Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [84]
So Jobs drove to Atari and asked Al Alcorn to recommend somebody who could help design a power supply that wouldn’t need a fan. He returned to the garage exploding with optimism, telling Wozniak and Wigginton that he had met the greatest analog designer in the history of the universe, an engineer who could design a power supply that would light up New York but still run off a six-volt battery. The subject of the excitement, Frederick Rodney Holt, was less confident about Apple. He met Jobs, surveyed all that was visible between hair and toe, and wondered whether Apple could afford to pay his consultancy fee. “I told him I was expensive. He said, That’s no problem.’ He just conned me into working.”
Holt started spending evenings and weekends at Apple, and Jobs and Wozniak discovered, once again, that appearances were deceptive. Holt looked as if he might have been the chief designer of a sci-fi machine that fired bolts of swizzle sticks. His face was creased with pleats; he had jade-colored eyes, a thatch of hair, and a bony frame that was usually decked in a turtleneck shirt, slacks, and waffle-stomper shoes. Thin fingers almost always held a Camel cigarette and were stained with the nicotine that gave him a raspy cough. But he was no dried-out, middle-aged engineer. Though old enough to be the father of both Wozniak and Jobs, Holt had first become a parent at the age of eighteen, a year after he had left home to marry the first of several wives.
As a youth he had inherited the complete works of Lenin from his grandfather, a Revolutionary Socialist who ran for governor of the State of Maine on the Eugene Debs ticket. And though Lenin came to share his teenage bookshelf with the works of Darwin, Holt decided that the triumph of the proletariat was infinitely preferable to the survival of the fittest. He found graduate work in mathematics at Ohio State lonely—“It was like playing chess with yourself”—edited a free-speech newspaper, and explored the private jealousies of radical-left splinter groups. He became national treasurer for the student portion of the National Coalition Against the War in Vietnam and was invited by a small New York publisher to write a book about the Logic of Marxism. But he was diverted by the call of politics and in 1965, when John Lindsay ran for mayor of New York City, Holt managed the rival campaign of a black taxi driver who stood as a Revolutionary Socialist. The duo succeeded in drawing far more attention from the FBI than from the New York electorate.
Alongside his political forays Holt developed an interest in both electronics and motorcycles. He developed, built, and installed some low-distortion hi-fi sets “with a lot of poop” and for almost ten years worked at an electronics company in the Midwest where he helped to design a low-cost oscilloscope. During evenings and weekends Holt graduated from riding motor scooters to Harley Davidsons and Triumphs, and from flat-track to illegal road racing. As the years passed and racers bought the latest motorcycles, Holt’s edge, which depended on his mechanical ability to modify stock machinery, began to evaporate. Nevertheless, when he moved to the West Coast from Ohio in the early seventies he installed his three motorcycles on a trailer and towed them across the country. In the spring of 1976 he abandoned racing because muscle-nerve damage in his thumbs prevented him from keeping a tight grip on the handlebars. The language of the motorcycle circuit still speckled his speech