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By Root 466 0

a new chip. They used color and wraparound type and relied heavily on symbols to explain the potential power of the electronics. Poker chips meant profits, race cars, speed, cleavers, cost cutting, while hamburgers showed that chips could be made to order. Jobs discovered that the ideas and look came from an advertising and public-relations agency in Palo Alto that bore the name of its founder, Regis McKenna. Jobs rang the agency and was funneled toward Frank Burge who took informal responsibility for screening new businesses. Burge wasn’t about to be harried by some youngster who announced that he wanted to prepare a color brochure and said, “You guys do good stuff; I’d like you to do my mine.” Burge listened and told Jobs he would speak to him within the week. Jobs called Burge several more times. “There were always a pile of messages on my desk and Steve wouldn’t let his get to the bottom of the pile. I didn’t want to be rude to him so I finally said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come take a look.’ As I was driving over to the garage I was thinking, ‘Holy Christ, this guy is going to be something else. What’s the least amount of time I can spend with this clown without being rude and then get back to something more profitable.’”

After Burge saw Jobs emerge from the kitchen with his jeans, sandals, unwashed dank hair, and thin beard, his discomfort grew. “I forgot about being rude. For about two minutes I was just thinking of escaping. In about three minutes two things hit me. First, he was an incredibly smart young man. Second, I didn’t understand a fiftieth of what he was talking about.” Impressed, Burge checked Jobs’s credentials with another agency client, Paul Terrell of the Byte Shops. Terrell told Burge, “They have overextended themselves and need some organization. Jobs isn’t very comfortable in a marketing role.” A couple of weeks later, another of the McKenna executives met Jobs and suggested that the agency might be prepared to handle Apple’s entire marketing campaign for a share of the company’s sales revenue. He added that they should all await the result of Apple’s first advertisement and also subject the computer to some closer scrutiny. An agency memo noted the extent of Jobs’s progress: “Though he moved a quantity into retail distribution, there is as yet no evidence that the retailer(s) are successful in finding customers.” The memo concluded that “Steve is young and inexperienced,” but the final line cautioned: “Bushnell was young when he started Atari. And he claims to be worth $10,000,000 now.”

Eventually Jobs and Wozniak were introduced to the head of the agency, Regis McKenna. His business card, which carried the impish line REGIS MCKENNA, HIMSELF, sounded sturdier than the bearer whose fragile appearance offered a clue to his chronic diabetes. McKenna had careful eyes, thinning fair hair, and a soft manner of speaking that concealed some tough bones. But the business card did reveal his stock-in-trade, which was to make companies appear larger, more stable, and more imposing than they were. As one of seven sons, McKenna had grown up in the blue-collar shadows of the Pittsburgh steel barons, hadn’t bothered to graduate from college, and had moved to California at the start of the sixties as an advertising salesman for a family-run magazine company. He moved to the Peninsula during its hush-hush, super-super secret days, slipped into the electronics industry, and wound up at Fairchild. When National Semiconductor was taken over in the late sixties by some disenchanted Fairchild employees, McKenna also defected. He helped build National’s image by using ploys that included the distribution of pictures and profiles of the executives on baseball cards.

When McKenna started his own company in 1970 he won the business of Intel which had been founded by yet more refugees from Fairchild. For some time McKenna looked after the account by himself, wrote the advertising copy, and arranged for interviews with journalists. He suffered all the pains of starting and building a business and won some clients by keeping an eye