Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [73]
Some ports of call were hopeless. Jobs strolled into a Los Altos bank, found the manager, asked for a loan, and was given a predictable rebuff. “I could tell that I’d get the same replies at other banks.” He went to Halted and asked Hal Elzig whether he would take a share of Apple in exchange for some parts. Elzig declined the offer, recalling, “I didn’t have any faith in these kids. They were running about barefoot.” Jobs approached Al Alcorn and asked whether he could purchase parts from Atari. Alcorn agreed but demanded cash up front. Jobs turned to Mel Schwartz, the Stanford physics professor, who had formed a small electronics company in Palo Alto and had an established line of credit at an electronics distributor, and Schwartz agreed to buy some parts for Jobs.
Jobs then approached three electronics parts houses where he asked for credit arrangements that would allow them to assemble and deliver the computers to the Byte Shops, before paying for the parts. He was granted receptions that ranged from amusement to outright skepticism. At one shop Jobs persuaded the controller of the company to conduct a background check. Paul Terrell was surprised to find himself paged during a seminar at an electronics conference and summoned to the telephone where he assured the controller that the two characters sitting across his desk were not spinning fairy tales. Apple’s biggest break came when Bob Newton, the division manager of Kierulff Electronics in Palo Alto, met Jobs and examined both him and the prototype. “He was just an aggressive little kid who didn’t present himself very professionally.” Nevertheless, Newton agreed to sell Jobs $20,000 worth of parts and explained that if the bill was paid within thirty days Jobs would not be charged interest. Jobs, unfamiliar with accounting rubric, recalled, “We didn’t know what ‘net thirty days’ was.”
Assured of a supply of parts, Jobs and Wozniak turned their attention to assembling and testing the computers. They were reluctant to rent a space in one of the parks of concrete and steel garages that dotted Sunnyvale and Santa Clara. Wozniak’s apartment, ballooning from the early months of marriage, was too small to take the strain of a miniature assembly line. Wozniak’s young wife, Alice, recalled, “The Apple was consuming all his time. I saw very little of him. He’d go off to HP and eat something at McDonald’s on the way home. He wouldn’t get home usually until after midnight. I was going nuts coming home from work and having things on the dining-room table that I couldn’t touch.” So with Alice resenting their presence, the founders of Apple resorted to the most practical spot which was the Jobs family home in Los Altos. Jobs, who was back living with his parents, commandeered the one unoccupied room in the three-bedroom house which had belonged, until she married, to his younger sister, Patty. The room was furnished with a single bed and a small chest of drawers and was fine for storing the plastic bags full of parts that arrived from the electronics distributors. The parts were assembled into Apple computers in that room and in Jobs’s own bedroom, where dripping soldering irons left scorch marks on a narrow desk.
The incoming parts weren’t subjected to exhaustive scrutiny. Jobs recalled, “We didn’t evaluate them too much. We just found out they worked.” The printed circuit boards were a great simplification over hand-wiring each computer. They sliced the assembly time for each machine from about sixty hours to about six. The boards also brought a new chore, known contemptuously in the electronics industry as “board stuffing,” which required that semiconductors and all the other parts be inserted into specially numbered holes on the lime-colored board. Jobs delegated the task to his sister, who was expecting her first child. He offered to pay her one dollar for every board she stuffed,