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By Root 547 0

For the three years following the revelation at Xerox, Apple’s engineers and programmers edged forward. They didn’t contribute any new, sweeping vision but they displayed a determination to improve on the work that had been done elsewhere. There were substantial enhancements in the software, and the grandest part of the enterprise was the way in which it was all squeezed into a desk-top system. They also practiced the message of one of Apple’s earliest advertisements: SIMPLICITY IS THE ULTIMATE SOPHISTICATION and tried to remove any cause of confusion. After weeks of debate, for example, the buttons on the mouse were reduced from three to one. Features that had formed part of the original machine, like the “softkeys,” keyboard buttons that concealed certain functions, also disappeared.

Jobs’s contribution to the Lisa project oscillated between the inspirational and the destructive. One marketing manager recalled, “Pricing after pricing would come back with an absolute five-thousand-dollar minimum price. There were gut-wrenching debates with Jobs. He’d say, ‘If I have to I’ll bring Woz in. Woz could do it for less. If you were good enough you could do it.’” He also managed to undermine morale. According to one observer, “The engineers would say, ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s on time. We know Jobs. He’ll change it anyway.’” But for all the commotion, Jobs also left his aesthetic touch on the computer. He left an overall style and shape and also helped with small details like the rounded edges on pictures of file folders, which he preferred to square corners.

The difference between Xerox and Apple was illustrated at the 1981 National Computer Conference in Houston. There Xerox announced the Xerox 8010 that colloquially was known as the Xerox Star. The computer had not been developed by the PARC group but nevertheless displayed some PARC hallmarks. It relied on a visual simulation of a desk top, a mouse, and bit-map graphics, but the execution was poor and the computer worked properly only when it was linked to a range of ancillary Xerox equipment. The software was excruciatingly slow and the execution of some novel ideas was generally considered rather clumsy.

There was far more patience at Apple. The miserable results of the Apple III served as a constant reminder of the penalties of rushing the development of a computer and releasing something that wasn’t properly tested. There was also less inclination to forecast the imminent demise of the Apple II, which the people in Cupertino started to think possessed some of the durable virtues of products like the Volkswagen Beetle.

If the scope of the work on Lisa was one example of a corporate ambition, so was the development of a disk drive. When Apple decided to start a project to build its own disk drives, there were some perfectly sensible reasons. Sales of Apple II systems rested heavily on disk drives and Apple’s one supplier, Shugart—by coincidence a Xerox subsidiary—was producing devices that in the opinion of some were unreliable. There was a distinct fear that Apple’s growth was being limited by the scarcity of disk drives. Apple found another supplier to provide a second source of drives and then decided to start its own project. The motives were muddled by a desire shared by Scott and Jobs to humiliate Shugart.

Wendell Sander described the scope of the project: “The company didn’t realize it was taking on a project that wasn’t really a computer system. There’s a closer affiliation between disk drives and integrated circuits than there is between disk drives and computers. They didn’t realize it was going to be so big. They didn’t appreciate the difficulty.” Another observer said, “Steve really believed that Apple could build a floppy disk faster, for less money, and with more performance than anybody else without having any experience with products like that.” The drive, code-named Twiggy, was originally supposed to be included in the Apple III but development problems soon ruled out that possibility.

The arrogant disregard for convention that proved so powerful