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“I’d pick Rizzo,” said Jobs. “He’ll get into the trenches faster. Get clear in your mind who you want.”

Murray dropped the name of a woman who was working for a venture-capital firm but had indicated she would take a $40,000 drop in salary to work at Apple.

“Is she beautiful and single?” Jobs inquired.

“She’s not single,” Murray chuckled.

“Are we interviewing for the Barbizon School of modeling?” Debi Coleman asked.

Jobs latched onto another name.

“He’s doing planning,” said Murray.

“He’s a venture capitalist,” retorted Jobs. “Sounds like a bullshit job to me.”

“What about Steve Capps?” asked Jobs.

“He works at Lisa,” Belleville remarked as though he wasn’t about to embark on a raiding mission at another division of the company.

“I heard through the grapevine he wants to work over here,” Jobs replied.

Matt Carter asked what his colleagues thought about a possible recruit for the manufacturing team, provoking Debi Coleman to venture, “He talked a good line. He asked the right questions.”

“His batteries are too low. I didn’t trust the guy,” Jobs said and immediately suggested an alternative. “They’ll like Duke a lot more. He’s awake. He’s more conservative, drives a two-eighty-Z and wears glasses.”

Vicki Milledge chipped in that she wasn’t allowed to have a secretary, or what at Apple was known as an “area associate.”

“Why not?” Jobs demanded.

“Because of the budget,” Milledge said.

“Screw ‘em,” Jobs retorted.

Pat Sharp, a woman with curly hair and spectacles, broached the subject of moving the division lock, stock, and barrel to a larger building. The Mac group was squeezed into one half of a single-story, red-tiled building, and some of its members worked in an annex. It was poised to move into another building on the opposite side of Cupertino’s Bandley Drive, a road Apple had turned into a corporate alley. Apple’s presence along the road was so pronounced that the buildings were known by the order in which the company had occupied them rather than by street numbers. “I was wondering about the layout,” Sharp ventured.

“I’m willing to spend a million bucks to fix up Bandley Three,” Jobs announced. “We’ll fix it up real nice and that’s it. That’s our final resting place. Put your energy into it. It’s going to be laid out for one hundred people. I don’t have any interest in running a division of more than a hundred and you’re not interested in working with more than a hundred. There will be no trailers, no outhouses, no nothing. If Bob wants a new software guy, someone else will have to go.”

“Can we put a weight room in or an exercise clinic?” asked Murray.

“No,” Jobs said. “We’ll have a few showers and that’ll be it. Think about what you want,” Jobs urged. “If the software or pubs people want private offices, now’s the time to think about it.”

He turned to a more immediate concern, a pilot build of two hundred Mac printed circuit boards that would be used for testing. Matt Carter reported the progress. “The kits are almost in. We’re going to stuff ’em next week.”

“Why don’t we order another twenty-five boards?” Jobs asked.

Debi Coleman agreed. “Is there any logic behind the two hundred? Last time we built fifty and then we wanted seventy-five.”

That reminder prompted Jobs to worry aloud that some of the existing printed circuit boards would fall into the hands of a competitor or one of the offshore firms that specialized in churning out low-priced, copycat computers. “I want to pull the first fifty and I want to trash them and have them compressed into a giant garbage compactor.

“When do we start building?”

He heard the date for the pilot-build start and was struck by another thought.

“What about beer busts?” he asked, referring to a recent party. “Do you want any more like that?” He paused briefly: “When’s our next party?”

“Christmas,” said Murray.

“That’s in January because everybody’s so busy,” said Jobs. “What about early November? What about a rock ‘n’ roll party? We’ve just had a square dance. Rock ‘n’ roll. Square dance. That’s the universe. We’ll have a Halloween rock ‘n’ roll dance.