Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [60]
Allen Baum was one of the bright young university graduates snared by Hewlett-Packard recruiters, and he immediately suggested that the company interview an older friend who designed computers, Stephen Wozniak. So when, in 1973, Hewlett-Packard offered Wozniak a job as an associate engineer in its Advanced Products Division, he jumped at the chance. The division made pocket calculators, which for Hewlett-Packard—with its traditional affinity for high-quality, low-volume electronic equipment—was a bold departure. The success brought by the arrival in 1972 of the HP 35, the first desk-top calculator to pack the punch of a slide rule, brought a blush to the entire division. For a time it was a whizzy place to work, and as competitors slashed the prices of their calculators, Hewlett-Packard concentrated on adding features to the HP 35 and giving them model numbers like HP 45 and HP 60. Six months after joining the company Wozniak was given his epaulettes and became a full-blown engineer. He, in turn, managed to persuade HP to hire his neighborhood chum Bill Fernandez as a lab technician.
Wozniak found the world of calculators and the problems they presented far removed from his exploits with minicomputers. He was assigned to work on a project to make refinements to the HP 35 and suffered the fate of many engineers who work for large companies when, after eighteen months of effort, the project was canceled. Myron Tuttle, an engineer who worked with Wozniak on the project that was code-named Road Runner, recalled, “I don’t think anyone in the lab was thought of as exceptional. Wozniak was one of the few people without degrees. He didn’t stand out. He was nothing out of the ordinary. He was a competent engineer.” Wozniak was intrigued by rumors of a hand-held terminal for the handicapped that was being designed in the company’s research laboratories; he applied for a transfer but was turned down. “They decided I didn’t have enough education.”
Aside from the repeated comments about his thin formal training, Wozniak enjoyed the way Hewlett-Packard allowed his mind to wander. He liked the doughnuts and coffee trundled around on a cart every morning, the regular paychecks, the attention paid to engineers (which included leave to appeal to the president if faced with dismissal), the manner in which the company enforced across-the-board salary cuts rather than resorting to layoffs, and the stock rooms that were open territory for engineers working on their own projects. From stock-room parts, Wozniak built Allen Baum an HP 45, converted Elmer Baum’s HP 35 into an HP 45 (and attached a company label that gave warranty information in Japanese), worked out a way of solving square roots on the less powerful HP 35, and also challenged Fernandez to see who was “the fastest square root in the West.”
While he worked at Hewlett-Packard Wozniak took lunchtime jaunts in light aircraft that belonged to his workmates. He conducted an eccentric private life from an apartment in Cupertino that resembled a bachelor’s version of the Bronx Zoo. Pet mice roamed around the calculator and computer manuals, and there were boxes filled with videotape players that a group of HP engineers had bought in bulk. The one substantial piece of furniture was a sofa that could be converted into a pool table, while the bedroom was furnished with a mattress and the sink was usually piled with dirty dishes. Apart from a fancy stereo system the center of Wozniak’s existence was still the telephone. He appropriated a used phone number for what he boasted was the Bay Area’s first dial-a-joke. Each day he recorded a new message on his answering machine selecting most of them from a book of two thousand Polish jokes along the lines of “When did the Polack die drinking milk? When the cow sat down.” Sometimes, after returning from work, Wozniak answered the phone, introduced himself as Stanley