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By Root 409 0

to be at National but Scott’s position as a director of a line was one of the keystones in the company’s system of management, and he was, in effect, running a business that employed eight hundred people. He prospered, endured table-pounding sessions with the company’s president where coffee cups were known to bounce, turned down an offer to run a plant in the Far East, and decided he wanted to stay in California. By the time he lunched with Markkula, Scott said, “I was bored. I had been doing the same job for four years.” He saw the formation of a company in engineer’s terms: “It’s like a chess game except the moves continue to happen. The challenge is to put together a whole system that works without being minded and that has its own checks and balances. I wanted to see if I could build a system from scratch.” He was a tubby man who walked with his fists clenched. He wore spectacles, had short hair that he would curl with his fingers, usually wore T-shirts that bulged over his belt, and on a good day looked like the benevolent proprietor of an automobile wrecking yard. There was about him more than just a hint that he would have been happy running an automated factory from a seat behind a computer terminal, with a can of Budweiser at his side while “The Ride of the Valkyries” thundered in the background.

Markkula, who was diplomatic and disliked imposing demands on others, asked Jobs and Wozniak to consider Scott as a possible president for Apple. Wozniak, anxious not to be burdened with any corporate drudgery, was impressed by Scott and flattered by his obvious infatuation with computers. “I felt very comfortable knowing that somebody else besides Steve would be around to manage production.” Jobs, however, was far less sure about this tumbling man who didn’t seem to care about Eastern philosophy and who preferred pizza to salad. He spent hours at a Bob’s Big Boy with Holt and Wozniak, ruminating about Scott. Holt recalled, “Jobs didn’t know whether he wanted to run the show or not. He didn’t have much confidence that Woz had much business acumen and was going to speak with him and help, if push came to shove, to keep the company on the right course. He was left in the uncertain position of not knowing how much power he was giving up.” If Scott proved unsatisfactory, Jobs also wanted to be free to repurchase his share of the stock. Markkula once again exercised his persuasive influence and explained to Jobs that it was not a question of power but whether Apple would be better managed.

Jobs listened. He balanced the promise of future contributions against the tangible loss of power. He was strong enough to admit what he didn’t know and pugnacious enough not to get bowled over by men who were many years older. He was prepared to relinquish the sweat of a year, but was also consoled by simple arithmetic. Since any combination of Wozniak, Jobs, and Markkula controlled the majority of the company’s shares, they could unseat Scott at any time. It was a peculiar arrangement and Scott, who had become a guardian of other people’s investments, recognized reality. “I wondered whether I could really get anything done or whether we would argue all the time. My biggest concern was whether Jobs and I could get along. He was concerned that I wasn’t doing consumer stuff. I was concerned that he didn’t know what he was doing.” Since Scott was the nominal boss, he was paid $20,001 for the first year, one dollar more than the members of the triumvirate.

Though, to one degree or another, they were all tekkies, Jobs, Wozniak, Holt, Markkula, and Scott had virtually nothing in common. They differed in age, appearance, background, and ambition. They were attracted to different sorts of lovers and had varying attitudes toward fidelity, pleasure, aesthetics, religion, money, and politics. A couple speckled their speech with obscenities while others almost blushed at the sound of a four-letter word. They were so different that a biologist presented with five chromosome specimens would probably have been surprised to learn the donors were