Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [66]
Raskin, a chunky, bearded man with a soft spot for model airplanes and music, set up shop in late 1979 and shuffled among several buildings, including Apple’s original office suite near the Good Earth Restaurant. In early 1981 Raskin, as Hertzfeld re-called, ran afoul of Apple politics. “The Lisa team in general told Steve to fuck off. Steve said, ‘I’ll get this team that’ll make a cheap computer and that will blow them off the face of the earth.’ Then Steve saw that Raskin had critical mass: He had a hardware engineer and a software engineer. Since Steve was a bigger kid than Raskin, he said, ‘I like that toy!’ and took it.”
Raskin quickly fell victim to Jobs, who wanted to impose his own imprimatur on the project. Jobs added veterans from the early days of Apple to Raskin’s team. He tried to change the code-name of the project from Mac to Bicycle after reading a Scientific American article that described the personal computer as the bicycle of the twenty-first century. But he backed off when his group protested. After taking control of Mac, Jobs made his intentions clear. He bet John Couch, the head of the Lisa division, $5,000 that Mac would ship first.
At first, Smith and Hertzfeld eyed Jobs with suspicion. The former had been raised in upstate New York where he had studied literature at junior college and become interested in a UNIVAC computer and phone phreaking. The first electronic device he had ever built was a blue box, which he constructed on his mother’s kitchen table. “I reckoned it was impossible to find it on the street and I wanted the satisfaction of building my own.” For phone phreaking he adopted the name Marty, and when he first visited California he stayed with John Draper. He attended some Homebrew meetings and, on moving permanently to California, built an office control system for doctors and dentists and bought a Commodore Pet because he couldn’t afford an Apple. Out of work, he helped a friend build a wall and was touring companies in a borrowed truck when he was offered a job as a technician in Apple’s service department. He repaired Apple IIs by day and studied the schematics at night. “I wanted to find out how the board worked by myself. I had almost subconscious dreams that I’d be dealing with logical elements in some way. I was always driven down to the lowest level of the system. I don’t like working on things if I don’t know how they work.”
Smith was fished from the service department by a programmer who recognized his talent and recommended him to Raskin. By the spring of 1980 Smith had designed a prototype based on an eight-bit microprocessor. For about six months, the computer languished with no software. A programmer hired to write some of the software placed unshakable faith in the computer languages used in artificial intelligence work and had little sympathy for the demands of microcomputers. Then Smith started working with the Motorola 68000 and by Christmas of 1980 had developed a second Mac. Hertzfeld, who was working on software for the Apple II, watched these changes with mounting envy. One night he stayed late and wrote a small program that produced a picture of Mr. Scrooge and the greeting: HI BURRELL.
Hertzfeld had grown up in Philadelphia and started programming when he was fifteen. “I was amazed you could get this typewriter to do such-neat things.” He studied science and mathematics at Rhode Island’s Brown University and moved to Berkeley because he wanted to live in California and preferred the prospect of graduate studies to