Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [71]
Wozniak was not easily swayed. The trio sat up late into the night arguing about the form of the proposed partnership. Wayne suggested they should balance the equity of their investments with the merit of invention. It was an idea that appealed to Jobs, but Wozniak had problems coming to grips with twentieth-century notions of property. He wanted complete freedom to use his design tricks and was worried that Hewlett-Packard would assign him to a project where he would need to rely on some of the ploys he had used in the Apple. Wayne thought, “It was almost as if Wozniak would condescend to allow Apple to use these principles but he wanted to reserve the right to sell them to other people.”
Eventually Jobs prevailed and Wayne drew up a ten-paragraph partnership agreement liberally sprinkled with “therefores,” “herewiths,” and “thereins.” The agreement stated that none of the trio could spend more than $100 without the consent of another. It also laid down that Wozniak would “assume both general and major responsibility for the conduct of Electrical Engineering; Jobs would assume general responsibility for Electrical Engineering and Marketing, and Wayne would assume major responsibility for Mechanical Engineering and Documentation.” Once Wozniak had been persuaded to agree to the venture, he had no qualms about giving Wayne 10 percent of the company and dividing the remainder with Jobs. He was convinced that if Jobs performed all the commercial donkeywork the split was equitable. What the agreement didn’t say, but what they all understood, was that Wayne would act as tie breaker if Wozniak and Jobs couldn’t agree on something. On the evening of April Fool’s Day, 1976, at Wayne’s Mountain View apartment, with Wozniak’s friend Randy Wigginton looking on, the three signed the agreement forming Apple Computer Company. Jobs signed the document in a wide, faintly childish hand with all the letters in lower case. Wozniak scribbled a cursive signature, and Wayne’s pen left his name illegible.
While they were sorting out formalities, Jobs had pressed ahead. He had used the $1,300 that he and Wozniak had pooled to commission the artwork for the printed circuit board. He visited Howard Cantin, who had prepared the artwork for Atari’s game boards (and had laid out the original Pong board) and asked him to prepare the board for the Apple computer. Cantin complied—“I did it as a favor for Steve.” Once Wozniak had loaded the first printed circuit board with chips and completed the wiring, he and Jobs made a formal introduction of the Apple computer at the Homebrew Club in April 1976. Their remarks revealed the division of labor. Wozniak described the technical features of the machine: such things as the size of the memory, the BASIC that was available, and the clock speed of the memory. Jobs asked the members how much they were prepared to pay for a computer that, unlike the Altair, had all the essential features lodged onto a single printed circuit board. The overall reaction was muted. The majority of other engineers at the Homebrew Club didn’t even bother to inspect the Apple. A few, like Lee Felsenstein, looked at the black-and-white computer with its 8K bytes of memory and concluded that “Wozniak might very well be heading for a fall. I thought if he was going to fail he was going to fail big and I wasn’t going to step in the way.”
Jobs, who by the spring of 1976 had taken to religiously attending meetings of the Homebrew