Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [169]
They waited for Wozniak to descend from a house that he had rented on a hill overlooking the festival grounds and used as a base for excursions in a long, black limousine. The journalists all waited for a line, a quote, a picture, or a close-up. They ruffled through steno pads, tightened tripods and monopods, and fiddled with cassette and microcassette recorders. A stream of leads led to a hedge of microphones and tape recorders, and when Wozniak arrived, ducking under a canvas flap, the tent ballooned to life. A bowl of Nikons, Canons, Pentaxes snapped and clicked. There was pushing and jostling and elbowing. The curved wall of cameras slid forward. A table collapsed and there were loud shrieks. The motor drives whirred, slapping image after image onto roll after roll of film. There were shouts and whistles. “Keep it down. . . . For chrissake, shuddup. . . . Quiet. . . . Quiet. . . . Woz! . . . Woz! . . .”—and all the while there was pushing and elbowing to get better pictures and angles. Sitting behind a table between the rock promoter and the graduate of Erhard Seminars Training, Wozniak wore a baseball cap that was set at a cockeyed angle, a T-shirt, shorts, and socks and grinned like an admonished schoolboy. He was spattered with a sad, repetitive, empty loop of questions: “How much money you lost? . . . How many people are here? . . . Why d’you do this?”
EPILOGUE
More than a quarter of a century has passed since I wrote the previous page on an Apple III computer. In 1984, as the first edition of this book made its way to the press, I received several letters from the publisher—those being the days before email had become the universal telegraph system—expressing anxiety that Apple’s day in the sun might already have passed. The apprehension was understandable. The hullabaloo surrounding the introduction of the Macintosh—trumpeted with an Orwellian television commercial on Superbowl Sunday 1984—had evaporated, and the notices had turned sour. IBM’s personal computer business was gaining strength. Compaq had reached $100 million in sales faster than any previous company and Microsoft’s operating system, DOS, was winning licensees by the month. There were plenty of reasons to think that Apple was teetering.
Twenty five years later, when people are as familiar with the names iPod, iPhone, or Macintosh as they are Apple, it is hard, particularly for those reared on cell phones and social networks, to imagine a time when the company appeared to be just another technology firm that would be snuffed out or absorbed by a competitor. Since 1984, there have been plenty of technology companies that have faded to grey or gone to black, and it’s remarkably easy to come up with an alphabetical list for these casualties that runs from A to Z.
The letter “A” alone includes Aldus, Amiga, Ashton-Tate, AST and Atari. As for the rest of the alphabet there’s always Borland, Cromemco, Digital Research, Everex, Farallon, Gavilan, Healthkit, Integrated Micro Solutions, Javelin Software, KayPro, Lotus Development, Mattel, Northstar Computers, Osborne Computer, Pertec, Quarterdeck, Radius, Software Publishing, Tandy, Univel, VectorGraphic, Victor, WordPerfect, Xywrite and Zenith Data Systems. The large technology companies that have weathered these decades—IBM and HP—have done so in areas far removed from personal computing. IBM, once the company that others in the personal computer industry feared, has even surrendered its franchise to the Chinese company Lenovo.
The mortality rate makes Apple’s survival—let alone prosperity—even more remarkable. I’ve watched Apple, first as a journalist and later as an investor, for most of my adult life. Journalists suffer from the malady of not forgetting a topic that once