Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [87]
These receptacles of wisdom sat in dozens of low-slung buildings with steel frames, concrete walls, and blank panes of glass. By the mid-seventies these monotonous industrial barns had largely replaced the mosaic of fields and orchards that had once stretched over the plain alongside the western fringes of San Francisco Bay. They were home for the dozens of companies that had been founded during the sixties and seventies as the center of electronic novelty drifted south from Sunnyvale toward San Jose. There was a clinical frailty to these buildings that were sometimes called “tilt-ups” because the walls were made from prefabricated blocks of poured concrete which were tilted into position. The buildings looked as if they had been supplied by a builder with a florist’s yard. There were fresh curbstones, gleaming black asphalt, and cropped grass that had all the smoothness and allure of Astroturf. It was an industrial Levittown.
A quick drive around Santa Clara or Mountain View brought a blur of logos and signs that seemed to be contractions or combinations of about five words: Advanced-Digi-Integrated-Micro-Technologies. The similar sounding names that stood by the driveways were familiar to any regular reader of Electronics News,but to say the companies were all the same was about as perceptive as observing that most shirts come with collars, sleeves, and buttons. Life behind the walls had a transitory flavor and the old seasonal rhythms of rural life had given way to a pattern associated with young companies that was almost biological. It tended to run through a cycle of ambition, enthusiasm, exhilaration, complication, disillusion, and frustration. An electronics association had taken to publishing a corporate genealogical chart, and chroniclers of the electronics industry would patiently explain to newcomers how Fairchild Semiconductor begat Intel Corporation and National Semiconductor and how they, in turn, spawned other companies. The chart, which grew longer and more entwined over the years, had its share of corporate divorces, second marriages, stepsons, and illegitimate offspring, and the breeding patterns were so incestuous that in humans they would have led to birth defects.
The founders and managers of these companies were fond of saying that there was nothing they might need that wasn’t within an hour’s drive. There were lawyers to draw up incorporation papers, venture capitalists to provide money, contractors to lay foundations, interior designers to decorate offices, accountants to check the books, distributors who stocked parts, job shops to perform tedious chores, public-relations agencies to court the press, and underwriters to prepare stock offerings. Many of these men had grown up in the semiconductor industry. They hopped between companies, left to form their own, and kept loose track of one another. They were mobile reservoirs of experience who knew whom to trust and steered business toward one another. It was a small place where word and rumor traveled fast, where people frequently wound up working for someone they had once hired and where allegiances were to people rather than to companies. All these men worked or invested in the companies whose products eventually trickled down to Haltek and Halted and to the likes of Wozniak and Jobs. But for all the physical proximity, there was still a considerable distance between the professionals and the amateurs.
Jobs, with his keen internal gyrocompass, began to bridge the gap and called the marketing department at Intel to find out who was responsible for their distinctive advertisements. To the irritation of many Intel engineers, these weren’t cluttered with dull charts or black-and-white technical drawings and didn’t dwell on the esoteric strengths of