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Wozniak considered Markkula’s confidence entirely misplaced and predicted to his parents with steadfast assurance that Apple’s bigtime investor would lose every penny. Wozniak did not share Markkula’s enthusiasm and was wondering whether to accept Hewlett-Packard’s invitation to transfer to Oregon. Nor was his wife, Alice, very enthusiastic about the business that consumed so much time and hadn’t produced much money. She said, “I liked security and the paycheck coming in.” When Markkula made it a condition of his investment that Wozniak join Apple full time, matters came to a head. Markkula, Jobs, and Holt discussed whether they could muddle through without Wozniak and issued all sorts of threats. Holt recalled, “We told him if he didn’t come to work full time for Apple Computer he was out. Even then he didn’t come waltzing through the door. He moaned and groaned and puttered around for a couple of weeks.” Jobs staged a fierce campaign to persuade Wozniak to join Apple. He called Wozniak’s friends, moaned that he was at his wits’ end and asked them to place persuasive telephone calls. He went around to Wozniak’s parents’ house, broke into tears, and begged for their help. Markkula provided a quieter pressure, patiently explaining to Wozniak, “You go to a company when you want to turn an idea into money.” Wozniak said, “Once I decided I was doing it to make money, it made the rest of the decisions easy.”

There were a few practical considerations. The Apple Computer Company was officially formed on January 3, 1977, and in March 1977, bought out the partnership for $5,308.96. To avoid any possible complication Markkula insisted that the company purchase Ron Wayne’s share of the partnership. Wayne was delighted when he received a check and discovered that it was worth $1,700 more than the paper it was printed on. There were also some larger matters. Since Markkula had never expressed any desire to run the business, there was also a pressing need to find somebody who would look after the nuts and chips. Wozniak recalled, “Mike said if he was putting money in, he wanted someone to mind the pennies.”

Markkula’s idea of a penny minder was Michael Scott whose career had been interwoven with his own. When both started work at Fairchild on the same September day in 1967, they were given adjoining offices. For a short time Markkula worked for Scott who was a year his junior. They did the sorts of things contemporaries did. They joshed about company chitchat and predicted to each other the speed with which prices for semiconductors would fall. After they discovered that they shared the same birth date, February 11, they made it a point to have an annual celebratory lunch. It was at their ritual meal in 1977 that Markkula asked Scott whether he would be interested in becoming president of Apple.

Scott, like Markkula, was an engineer at heart. He had grown up in Gainesville, Florida, and in his teens had spent afternoons and weekends playing around in a university data-processing department with an IBM 650—which, in the late fifties, had been the most popular computer in the world. He chose the California Institute of Technology over MIT because he preferred sun to snow, and he specialized in physics. After graduating he spent a couple of years as an engineer at Beckman Instruments Systems Division in Southern California which was building ground instruments for checking Saturn rockets. Beckman happened to be a regular port of call for Fairchild salesmen anxious to meet quotas and targets set by Don Valentine. Scott joined Fairchild (where he was lured partly by the promise of a $100 reward for leads to other recruits). He stayed a couple of years, was disillusioned by corporate politicking, and left to join National Semiconductor.

On his thirty-second birthday Scott was running a $30 million a year manufacturing line which made chips that combined analog and digital electronics. It was not the most glamorous place