Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [157]
By then the damage had been done. The Apple III was bollixed up at almost every stage of its development. What was shipped was unreliable and prone to failure. Visicalc was included in the early shipments because no other piece of software was ready. The Apple software that accompanied the computer was untested. The manuals looked shoddy and were accompanied by twenty pages of corrections. Word began to seep out when buyers discovered that the computer was full of startling surprises, SYSTEM FAILURE flashed in an aberrant manner across the screen. Damaging newspaper articles began to appear which wreathed the machine in a funereal cloud. Apple stopped advertising the computer, subjected the machines to arduous tests, redesigned the circuit board, readied some software, allowed early customers to swap their machines for ones that worked, and reintroduced the machine (with an expanded memory) a year later. What eventually became a sound, reliable workhorse and a capable business computer was ruined by the disastrous introduction and Jobs’s optimistic poster became an embarrassing reminder of what might have been. For in the three years following its introduction only sixty-five thousand Apple IIIs were sold.
Jobs, who hopped away from the Apple III once the look and shape of the computer had been settled, was always more interested in the development of Lisa. Work had started on Lisa before the Apple III and from the start it was seen as a bolder, more ambitious project. In October 1978, or almost five years before the computer was shipped in any volume—at a price of around $10,000—Jobs had visualized what he wanted it to look like. He knew he wanted a computer that incorporated the disk drives and screen and also had a detachable keyboard. He knew too that he wanted it built around a sixteen-bit microprocessor rather than the eight-bit device that sat at the center of the Apple II. And he also had an inkling that word processing and a spread-sheet program like Visicalc would have to be included. A preliminary paper drawn up to accommodate most of these ideas bore out a colleague’s observation that Jobs “decided what he wanted Lisa to look like before he was sure what technology would be in the machine.” The original estimates for the computer called for shipment in January 1980, a retail price of $2,000, and a manufacturing cost of $600.
A small group formed to work on Lisa was quartered in Apple’s one-time home—the office suite behind the Good Earth building—and began to grope toward a target that was, to say the least, hazy. For close to eighteen months the project floundered. Occasionally it was interrupted by hiccups and spurts, by the arrival of new managers or by politicking. But there wasn’t all that much contact between the planners and the laboratory, or even between the software and hardware engineers. The general questions of who would use the machine and how it would blend with Apple’s lines of distribution were, for the most part, sidestepped. Left to their own devices, the hardware engineers built a prototype around an eight-bit chip, the Intel 8086, that turned out to be slow and disappointing. Others started to investigate the possibility of using a competing eight-bit chip, the Motorola 68000 (the successor to the eight-bit 6800 that Wozniak