Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [61]
When Pacific Telephone’s answering machine broke under the strain, Wozniak rigged up his own and asked callers to ring the phone company and complain about the tardy service. The phone company, monitoring the heavy traffic and pestered by a local store that had the misfortune of having a number similar to Wozniak’s finally gave him one of the lines from “the radio station bank” that were reserved for heavy use. One of the callers was Alice Robertson, a plump San Jose high-school student with long hair, wide eyes and a hefty laugh. Wozniak answered her call, chatted for a couple of minutes, abruptly announced, “I can hang up faster than you can,” and slammed down the receiver. That peculiar exchange marked the start of a nervous series of calls that eventually culminated in a date.
As he embarked on his first major amorous adventure, Wozniak also had to contend with nagging obligations to Alex Kamradt and Computer Conversor. Kamradt had engaged several other engineers who spent months trying to unravel Wozniak’s design. To help turn a prototype and some schematics into a product, Kamradt looked to the person who had accompanied Wozniak on several of his trips to Computer Conversor, Steven Jobs.
According to Kamradt, Jobs promised to take charge of guiding production on the terminal in return for salary and stock. Kamradt recalled, “He resented me having money. He was somewhat unscrupulous and he wanted to get as much as he could, but I liked his assertiveness.” Wozniak, who scarcely visited Call Computer’s one-room headquarters, was unaware of the scope of Jobs’s interest. “Steve listened to Alex. He was very attentive. He listened to what Alex said a terminal could do for his business.”
For several months Jobs worked with Robert Way, the head of a small engineering company that provided design services for electronic companies. Jobs monitored the layout of the printed circuit board and the design of a vacu-form case. Together with Way he drew up a bill of materials and a parts numbering system and also acquired a license from Atari for a video circuit that would hook the terminal to a television. Way found Jobs a hard taskmaster. “Nothing was ever good enough for him. He was the rejector.” Way also observed the division of responsibilities. “Every check I ever received was signed by Kamradt. The responsibility for seeing the design got done was Jobs’s.” After some months Way, bemused by Kamradt’s perennial optimism, threw up his hands and ducked out of the project. “They were the weirdest group of people I ever met in my life.”
While Kamradt worried whether he would ever get the terminal to work, Wozniak, stimulated by the Homebrew meetings, was working on his own computer. He subjected some of the new microprocessors to minute inspection and quickly found out that they hadn’t changed the essence of a computer. “I was surprised that they were like the minicomputers I had been used to.” Though microprocessors hadn’t changed the nature of the enterprise, diehards still looked to the early mainframes, when computer design was attacked by large teams, and hailed them as the grand old days when men were men. Yet even in the forties and fifties the challenge facing engineers was one of minimal design—though they were trying to limit the size of a computer to a room.
For microcomputer designers like Wozniak, the challenge was still to squeeze the maximum performance out of the minimum number of parts. A compact machine not only kept the cost down but was also the source of substantial pride. The size of the new components, the fact that a computer could be squeezed into a case the size of a bread box rather than manhandled into an office building, also made it possible for one person to exercise control over an entire machine. “In microcomputer design,” one of the Homebrew regulars