Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [155]
One of the consequences of visible corporate glory was reflected in the ambitious schedules established for the Apple III. Those timetables reflected none of the perils of developing computers that had been carefully spelled out in numerous articles and books. “We were terribly optimistic about the schedules on the Apple III,” said product designer Jerry Mannock. “The Apple II had been so successful that everybody was walking around thinking they could do anything.” From the start the Apple III was supposed to be a stopgap product, a bridge between the time that Apple II sales were expected to drop and the day that Lisa was ready.
It also came to be seen as a test of Apple’s ability to build a computer as a company. The circumstances had obviously changed since the days when Wozniak made gross modifications to the Apple I, and though Apple’s payroll had lengthened so had the company’s commitments. There was a growing band of customers who needed attention and support, there were the sundry distractions of corporate life, and there was also the need to have large numbers of the new computer ready to ship at the time of introduction rather than the dozens that were needed after the announcement of the Apple II. The schedule for the Apple III was the sort of timetable that might have been set by a hobbyist determined to show off a design at the Homebrew Club. It called for a computer that would be designed, tested, and ready for manufacture within ten months of conception.
Building a computer as a company, Apple soon discovered, was far more laborious than knocking together a machine in a garage. “The Apple III was designed by committee,” Randy Wigginton complained. “Apple felt that was the way a proper company should design a computer. Everybody had certain ideas about what the Apple III should do and unfortunately all of them were included.” The general plan was for a computer that contained all the features that were missing from the Apple II and to stretch the powers of the 6502 microprocessor since more powerful processors were not available at low prices. It was to have a larger memory, a built-in disk drive, a better operating system, a display of eighty columns that would be suitable for word processing and spreadsheet calculations, an upper- and lower-case keyboard, a keypad, improved color, and a faster microprocessor. It was also supposed to run all the programs developed for the Apple II and so become instantly useful in scores of different applications.
A fearsome pressure built up inside the company and helped promote stomach-contracting schedules. Some of this stemmed from marketing projections that repeatedly forecast imminent declines in the sales of Apple IIs. Wendell Sander, the chief hardware engineer on the Apple III, said, “We kept wondering when the bubble was going to burst on the Apple II. We could have done with more professionalism from the marketing side.” Pressure also sprang from the commitments to ship the Apple III that were made in the prospectus prepared for the public stock offering. None of this was helped by Jobs who, a few months before the computer was announced, doled out some glossy posters carrying the line THE DECISION YOU’RE MAKING NOW HELPED SHIP 50,000 APPLE IIIS IN 1980. The combination of pressures was sufficient to squelch the cries of anguish and dam the stream of frantic memos that circulated among the people under the most strain. “It was the classic story,” said Jef Raskin, “of people at the bottom saying, ‘Things aren’t working here. We’re in trouble.’ Then the next level up would say, ‘We’re in some trouble with this,’ and the level above would say, ‘We’re getting around the trouble,’ and the people at the top would say, ‘It will be okay. Let’s ship.’”
The rush to ship the computer resulted in an all-out scramble that was reflected most keenly in the publications department where the technical writers were again sandwiched between the changes being