Apple II, Carl Helmers, writing in the computer magazine Byte, called it “one of the best examples of the concept of the complete ‘appliance’ computer.” That amounted to a bold endorsement in a magazine that treated the arrival of other computers with a certain amount of circumspection. Byte’s review of the Commodore PET, which appeared in the same issue, concluded: “The Pet is far from the only alternative in the marketplace today. But it is a strong contender.” The reviewer also made the ominous observation: “For several weeks I was unable to get anyone at Commodore on the phone and was left to fend for myself.” Byte greeted Radio Shack’s TRS 80 with what sounded like a familiar refrain: “The TRS 80 is not the only alternative for the aspiring personal computer user but it is a strong contender.”

The importance of blue-chip financial backers and the way in which business journalists often look to canny investors for guidance only became apparent when stories started to appear in general-interest magazines. About the time the Apple II disk drive was introduced, the syndicated financial columnist Dan Dorfman paid a call in Cupertino. His glowing account in Esquire, beneath the headline MOVE OVER, HORATIO ALGER, included this assessment: “Apple has some mighty impressive believers. . . . One is Venrock Associates, the venture capital arm of the Rockefeller brothers; another is Arthur Rock, one of the country’s premier venture capitalists.”

While Apple, two years after it was founded, made the cover of Inc, a magazine specializing in the coverage of small businesses, cracking the skepticism at the major magazines proved a much tougher proposition. Apple was more than three years old before it made the pages of Time. Even then, under the headline SHINY APPLE, the firm was given only one column.

If McKenna was helpful with the mechanical aspects of dealing with the press, Apple’s own managers looked after other parts of the company’s image. The general look of the company was tied up with the owner’s instruction manual. Scott was more eager to ship computers than to fuss over the graphic design of a manual and felt that all the company needed to distribute was data sheets. Jobs thought otherwise. Jef Raskin, who managed the production of Apple’s first comprehensive manual, said, “Jobs wanted good manuals and he fought very hard for them.” When the manual eventually appeared in August 1979, it set a standard that competitors like Commodore, Radio Shack, and Atari publicly admitted they would have