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He struggled to make the manufacturing area out-of-bounds for the rest of the company and made withering comments when people slopped into his bailiwick without shoes. “Steve Jobs didn’t want to limit access. I said, ‘Baloney!’ I don’t want my people in a goldfish bowl.’” Don Bruener, the high-school student originally hired to troubleshoot balky boards, observed the new tone. “At the beginning if you thought about a change in production you could talk to someone and get it changed. It became more of an assembly line and you had to go through channels and write up a proposal for change.”

The same sort of shift occurred in the engineering laboratory. Rod Holt, the unwilling head of the department, found himself trying to guide the affairs of quality control, service, documentation, mechanical engineering, industrial design, and the work of the hardware engineers. “I stood up at a staff meeting,” Holt recalled, “and said, ‘If you guys don’t square this around, I’m quitting.’” To solve the problem Apple overcompensated by chasing two candidates. One, Tom Whitney, had guided large calculator projects at Hewlett-Packard and was a college friend of the hardware engineer, Wendell Sander, and a former boss of Steve Wozniak. The other, Charles H. Peddle III, had managed the MOS Technology team that had designed the 6502 microprocessor that lay at the heart of the Apple II. When both men agreed to join Apple their decisions were greeted with enthusiasm. Each, however, was surprised to find the other present, and after a few weeks, Peddle left.

Whitney, a tall man with a studious air, sought to introduce some of the practices that had proved effective at Hewlett-Packard. He assigned project leaders, scheduled meetings on design specifications, and tried to sort through the heap of tasks that needed attention. A battery of forms with various Hewlett-Packard acronyms became part of the Apple vocabulary. ECOS stood for engineering change order, ERS for external reference specification, and IDS for internal design specification. One of the young engineers, Chuck Mauro, said that his colleagues greeted the new regimen with guffaws. “We thought, ‘Here we go. Here comes red tape and forms to fill out and meetings every week.’ Organization was just too hard to take.”

The creeping professionalism was also reflected in the sort of software that was produced. Among the youngsters there was a strong allegiance to the BASIC programming language which had ruled strong at the Homebrew Club, was the lingua franca of the hobbyist community, and had proved more than adequate for games like Breakout—but it wasn’t really suitable for more powerful applications. Jef Raskin, who wrote the first proper Apple manual, argued for the merits of the more powerful language, Pascal, and helped convince Jobs that he should at least give it a try. Bill Atkinson, a programmer who did much of the work on Pascal, recalled, “Mike Scott didn’t believe in software. He thought we should put out hot hardware and people would supply software. Steve Jobs said, ‘Our users only want assembly language and BASIC but I’ll give you three months to convince me otherwise.”

Jobs allowed his skepticism to be overruled by his natural inclination to find a better way to do things. Once Pascal was converted to run on the Apple, it gave the company a new language to sell, simplified development of new programs, and most important, boosted the company’s reputation among experienced programmers who considered it a seal of respectability. Raskin and others continued to complain that Apple treated software as hardware’s stepsister. “Software is the glass through which the majority of our users see the Apple. If it doesn’t work right, the Apple isn’t working right.” Gradually his complaints, the arrival of some more graybeards, and the demands of the market helped nudge Apple away from a devotion to hardware.

A drive to introduce the ways and procedures of a larger company wasn’t limited to recruitment