Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [67]
Smith and Hertzfeld had gradually learned to live with Jobs and he with them. It was a delicate set of relationships glued together by the fact that they all needed each other. Hertzfeld and Smith worked around Jobs’s unpredictable nature. Hertzfeld explained, “He’d stop by and say, ‘This is a pile of shit’ or ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.’ The scary thing was that he’d say it about the same thing.” The pair floated in the uncertainty of whether Jobs liked them or whether he just liked them for the jobs they were performing. And Hertzfeld, three years after the start of the project, admitted, “I like working for Steve because of Mac but I don’t know if I like him.”
Yet Jobs had instilled an urgency into the Mac project and his influence within the company had given it increasing prominence. One of the programmers who worked on the early stages of Mac had nicknamed Jobs “the reality distortion field” and the sci-fi moniker had stuck. Jobs had many of his group believing they were building another Apple II and his faith was almost strong enough to persuade them that they were working in a garage when all the tangible evidence suggested otherwise.
Like all employees, Smith and Hertzfeld had grumbled about their boss. They complained that Jobs forbade them to show Mac to their friends while he paraded visitors, including his one-time flame, folk singer Joan Baez, through the lab. Their irritation mounted when it took Jobs months to concede that the Mac screen and 64K bytes of memory were too small before he ordered a redesign. They mumbled some more when Jobs refused to give them permission to sell a mouse interface for the Apple II. When Jobs arranged for the programmer developing the word processor for the Mac to receive a royalty of $1 for every copy sold, tempers rose. It had not taken Hertzfeld and Smith long to figure that, given Apple’s ambitions for the computer, the word processor would leave its author with larger tax problems than they were contemplating. Smith worried that Jobs wasn’t thinking boldly enough about future computers and, on hearing that the Mac group would move into a building occupied by personal computer systems division, muttered, “It says, ‘Thanks guys,’ but now you’re just like all the rest. You’re just ordinary guys. Mac will become another PCS and we’ll be just another big company.” On several occasions Hertzfeld had threatened to quit but each time Jobs had persuaded him to stay.
Yet Jobs exercised many paternal touches. He had presented Hertzfeld and Smith and other members of the Mac group with medals and helped make a ritual out of outings to sushi bars. When a programmer fell ill, he called the hospital frequently. He dropped by the Mac lab over the weekends and took evident pleasure in personally delivering envelopes containing stock options. He had contemplated inviting actress Brooke Shields to attend a Christmas party and chuckled at how her appearance would make Hertzfeld and Smith blush. Jobs was shrewd enough to know that he could tantalize both Hertzfeld and Smith. “Andy,” Jobs concluded, “is struggling with himself. He wants to make some money and he wants to be famous.”
Fame and the notoriety that had come to surround Jobs and Wozniak and the programmers featured in Tracy Kidder’s best-selling book The Soul of a New Machine worked as powerful stimulants. Smith’s business card read HARDWARE WIZARD and Hertzfeld’s SOFTWARE ARTIST and the two speckled their speech with the engineer’s equivalent of fighter pilots’ muscle talk such as kludge,