The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 93

Jobs began calling chip makers such as Intel to get free samples. “I mean, he knew how to talk to a sales representative,” Wozniak marveled. “I could never have done that. I’m too shy.” Jobs also started accompanying Wozniak to Homebrew meetings, carrying the television set and conducting the demonstrations, and he came up with a plan to sell circuit boards preprinted with Wozniak’s design. It was typical of their partnership. “Every time I’d design something great, Steve would find a way to make money for us,” said Wozniak. “It never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them in the air and sell a few.’?” Jobs sold his Volkswagen Bus and Wozniak sold his HP calculator to raise funding for their endeavor.

They made an odd but powerful partnership: Woz was an angelic naif who looked like a panda, Jobs a demon-driven mesmerizer who looked like a whippet. Gates had bullied Allen into giving him more than half of their partnership. In the case of Apple, it was Wozniak’s father, an engineer who respected engineers and disdained marketers and managers, who insisted that his son, who had made the designs, be given more than 50 percent of the partnership. He confronted Jobs when he came by the Wozniak house: “You don’t deserve shit. You haven’t produced anything.” Jobs began to cry and told Steve Wozniak that he was willing to call off the partnership. “If we’re not 50-50,” Jobs said, “you can have the whole thing.” Wozniak, however, understood what Jobs contributed to their partnership, and it was worth at least 50 percent. If he had been on his own, Wozniak might not have progressed beyond handing out free schematics.

After they demonstrated the computer at a Homebrew meeting, Jobs was approached by Paul Terrell, the owner of a small chain of computer stores called The Byte Shop. After they talked, Terrell said, “Keep in touch,” handing Jobs his card. The next day Jobs walked into his store barefoot and announced, “I’m keeping in touch.” By the time Jobs had finished his pitch, Terrell had agreed to order fifty of what became known as the Apple I computer. But he wanted them fully assembled, not just printed boards with a pile of components. It was another step in the evolution of personal computers. They would not be just for solder-gun-wielding hobbyists anymore.

Jobs understood this trend. When it came time to build the Apple II, he did not spend much time studying microprocessor specs. Instead he went to Macy’s at the Stanford mall and studied the Cuisinart. He decided that the next personal computer should be like an appliance: all fit together with a sleek case and no assembly required. From the power supply to the software, from the keyboard to the monitor, everything should be tightly integrated. “My vision was to create the first fully packaged computer,” he explained. “We were no longer aiming for the handful of hobbyists who liked to assemble their own computers, who knew how to buy transformers and keyboards. For every one of them there were a thousand people who would want the machine to be ready to run.”

By early 1977 a few other hobbyist computer companies had bubbled up from the Homebrew and other such cauldrons. Lee Felsenstein, the club’s master of ceremonies, had launched Processor Technology and come out with a computer called Sol. Other companies included Cromemco, Vector Graphic, Southwest Technical Products, Commodore, and IMSAI. But the Apple II was the first personal computer to be simple and fully integrated, from the hardware to the software. It went on sale in June 1977 for $1,298, and within three years 100,000 of them were sold.

The rise of Apple marked a decline of hobbyist culture. For decades young innovators such as Kilby and Noyce had been introduced to electronics by knowing how to distinguish different transistors, resistors, capacitors, and diodes, then wire-wrapping or soldering them into breadboards to create circuits that became ham radios, rocket controllers, amplifiers, and oscilloscopes. But in 1971 microprocessors began making complex circuit boards obsolete, and Japanese electronics companies began mass-producing products that were cheaper than homemade ones. Sales of do-it-yourself kits withered away. Hardware hackers such as Wozniak ceded primacy to software coders such as Gates. With the Apple II and then, more notably, the Macintosh in 1984, Apple pioneered the practice of creating machines that users were not supposed to open and fiddle with their innards.

The Apple II also established a doctrine that would become a religious creed for Steve Jobs: his company’s hardware was tightly integrated with its operating system software. He was a perfectionist who liked to control the user experience end to end. He didn’t want to let you buy an Apple machine and run someone else’s clunky operating system on it, nor buy Apple’s operating system and put it on someone else’s junky hardware.

That integrated model did not become standard practice. The launch of the Apple II woke up the big computer companies, most notably IBM, and prompted an alternative to emerge. IBM—more specifically IBM as it was outmaneuvered by Bill Gates—would embrace an approach in which the personal computer’s hardware and its operating system were made by different companies. As a result, software would become king, and, except at Apple, most computer hardware would become a commodity.

DAN BRICKLIN AND VISICALC

For personal computers to be useful, and for practical people to justify buying them, they had to become tools rather than merely toys. Even the Apple II might have been a passing fad, once the excitement of the hobbyists receded, if users had not been able to apply it to a practical task. Thus there arose a demand for what became known as application software, programs that could apply a personal computer’s processing power to a specific chore.

The most influential pioneer in that field was Dan Bricklin, who conceived the first financial spreadsheet program, VisiCalc.⁸³ Bricklin was an MIT computer science graduate who spent a few years developing word-processing software at Digital Equipment Corporation and then enrolled at Harvard Business School. Sitting in a lecture one day in the spring of 1978, he watched as the professor created the columns and rows for a financial model on the blackboard. When he found an error or wanted to modify a value in one cell, the professor had to use his eraser and change the values in many of the other cells.⁸⁴

Bricklin had seen Doug Engelbart demonstrate his oNLine System, made famous at the Mother of All Demos, which featured a graphical display and a mouse for pointing and clicking. Bricklin began envisioning an electronic spreadsheet that would use a mouse and simple point-drag-and-click interface. That summer, while riding a bike on Martha’s Vineyard, he decided to turn the idea into a product. He was well suited for such an endeavor. He was a software engineer with the instincts of a product person; he had a feel for what users would want. His parents were entrepreneurs, and he was excited by the prospect of starting a business. And he was a good team player, who knew how to find the right partners. “I had the right combination of experience and knowledge to develop software that met a need people had,” he observed.⁸⁵

So he teamed up with a friend he had met at MIT, Bob Frankston, another software engineer whose father was an entrepreneur. “The ability for Dan and me to work as a team was crucial,” Frankston said. Although Bricklin could have written the program alone, instead he sketched it out and had Frankston develop it. “It gave him the freedom to focus on what the program should do rather than how to do it,” Frankston said of their collaboration.⁸⁶

The first decision they made was to develop the program for use on a personal computer rather than on a DEC business computer. They chose the Apple II because Wozniak had made its architecture open and transparent enough that the functions needed by software developers were easily accessible.