Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [68]
One result of this emotional fandango, the grueling work and the daliance with fame, was that Hertzfeld and Smith had become close friends. They enjoyed what Smith, with his tendency to reduce everything to initials, called a BFR: a Best Friend Relationship. Sometimes they daydreamed about leaving Apple and starting their own company. Yet every time Jobs asked for something, they worked day and night until it was completed. Smith had embarked on a six-month diversion to squeeze a lot of circuits onto one custom-designed chip. When the effort failed, he had to re-design Mac all over again. On one Friday evening Jobs had threatened to remove some chips that controlled the computer’s sound unless they worked by the following Monday. Hertzfeld and Smith had straightened with alarm and worked through the weekend, and by the Monday morning the sound worked. These were the sort of management tactics (coupled with the difficulty of finding rewards to top riches and fame) that were calculated to burn out engineers.
Hertzfeld and Smith had suspended the rest of their lives until they completed Macintosh. They had no girlfriends, and they spent their Sundays hunched over a printed circuit board or behind a computer terminal. And on this one Sunday, Smith, as he had on dozens of previous occasions, had decided to abandon sleep until he had solved the problem. “Having friends,” he said, “is orthogonal to designing computers. When they call, I find myself hanging up on them.”
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While Wozniak completed the design of his computer, Jobs fluttered in the background, flitting in and out of Call Computer and continuing to work at Atari where he was asked to produce a device that would generate horoscopes from tidbits of information about dates and places of birth. The computing power needed to chart the progress of an individual with the course of the planets proved too much and the project fizzled. Jobs was uncertain about what he wanted to do and was unhappy about one obvious path. “I didn’t see myself growing up to be an engineer.” Though he nursed secret dreams of buying a BMW 320i he was uneasy about the prospect of being pulled into an orbit of cars and houses. Instead he fell back on his natural inquisitiveness and spent two semesters auditing a physics course offered by Stanford for gifted freshmen. Jobs left his mark on Mel Schwartz, the professor who taught the class. “Very few people turn up who say they want to learn something. I was impressed by Steve’s enthusiasm. He was really interested and curious.”
Unlike Wozniak, Jobs found the nitpicking technical debates of the Homebrew Club unappealing. He attended a few meetings but was bored by the chitchat about timing cycles, direct memory access, and synchronous clocks. Yet he kept close tabs on Wozniak’s battles with his computer. When the two talked on the telephone, they almost always chatted about developments or problems with the machine. When they met, or when Jobs visited Wozniak’s home, it was always the computer that formed the central topic of conversation. Jobs analyzed the reason why he and Wozniak, the proverbial odd couple who were separated by age, temperament, and inclination, could stay friends, and observed, “I was a little bit more mature for my age and he was a little less mature for his.”
During January and February 1976 Jobs started to badger Wozniak about the possibility of making and selling some printed circuit boards so that others could build their own versions of the computer. Wozniak had not contemplated doing anything apart from handing out schematics of the machine to any Homebrew members who were interested. “It was Steve’s idea to hold them in the air and sell a few.” Jobs entertained the