Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [69]
The two tossed around names for their company. One afternoon, driving along Highway 85, between Palo Alto and Los Altos, Jobs, summoning the shades of his dietary regime and his rural life in Oregon, suggested they call the company Apple Computer. Try as he might Wozniak couldn’t improve on the suggestion. “We kept trying to think of a better name but every name we came up with wasn’t any better.” They played with the sound of names like Executek and Matrix Electronics but the simplicity of Apple always seemed more appealing. For a few days the two wondered whether their choice would land them in a legal wrangle with Apple Records, the Beatles’ recording company, and Jobs worried that Apple Computer was altogether too whimsical for anything that even pretended to be a company. Eventually, anxious to place the partnership advertisement in the San Jose Mercury Jobs issued an ultimatum. “I said, ‘Unless we come up with something better by five P.M. tomorrow, we’ll go with Apple.’”
Jobs reckoned that it would cost about $25 to make each printed circuit board and that if all went well they might be able to sell a hundred for $50 apiece. They agreed that each would contribute half toward the $1,300 or so that Jobs reckoned the printed circuit board would cost. Neither had much money. Wozniak was earning $24,000 a year at Hewlett-Packard but was spending most of it on his stereo system, records, and the computer that had a way of gobbling up parts. His checking account at a Cupertino bank oscillated between black and red and his landlord, fed up with receiving checks that bounced, was insisting the rent be paid in cash. Jobs, meanwhile, was carefully guarding the $5,000 he had saved from his work at Atari.
To provide most of his share, Wozniak decided to sell his HP 65 calculator for $500. He knew that Hewlett-Packard was about to announce an enhanced version, the HP 67, that would be available to employees for $370. “I figured I had a profit and a better calculator.” The buyer, however, paid Wozniak only half the agreed price. Jobs had a similar problem when he decided to use some of the $1,500 he made from selling a red and white Volkswagen bus. This particular piece of foreign machinery had never been given the parental seal of approval. Paul Jobs had accompanied his son on the original purchase mission, taken one look at the Volkswagen, and concluded, “It was a tired, gutless thing that wouldn’t go anywhere.” He told his son that Volkswagen vans tended to have problems with wheel bearings and the reduction-gear mechanism but his advice wasn’t heeded. The younger Jobs planned to fix any problems and bought a book called How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive! A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. Eventually, when the van proved too troublesome he buckled to his father’s advice and sold the van after it passed some checks at an automotive diagnostic center. Paul Jobs chuckled quietly when “two weeks later the guy came back with the engine in a bucket.” Steve Jobs promptly offered to share the cost of repairs and his $1,500 nest egg dwindled.
Jobs, never coy about offering his opinion, watched Wozniak make some modifications to the computer. Rather than rely on somebody else’s board of memory chips, Wozniak decided to build his own. For the hobbyists the design of a reliable memory board was a persistent bugbear and the memory frequently came to mean the difference between a reliable and erratic machine. The memory chips were just