Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [98]
As Holt completed his work and the final size of the computer became clearer, Jobs returned to his former Atari workmate Howard Cantin, who had produced the artwork for the Apple I printed circuit board, and asked him to do the same for the Apple II. This time Jobs had more strenuous demands. He rejected Cantin’s first layout and insisted that on the second the lines linking chips be soldier straight. Cantin recalled the tussle. “He just drove me up the wall. I tried to tell him that there was a point at which a drive for perfection is nonproductive. He irritated me so bad I swore I’d never work for him again.” Jobs relented only when Cantin reduced the layout of the printed circuit board to the size of a lawyer’s scratch pad. Instead of taking the taped artwork directly to the printed-circuit-board manufacturers, Jobs insisted that the layout be fine-tuned, or digitized, by computer even though that caused a delay.
As the West Coast Computer Faire drew closer, there were other humdrum concerns. The business cards weren’t returned from the printer until two days before the fair opened. A few printed circuit boards were stuffed with chips before they had been coated with their glossy silk screens. Jobs meanwhile had plumped for a brown keyboard after gauging the reaction of people like his parents to a variety of colors. Though the computers were working, the keyboards went dead every twenty minutes because of a chip that was sensitive to static electricity. Meanwhile, Wozniak was busy trying to squeeze the programming code for an abbreviated form of the BASIC language into a ROM chip. He had hoped to use a new chip from AMI but when the part failed to appear on time he had to revert to a chip made by Synertek. He, Espinosa, Wigginton, and Holt wrote some small demonstration programs that highlighted the computer’s way with color and sound. The demonstration programs were duplicated hurriedly onto cassette recorders and every time the supply of tapes was exhausted, Espinosa was dispatched to the nearby Gemco discount store to buy some more.
More important, there was uncertainty about whether the case would be ready for the opening of the fair. After the mechanical drawings had passed muster, Mannock and Jobs had been presented with a choice between two molding processes: reaction injection or structural foam. In the former, a chemical reaction forces polyurethane to fill a mold but leaves bubbles in the finish. The latter is more elaborate, requiring pressurized foam to be injected and heated, but it also leaves a more polished result. Since nobody expected that Apple would sell more than five thousand of its second computer, Jobs and Mannock chose the reaction injection method which used epoxy tools rather than the more durable, and far more expensive, metal used for long production runs.
The first cases that were extracted from the molds were rickety. The surfaces were uneven, the lids were bowed, and the edges lapped over the keyboard. At Apple half a dozen people used trimming knives, sandpaper, and putty to camouflage the worst blemishes and sprayed the cases with a beige paint which gave a light look. They decided to muddle though the fair without air vents on the sides of the cases that weren’t cut cleanly. With most of the preparations over they adjourned on the evening before the fair to the St. Francis Hotel on San Francisco’s Union Square. Scott and Markkula were used to large hotels but for the younger members it was their first taste of the big time. Espinosa, who had traded his newspaper route for an hourly wage at Apple of three dollars, was startled to receive a cash advance and expense-account privileges.
Apple’s color computer was named with the same sort of reflex with which other, larger computer companies had named their machines.