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“We don’t stand a chance advertising with features and benefits and with RAMs and with charts and comparisons,” Jobs said. “The only chance we have of communicating is with a feeling.”

“It’s got to be like a Sony Walkman or a Cuisinart. It’s got to be a cult product,” Murray said.

Jobs frowned. “Yeah, we say, ‘It’s a cult,’ and then we say, ‘Hey, drink this Kool-Aid.’” He strolled toward the door and said, “We want to create an image people will never forget. We’ve got to build it and we’ve got to build it early.”

Murray was struck by a thought, looked at Jobs, and said hopefully, “The personal computer that gives you personality.”

Jobs ignored the suggestion, stopped and examined some photographs hanging on the wall that showed children and students using Mac computers. “Maybe if we give these photographs to the press they’d print them.” He turned to Klein. “Don’t you think they’d run something like this?”

“The San Jose Mercury might,” Klein said.

STANLEY ZEBER ZENSKANITSKY

Alex Kamradt was one of life’s eternal optimists. He was tall, broad but not stout, and had a round face and a head of thick, black, curly hair. He often looked beleaguered or earnestly confused and was the Pickwickian founder of Call Computer, a house-sized company, that he ran from a higgledly-piggedly office in Mountain View. The corporate epicenter was a wooden, rolltop desk piled with papers, magazines, computer printouts, calling cards, pens, and pencils. The desk was surrounded by Teletypes, grubby lime walls, a dining table, some stern, straight-backed chairs, and bookshelves stacked with hefty, looseleaf binders.

A one-time physicist at Lockheed, Kamradt had become interested in computers while trying to write programs to solve scientific calculations. He sold a home, bought a minicomputer with part of the proceeds, and planned to use it to keep tabs on local real-estate deals. Instead he found himself renting out time on the computer to small companies along the San Francisco Peninsula. Together with a few high-school students he started to write programs that helped small businesses manage their accounts payable, accounts receivable, and inventories. His clients hooked into the computer by Teletype in the same way that Berkeley’s barterers linked up with Resource One’s Community Memory Project.

But Kamradt sensed that the arrival of the microprocessor could change the scope of Call Computer. He wanted to rent or sell his customers a more convenient terminal with a typewriter keyboard that could be connected to a television. He began to attend meetings of the Homebrew Club with the specific intention of finding someone to design his terminal. “I started asking people who was the sharpest engineer and they said Wozniak.”

In mid-1975 Kamradt and Wozniak formed a subsidiary of Call Computer that they named Computer Conversor. Kamradt provided around $12,000 in start-up money and took 70 percent of the company while Wozniak was given 30 percent and a free account on the minicomputer. Though the arrangement was casual, Wozniak promised to produce a design for a terminal that would, as the company’s name implied, converse with another computer. Kamradt saw the terminal as part of a grander scheme. “I wanted to have a computer terminal to sell and to rent. I knew that the first stage was to make a terminal and then gradually add more memory and turn it into a computer. Wozniak and I had an agreement that we were going to build a terminal then a computer.”

Wozniak had a practical reason for designing the terminal. He had enviously eyed a similar machine that phone phreak John Draper had installed in the basement of his Los Altos home. It added an extra dimension to phone phreaking. Hooked to a telephone, the terminal let Draper delve in and out of ARPANET, a computer network financed by the federal government to link universities and research establishments. Armed with a few telephone numbers and the proper access codes, outsiders like Draper could