Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [74]
While the boards were being assembled, Jobs and Wozniak chewed over ideas for a retail price. Wozniak was prepared to sell the computers to his Homebrew chums for slightly more than the cost of the parts or for around $300. Jobs had larger thoughts and did some rough-and-ready reckoning. He decided that Apple should sell the boards for twice the cost of the parts and allow dealers a 33 percent markup. The arithmetic was close to Paul Terrell’s offer and also happened to coincide with a retail price that had a euphonious ring: $666.66.
When Jobs turned up at the Byte Shop in Mountain View carrying twelve bulging printed circuit boards packed in thin gray cardboard boxes, Terrell was dismayed. “There was nothing. Steve was half right.” The fully assembled computers turned out to be fully assembled printed circuit boards. There was quite a difference. Some energetic intevention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. Terrell couldn’t even test the board without buying two transformers to power the computer and the memory. Since the Apple didn’t have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funneled in or out of the computer. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn’t be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn’t provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip. Though Wozniak could type in 4K bytes of code in an hour, that was hardly a practical arrangement for even the most zealous hobbyist. Finally, the computer was naked. It had no case. Despite all the shortcomings and all his reservations, Terrell took delivery of the machines and paid Jobs, as he had promised, in cash.
Jobs was trying to balance everything, relying on instincts and common sense to cope with the daily rush of surprises. Aware of the importance of image he arranged for a polished corporate address by renting a mail-drop box in Palo Alto. He hired an answering service to help give the impression that Apple was a steady enterprise and not a fly-by-night operation. He also started to recruit some help and looked to familiar faces for support.
The steady, dependable Bill Fernandez had not been invited by Hewlett-Packard to transfer with the rest of the calculator division to its new base in Oregon and was looking around for work. Still living at home in Sunnyvale, Fernandez thought that Apple might someday offer him the chance to become an engineer. Jobs went through the pretense of an interview, asked some cursory questions about digital logic, and made his first job offer. Fernandez asked for a formal written contract and became Apple’s first fulltime employee. “I was the only legitimate Indian. The rest were chiefs. . . . I was basically the gofer.”
To keep track of the money Jobs asked his college friend, Elizabeth Holmes, who was working as a gem cutter in San Francisco, to monitor the Apple checkbook and keep a journal recording cash expenses. Holmes, who dropped by the Jobs household once a week and was paid the standard four dollars an hour, noticed that “Steve was working very, very hard. He was very directed and not very sentimental.” Meanwhile, Jobs also kept Dan Kottke abreast of progress, invited him to Los Altos for the summer, and promised some work. When Kottke arrived, Clara Jobs turned the family couch into a bed.
As work started on the second batch of fifty computers, Paul Jobs buckled to reality and suggested Apple continue its business in the garage. “It was easier to empty out the garage than try and fight it out in the house. My cars could sit outside.