Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [59]
Wozniak used the machine he had built to play Pong as a basis for the Computer Conversor terminal. Both he and Kamradt felt that microprocessors were too expensive, and so from the outset the terminal was not supposed to be much more than a television-typewriter. The finished terminal allowed a user to type text on a television screen and ran slightly faster than an ordinary Teletype. It also had a couple of rubber muffs which slipped around a telephone receiver and allowed information to travel between the terminal and Kamradt’s minicomputer.
Wozniak managed to tame the quirks in his prototype and found it reliable enough to use on ARPANET. “It was pretty easy to figure out how to jump around from computer to computer.” Though the terminal was satisfactory for Wozniak, the prototype presented Kamradt with a problem. “It was useful to Wozniak so he considered it finished. He could fix what was wrong. Nobody else could. The genius is nothing unless you can get it out of him. I couldn’t. He was hard to reach and didn’t want to build a company.”
Wozniak felt that his primary responsibility lay with his full-time work. After a year of phone phreaking at Berkeley, he had left the university and had spent six months working on the assembly line at Electroglass, a company that supplied equipment to semiconductor manufacturers. He never considered going to work for his father’s employer, Lockheed, which had lost the righteous glow it had acquired during the late fifties. In part Lockheed was a victim of fashion, and at the end of the sixties much of its work was seen in a sinister light rather than in the patriotic glow that had shone around any company working to protect Americans against scores of Sputniks. Lockheed was closely linked to the imbroglio in Southeast Asia, was suffering from the winding down of the space program, was tangled in bribery scandals, was the target of congressional committees investigating cost overruns on government contracts, and had received a federal bailout.
Life at Lockheed had acquired an antique ring. The corporate vocabulary was studded with the lingo of the industrial crescent and there was much talk of “mandates,” “mass meetings,” and “thorny noneconomic issues.” More important, the generation that had grown up in the curve of Lockheed’s satellite dishes was now dubious about the technical competence of the people who left their cars in the herringbone parking lots. They thought Lockheed scientists were more like civil servants than electrical engineers. Al Alcorn at Atari formed his impressions. “Lockheed engineers were notorious for having no breadth. They could design an aileron on a missile but they couldn’t change a light bulb.” Stephen Wozniak accepted all the stereotypes and, like so many others, looked for work in the dozens of smaller electronic companies that had flourished while Lockheed aged. “I didn’t want to drink a lot. The standard picture of the Lockheed engineer was that he drank or beat his wife.”
One of the companies that had grown while Lockheed had been covered in odium was Hewlett-Packard, and its engineers had gained their own reputation. They were younger than the Lockheed men, many had doctorates, and they had the advantage of working for a company that had its roots in the area rather than in some distant city. Hewlett-Packard had been started by some Stanford students in the Palo Alto garage just before World War II, and though the founders had become wealthy (and one of them Deputy Secretary of Defense), their underlings still called them Bill and Dave. In the late sixties and early seventies Hewlett-Packard was a steady corporate pillar on the Peninsula and had gained a formidable reputation for producing reliable laboratory instruments,