Steve Jobs #2

STEVE JOBS - THE APPLE COMPUTER MAN

 FROM THE BOOK BY WALTER ISAACSON

Breakout

     One day in early 1975 Al Alcorn was sitting in his office at
Atari when Ron Wayne burst in. "Hey, Stevie is back!" he shouted.
"Wow, bring him on in," Alcorn replied.
     Jobs shuffled in barefoot, wearing a saffron robe and
carrying a copy of Be Here Now, which he handed to Alcorn and
insisted he read. "Can I have my job back?" he asked.
"He looked like a Hare Krishna guy, but it was great to see him,"
Alcorn recalled. "So I said, sure!"
     Once again, for the sake of harmony, Jobs worked mostly at
night. Wozniak, who was living in an apartment nearby and working
at HP, would come by after dinner to hang out and play the video
games. He had become addicted to Pong at a Sunnyvale bowling
alley, and he was able to build a version that he hooked up to
his home TV set.
     One day in the late summer of 1975, Nolan Bushnell, defying
the prevailing wisdom that paddle games were over, decided to
develop a single-player version of Pong; instead of competing
against an op ponent, the player would volley the ball into a
wall that lost a brick whenever it was hit. He called Jobs into
his office, sketched it out on his little blackboard, and asked
him to design it. There would be a bonus, Bushnell told him, for
every chip fewer than fifty that he used. Bushnell knew that jobs
was not a great engineer, but he assumed, correctly, that he
would recruit Wozniak, who was always hanging around. "I looked
at it as a two-for-one thing," Bushnell recalled. "Woz was a
better engineer."
     Wozniak was thrilled when Jobs asked him to help and
proposed splitting the fee. "This was the most wonderful offer in
my life, to actually design a game that people would use," he
recalled. Jobs said it had to be done in four days and with the
fewest chips possible. What he hid from Wozniak was that the
deadline was one that Jobs had imposed, because he needed to get
to the All One Farm to help prepare for the apple harvest. He
also didn't mention that there was a bonus tied to keeping down
the number of chips. "A game like this might take most engineers
a few months," Wozniak recalled. "I thought that there was no way
I could do it, but Steve made me sure that I could." So he stayed
up four nights in a row and did it. During the day at HP, Wozniak
would sketch out his design on paper. Then, after a fast-food
meal, he would go right to Atari and stay all night. As Wozniak
churned out the design, Jobs sat on a bench to his left
implementing it by wire - wrapping the chips onto a breadboard.
"While Steve was breadboarding, I spent time playing my favorite
game ever, which was the auto racing game Gran Trak 10," Wozniak
said.
     Astonishingly, they were able to get the job done in four
days, and Wozniak used only forty-five chips. Recollections
differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply gave Wozniak half of the
base fee and not the bonus Bushnell paid for saving five chips.
It would be another ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being
shown the tale in a book on the history of Atari titled Zap) that
jobs had been paid this bonus. "I think that Steve needed the
money, and he just didn't tell me the truth," Wozniak later said.
When he talks about it now, there are long pauses, and he admits
that it causes him pain. "I wish he had just been honest. If he
had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would
have just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your
friends." To Wozniak, it showed a fundamental difference in their
characters.
     "Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don't understand
why he would've gotten paid one thing and told me he'd gotten
paid another," he said. "But, you know, people are different."
When jobs learned this story was published, he called Wozniak to
deny it. "He told me that he didn't remember doing it, and that
if he did something like that he would remember it, so he
probably didn't do it," Wozniak recalled. When I asked Jobs
directly, he became unusually quiet and hesitant. "I don't know
where that allegation comes from," he said. "I gave him half the
money I ever got. That's how I've always been with Woz. I mean,
Woz stopped working in 1978. He never did one ounce of work after
1978. And yet he got exactly the same shares of Apple stock that
I did."
     Is it possible that memories are muddled and that Jobs did
not, in fact, shortchange Wozniak? "There's a chance that my
memory is all wrong and messed up," Wozniak told me, but after a
pause he reconsidered. "But no. I remember the details of this
one, the $350 check." He confirmed his memory with Nolan Bushnell
and Al Alcorn. "I remember talking about the bonus money to Woz,
and he was upset," Bushnell said. "I said yes, there was a bonus
for each chip they saved, and he just shook his head and then
clucked his tongue."
     Whatever the truth, Wozniak later insisted that it was not
worth rehashing. Jobs is a complex person, he said, and being
manipulative is just the darker facet of the traits that make him
successful. Wozniak would never have been that way, but as he
points out, he also could never have built Apple. "I would rather
let it pass," he said when I pressed the point. "It's not
something I want to judge Steve by."
     The Atari experience helped shape Jobs's approach to
business and design. He appreciated the user-friendliness of
Atari's insert-quarteravoid-Klingons games. "That simplicity
rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person,"
said Ron Wayne. Jobs also absorbed some of Bushnell's
take-no-prisoners attitude. "Nolan wouldn't take no for an
answer," according to Alcorn, "and this was Steve's first
impression of how things got done. Nolan was never abusive, like
Steve sometimes is. But he had the same driven attitude. It made
me cringe, but dammit, it got things done. In that way Nolan was
a mentor for Jobs."
     Bushnell agreed. "There is something indefinable in an
entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve," he said. "He was
interested not just in engineering, but also the business
aspects. I taught him that if you act like you can do something,
then it will work. I told him, 'Pretend to be completely in
control and people will assume that you are.'"
..........

To be continued now and again