Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [76]
The prodding from the Byte Shop’s Paul Terrell forced Jobs to pressure Wozniak to come up with an interface that could load BASIC into the computer from a cassette tape recorder. Wozniak, fully occupied with the computer, arranged for another engineer at Hewlett-Packard to design the interface in return for a royalty on sales. The design was unsatisfactory; it couldn’t read the data properly from the tape and the duo had to buy out the engineer for $1,000. Wozniak flinched. “We weren’t going to go ahead with our design and then pay him for each one we sold.” Wozniak, who had no experience designing interfaces and had never dealt with data stored on cassette tapes, rigged up the simplest possible design: “It worked.” Mounted on a small two-inch-high printed circuit board, the interface plugged into the main board.
As a sales incentive a cassette tape of BASIC was included with the $75 interface card and the Apple advertising copy stated: “Our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost.” The one-page advert carried the slogan: BYTE INTO AN APPLE and boasted about “A Little Cassette Board That Works,” though it could be relied on to cope only with cassettes running on expensive tape recorders. There was a tentative tone about the ad that was reflected in the line “The Apple Computer is in stock at almost all major computer stores.”
It was certainly in stock at the Byte Shops. It was almost always in stock. Despite the koa-wood cases that were supplied by a local cabinetmaker, Paul Terrell and his cast of refugee engineers and programmers found that the Apple computers weren’t selling as quickly as the Altair or the IMSAI 8080, a computer that would run software written for the Altair and was sold by IMS Associates, another small company on the San Francisco Peninsula. Terrell, who was in the middle of a frantic eleven months during which he masterminded the opening of seventy-four Byte stores across North America, couldn’t afford to stock $10,000 worth of slow-moving computers in shops that had monthly sales of only $20,000. At his headquarters he spent much of his time asking skeptical outsiders—who muttered about his precarious balance sheet and poked at the Formica counters—whether they could remember what the first one hundred McDonald’s looked like. As for the Apples he recalled, “We had problems unloading them.”
For a few weeks Jobs and Kottke tooled along El Camino, delivering the computers and encountering teenagers in the stores. Some, too young to drive, had discovered that if they timed it right they could catch the No. 21 and No. 22 buses of the Santa Clara Transit District and visit every Byte store in an afternoon. The teenagers formed a permanent part of the decor, playing with the computers laid out on the table, feeding paper-tape programs into the computers, and performing small programming chores in return for free magazines.
On these weekly rounds. Jobs typed into the Apple a demonstration program that paraded the message THIS IS AN APPLE COMPUTER across a television screen. Some of the Byte Shop managers found Jobs tough to handle. One, Bob Moody, said, “It was difficult at best. Steve wasn’t the guy to deal with. He was very fidgety and very abrupt.” Terrell was a bit more patient and reassured Jobs about the name of Apple Computer. “He came flying into the Byte Shop, buzzing at a hundred miles per hour. ‘It’s the goddamn logo. People think it’s horseshit. We’ve got to change the name. Nobody is going to take it seriously.” Terrell, who had endured similar taunts after he gave his store a name most people mistook for a sandwich bar, passed on a piece of homespun wisdom: “Once people understand