The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 92

Jobs spent the following year dropping in and out of Reed College and then seeking spiritual enlightenment on a pilgrimage to India. When he returned in the fall of 1974, he went to work at Atari under Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn. Atari, flush with its success with Pong, was on a hiring spree. “Have fun; make money,” declared one of the ads it took out in the San Jose Mercury. Jobs showed up dressed in his hippie garb and said he wouldn’t leave the lobby until he was hired. At Alcorn’s urging, Bushnell decided to take a chance on him. Thus the torch was passed from the most creative entrepreneur of video games to the man who would become the most creative entrepreneur of personal computers.

Despite his newly acquired Zen sensibilities, Jobs was inclined to inform his coworkers that they were “dumb shits” whose ideas sucked. Yet somehow he also managed to be compelling and inspiring. He sometimes wore a saffron robe, went barefoot, and believed that his strict diet of only fruits and vegetables meant that he need not use deodorant or shower often. As Bushnell recounted, “this was a mistaken theory.” So he put Jobs on the night shift, when almost no one else was around. “Steve was prickly, but I kind of liked him. So I asked him to go on the night shift. It was a way to save him.”

Jobs would later say that he learned some important lessons at Atari, the most profound being the need to keep interfaces friendly and intuitive. Instructions should be insanely simple: “Insert quarter, avoid Klingons.” Devices should not need manuals. “That simplicity rubbed off on him and made him a very focused product person,” said Ron Wayne, who worked with Jobs at Atari. In addition, Bushnell was able to help mold Jobs into an entrepreneur. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve,” Bushnell recalled. “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.”

Wozniak liked to come by Atari most evenings, after he finished work at Hewlett-Packard, to hang with Jobs and play the auto racing video game, Gran Trak 10, that Atari had finally developed. “My favorite game ever,” he called it. In his spare time, he pieced together a home version of Pong that he could play on his TV set. He was able to program it to blast the word Hell or Damn whenever a player missed hitting the ball. One night he showed it to Alcorn, who came up with a scheme. He assigned Jobs to engineer a one-player version of Pong, to be called Breakout, in which a user could volley the ball against a brick wall, dislocating bricks to win points. Alcorn guessed, correctly, that Jobs would convince Wozniak to do the circuit design. Jobs was not a great engineer, but he was good at getting people to do things. “I looked at it as a two-for-one thing,” Bushnell explained. “Woz was a better engineer.” He was also a lovable and naive teddy bear of a guy, who was as eager to help Jobs make a video game as Tom Sawyer’s friends were to whitewash his fence. “This was the most wonderful offer in my life, to actually design a game that people would use,” he recalled.

As Woz stayed up all night churning out elements of the design, Jobs sat on a bench to his left wire-wrapping the chips. Woz thought the task would take weeks, but in an early example of Jobs exerting what colleagues called his reality distortion field, he was able to stare unblinkingly at Woz and convince him he could do the job in four days.

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) and Steve Wozniak (1950– ) in 1976.

Jobs graphic on the original Macintosh in 1984.

Richard Stallman (1953– ).

Linus Torvalds (1969– ).

The March 1975 first gathering of the Homebrew Computer Club came just after Wozniak had finished designing Breakout. At the outset of the meeting, he felt out of place. He had been making calculators and home television game displays, but most of the excitement at that meeting centered on the new Altair computer, which didn’t initially interest him. Shy at the best of times, he withdrew into a corner. He later described the scene: “Someone there was holding up the magazine Popular Electronics, which had a picture of a computer on the front of it called the Altair. It turned out all these people were really Altair enthusiasts, not TV terminal people like I thought.” They went around the room introducing themselves, and when Wozniak’s turn came he said, “I’m Steve Wozniak, I work at Hewlett-Packard on calculators and I designed a video terminal.” He added that he also liked video games and pay movie systems for hotels, according to the minutes taken by Moore.

But there was one thing that piqued Wozniak’s interest. A person at the meeting passed around the specification sheet for the new Intel microprocessor. “That night, I checked out the microprocessor data sheet and I saw it had an instruction for adding a location in memory to the A register,” he recalled. “I thought, Wait a minute. Then it had another instruction you could use for subtracting memory from the A register. Whoa. Well, maybe this doesn’t mean anything to you, but I knew exactly what these instructions meant, and it was the most exciting thing to discover ever.”

Wozniak had been designing a terminal with a video monitor and a keyboard. He had planned for it to be a “dumb” terminal; it would have no computing power of its own, and instead it would connect via a phone line to a time-shared computer somewhere else. But when he saw the specs for the microprocessor—a chip that had a central processing unit on it—he had an insight: he could use a microprocessor to put some of the computing power into the terminal he was building. It would be a great leap from the Altair: a computer and a keyboard and a screen all integrated! “This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head,” he said. “That night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple I.”

After a day of work on calculator design at HP, Wozniak would go home for a quick dinner and then return to his cubicle to work on his computer. At 10 p.m. on Sunday, June 29, 1975, a historic milestone occurred: Wozniak tapped a few keys on his keyboard, the signal was processed by a microprocessor, and letters appeared on the screen. “I was shocked,” he confessed. “It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on the screen right in front of them.” That was not precisely true, but it was indeed the first time a keyboard and a monitor had been integrated with a personal computer designed for hobbyists.

The mission of the Homebrew Computer Club was to share ideas freely. That put it in the crosshairs of Bill Gates, but Wozniak embraced the communal ethos: “I so believed in the club’s mission to further computing that I Xeroxed maybe a hundred copies of my complete design and gave it to anyone who wanted it.” He was too shy, initially, to stand in front of the group and make a formal presentation, but he was so proud of his design that he loved standing in the back, showing it off to any who gathered around, and handing out the schematics. “I wanted to give it away for free to other people.”

Jobs thought differently, just as he had with the Blue Box. And as it turned out, his desire to package and sell an easy-to-use computer—and his instinct for how to do it—changed the realm of personal computers just as much as Wozniak’s clever circuit design did. Indeed, Wozniak would have been relegated to minor mentions in the Homebrew newsletter had Jobs not insisted that they create a company to commercialize it.