Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [156]
Meanwhile, Apple was also learning that there was nothing like software development to illustrate how quickly a year could slip by. Though the Apple III was supposed to run all the programs written for the Apple II, the improvements and modifications made adjustment of the Apple II software a complicated and tiresome venture. The programmers had to accommodate all the changes in the hardware: The computers started differently, the keyboards and disk drives were laid out differently, and the memory had been expanded. The programmers were also submerged beneath the sheer weight of the programming, which was ten times as much as for the Apple II.
Though the burden had increased Apple decided to try to develop as much software as possible inside the company. Little attention was paid to working closely with outside software houses, and there was a distinct effort to tighten up on the distribution of technical information about the intimate secrets of the Apple III. This made it almost impossible for independent software companies to develop programs for the computer. Two weeks before the announcement, a prototype machine was delivered to Visicorp accompanied by a request for a demonstration program of Visicalc. It was a year after the announcement before Apple’s programmers had finished modifying the Pascal language so it would work on the computer and thus give independent software a way to write programs other than with BASIC or assembly language.
The Apple III was announced with great fanfare at the National Computer Conference in Anaheim in the summer of 1980. Apple rented Disneyland for an evening, distributed twenty thousand free tickets, and hired a fleet of red double-decker buses to ferry guests to the amusement park. The splash didn’t deceive anybody in Cupertino. Sherry Livingston recalled, “They blew the Apple III and they knew it when they announced it.” Once the public promises had been made, Apple was hoist with its own petard. The pressure to ship started backbiting between the competing interests of the engineering, marketing, manufacturing, and corporate sides of the company.
Problems with the design, some of which resulted from creeping elegance, made it impossible to squeeze the computer into its case. This resulted in a second, clumsy board which had to be piggybacked on the main printed circuit board. In addition Apple didn’t pay much attention to testing quality. In the garage Jobs and Wozniak had performed their own crude, yet competent, tests, but as Apple grew no department had been formed to monitor the quality of parts. Wendell Sander said, “We didn’t have any way of comparing the quality of components. We didn’t have enough component-evaluation engineers to test the choice of connector. We listened to the salesmen and believed what they said.” A chip from National Semiconductor, which was supposed to provide the computer with a clock, usually failed after about three hours, and though Jobs savagely berated the chief executive of the semiconductor company, that didn’t solve the problem.
Lines on the printed circuit boards were too close together and that led to shorts. “We screamed that it shouldn’t be shipped without new boards,” said Rick Auricchio, “but the marketing people said it wouldn’t be a problem. The engineers said it would be.” The production team had its own gripes. Screws were so positioned that they pierced cables inside the computer. A heavy metal case was used because of uncertainty about some FCC regulations,