Category: Books

The Problems of Design by a Marketing Committee

(p. 226) So why did the Apple Ill have so many problems, despite the fact that all of our other products had worked so great? I can answer that. It’s because the Apple III was not developed by a single engineer or a couple of engineers working together. It was developed by committee, by the marketing department. These (p. 227) were executives in the company who could take a lot of their power and decide to put all their money and resources in the direction of their own ideas. Their own ideas as to what a computer should be.

Marketing saw that the business community would be the bigger market. They saw that the typical small businessman went into a computer store, bought an Apple II, a printer, the VisiCalc spreadsheet program, and two plug-in cards. One was a memory card, which allowed them to run larger spreadsheets. And the other was an eighty-column card, which allowed them to present eighty columns of characters across the video display, instead of the normal forty. Forty columns was the limit of American TVs.
So they came up with the idea that this should all be built into a single machine: the Apple III. And it was built.
Initially there was virtually no software designed for the Apple III. Yet there were hundreds of software programs you could buy for the Apple II. So to have a lot of software right away, Apple built the Apple III as a dual computer–there was a switch that let you select whether the computer started up as an Apple II or as an Apple III. (The Apple III hardware was designed to be extremely compatible with the Apple II, which was hard to improve on.) It couldn’t be both at. once.
And it was here they did something very wrong. They wanted to set the public perception of the Apple III as a business computer and position the Apple II as the so-called home hobby machine. The little brother of the family. But get this. Marketing had us add chips–and therefore expense and complexity–to the Apple III in order to disable the extra memory and eighty column triodes if you booted it up as an Apple II.
This is what killed the Apple Ill’s chances from the get-go. Here’s why. A businessman buying an Apple II for his work could easily say, “I’ll buy an Apple III, and use it in the Apple II mode since I’m used to it, but I’ll still have the more modern machine.” (p. 228) But Apple killed the product that businessman would want by disabling the very Apple II features (extra memory and eighty- column mode) he was buying the computer for.
Out of the chute, the Apple Ill got a lot of publicity, but there was almost nothing you could run on it. As I said, it wasn’t reliable. And in Apple II mode, it was crippled.
To this day, it boggles my mind. It’s just not the way an engineer–or any rational person, for that matter–would think. It disillusioned me that big companies could work this way.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Commodore, Atari, and Some Venture Capitalists, Refused to Fund Jobs and Wozniak

(p. 196) After Commodore turned us down, we went over to Al Alcorn’s house. He was one of the founders of Atari with Nolan Bushnell, and he was the one who’d hired Steve to do video games there two years before.

Now, I knew Al knew me. He knew I had designed Breakout, the one-player version of Pong. I remember that when we went to his house I was so impressed because he had one of the earliest color projection TVs. Man, in 1976, he would have been among the first people to have one. That was cool.
But he told us later that Atari was too busy with the video game market to do a computer project.
A few days after that, venture capitalists Steve had contacted started to come by. One of them was Don Valentine at Sequoia. He kind of pooh-poohed the way we talked about it.
He said, “What’s the market?”
“About a million,” I told him.
“How do you know?”
I told him the ham radio market had one million users, and this could be at least that big.
Well, he turned us down, but he did get us in touch with a guy named Mike Markkula. He was only thirty, he told us, but already retired from Intel. He was into gadgets, he told us. Maybe Mike would know what to do with us.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

HP Turns Down Wozniak Again

(p. 193) But I went to talk to the project manager, Kent Stockwell. Although I had done all these computer things with the Apple I and Apple II, I wanted to work on a computer at HP so bad I would have done anything. I would even be a measely printer interface engineer. Something tiny.

I told him, “My whole interest in life has been computers. Not calculators.”
(p. 194) After a few days, I was turned down again.
I still believe HP made a huge mistake by not letting me go to its computer project. I was so loyal to HP. I wanted to work there for life. When you have an employee who says he’s tired of calculators and is really productive in computers, you should put him where he’s productive. Where he’s happy. The only thing I can figure is there were managers and submanagers on this computer project who felt threatened. I had already done a whole computer. Maybe they bypassed me because I had done this single-handedly. I don’t know what they were thinking.
But they should’ve said to themselves, “How do we get Steve Wozniak on board? Just make him a little printer interface engineer.” I would’ve been so happy, but they didn’t bother to put me where I would’ve been happiest.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

“Fun” and “Profits” as Motives for Entrepreneurship

(p. 184) After we started selling the boards to Paul Terrell–working day and night to get them to him on time–we had profits like I never imagined. Suddenly our little business was making more than I was making at HP. That wasn’t very much, admittedly. But still, it was a lot. We were building the boxes for $220 and selling them wholesale to Paul Terrell for $500.

And, of course, we didn’t need a ton of money to operate. I had a day job, so I looked at it as, Hey, cool. Extra money for pizza! As for Steve, he was living at home. I was twenty-five and he was only twenty-one at the time, so what expenses could we have, really? Apple didn’t have to make that much to sustain itself and be ongoing. We weren’t paying ourselves salaries or paying rent, after all. We didn’t have any patents to pay for. Or lawyers. It was a small-time business, and we weren’t worried that much about anything.
My dad, watching this, pointed out that we weren’t actually making money because we weren’t paying ourselves anything. But we didn’t care, we were having too much fun.

But note, only several pages later:

(p. 194) Like I said before, we needed money. Steve knew it and I knew it.

So by that summer of 1976, we started talking to potential money people about Apple, showing them the Apple II working in color in Steve’s garage.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Apple Was Founded Without Clear Path to Profit

(p. 172) Frankly, I couldn’t see how we would earn our money back. I figured we’d have to invest about. $1,000 to get a computer company to print the boards. To get. that money back, we’d have to sell the board for $40 to fifty people. And I didn’t think there were fifty people at Homebrew who’d buy the board. After all, there were only about five hundred members at this point, and most of them were Altair enthusiasts.

But Steve had a good argument. We were in his car and he said–and I can remember him saying this like it was yesterday: “Well, even if we lose our money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.”
For once in our lives, we’d have a company. That convinced me. And I was excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company. Wow. I knew right then that I’d do it. How could I not?

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

“Our Own Peaceful Deity Keeping Watch Before the Open Gates of America”

EnlighteningTheWorldBK2010-05-18.jpg

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

I believe that a case can be made that Grover Cleveland is an under-appreciated President. (I like his comment on the Statue of Liberty quoted below.)

(p. W9) The cold rains of Oct. 28, 1886, did little to dampen the ardor of the tens of thousands of giddy New Yorkers who crowded onto the southern tip of Manhattan that afternoon to watch the festivities on Bedloe’s Island, a patch of land in New York Harbor. On cue, an enormous veil dropped, and the spectators gazed for the first time at the face of the massive statue that, until then, had been the subject not only of curiosity but also of skepticism.

Whatever doubts Americans might have had about this unsolicited, and rather costly, gift from the French seemed at once to vanish. A “thunderous cacophony of salutes from steamer whistles, brass bands, and booming guns, together with clouds of smoke from the cannonade, engulfed the statue for the next half hour,” Yasmin Sabina Khan writes in “Enlightening the World,” her account of how the Statue of Liberty came to be.
The crowd roared, then various speakers held forth, welcoming the 225-ton, 151-foot-tall Lady Liberty, as she would soon be known. President Grover Cleveland, in his remarks, tried to distinguish this colossus from others of its kind throughout human history. Where the statue-symbols of other nations might depict “a fierce and warlike god, filled with wrath and vengeance,” this one exhibited only “our own peaceful deity keeping watch before the open gates of America.”
President Cleveland’s interpretation of the statue turned out to be but one of many over the years. To Ms. Khan the Statue of Liberty’s symbolic significance is not a complicated matter and never was. The statue celebrates the “friendship” of the people of France and those of the U.S.; it represents “liberty” and “liberty” alone.

For the full review, see:

ALAN PELL CRAWFORD. “BOOKS; Lady Liberty’s Path to America.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MAY 8, 2010): W9.

Wozniak Spent a Lot of Time Collecting Information Before Building a Project

(p. 160) My style with projects has always been to spend a lot of time getting ready to build it. Now that I saw my own computer could be a reality, I started collecting information on all the components and chips that might apply to a computer design.

I would drive to work in the morning–sometimes as early as 6:30 a.m.–and there, alone in the early morning, I would quickly read over engineering magazines and chip manuals. I’d study the specifications and timing diagrams of the chips I was interested in, like the $40 Motorola 6800 Myron had told me about. All the while, I’d be preparing the design in my head.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Swedish Town Wants Nuclear Waste Dump

OsthammarSwedenNuclearWasteSite2010-05-20.jpg“Osthammar is competing for the right to host a storage site for radioactive waste.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

After reading Petr Beckmann’s The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear, a few decades ago, I became convinced that nuclear power was being rejected in the United States due to irrational fears based on a failure to make reasonable estimates of the costs and the benefits.
Isn’t it ironic that the irrational fear of nuclear power is at long last being overcome mainly by the irrational fear of global warming?

(p. A10) . . . , in Osthammar, . . . as many as 80 percent of the 21,000 inhabitants are in favor of the nuclear waste dump. The town is now one of two finalists among the communities in Sweden that vied for the right to host the dump.

Sweden, which swore off nuclear power after less than 20 percent of Swedes approved of it in a referendum in the 1980s, would seem an unlikely place for such a competition. But it has reversed course recently and plans to begin building new nuclear reactors, adding to the 10 it already operates.
But legislation requires that before any new plants can be built, the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company, better known by the initials SKB, must first create permanent storage space for the radioactive waste the reactors produce.
In most countries, of course, people would sooner allow a factory hog farm or garbage incinerator in their backyards than a nuclear waste dump. But in Sweden, SKB found 18 of 20 possible towns near proposed sites intrigued by their proposition. Then it had to whittle the list down to two, Osthammar and Oskarshamn, both already the site of nuclear plants.
SKB recently said it would ask the Swedish government later this year for permission to build the storage depot in Osthammar. If the government gives the green light to Osthammar over Oskarshamn, construction could begin some time after 2015, officials said.
Claes Thegerstrom, a nuclear physicist who is the chief executive of SKB, attributed the new attitude of Swedes toward nuclear energy to fears of global warming. “In the 1980s nobody was mentioning CO2,” or carbon dioxide, considered the major cause of global warming, he said. “Now, it’s on the top of the list of environmental issues.” Since they burn no fossil fuels, nuclear power plants do not produce carbon dioxide.

For the full story, see:
JOHN TAGLIABUE. “Osthammar Journal; A Town Says ‘Yes, in Our Backyard’ to Nuclear Site.” The New York Times (Tues., April 6, 2010): A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated April 5, 2010.)

Beckmann’s wonderful book was:
Beckmann, Petr. The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear. Golem Press, 1976.

Wozniak: “It Was as if My Whole Life Had Been Leading Up to this Point”

(p. 155) It was as if my whole life had been leading up to this point. I’d done my minicomputer redesigns. I’d done data on–screen with Pong and Breakout., and I’d already done a TV terminal. From the Cream Soda Computer and others, I knew how to connect memory and make a working system. I realized that all I needed was this Canadian processor or another processor like it and (p. 156) some memory chips. Then I’d have the computer I’d always wanted!

Oh my god. I could build my own computer, a computer I could own and design to do any neat things I wanted to do with it for the rest of my life.
I didn’t need to spend $400 to get an Altair–which really was just a glorified bunch of chips with a metal frame around it and some lights. That was the same as my take-home salary, I mean, come on. And to make the Altair do anything interesting, I’d have to spend way, way more than that. Probably hundreds, even thousands of dollars. And besides, I’d already been there with the Cream Soda Computer. I was bored with it then. You never go back. You go forward. And now, the Cream Soda Computer could be my jumping-off point.
No way was I going to do that. I decided then and there I had the opportunity to build the complete computer I’d always wanted. I just needed any microprocessor, and I could build an extremely small computer I could write programs on. Programs like games, and the simulation programs I wrote at work. The possibilities went on and on. And I wouldn’t have to buy an Altair to do it. I would design it. all by myself.
That night, the night of that first meeting, this whole vision of a kind of personal computer just popped into my head. All at once. Just like that.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.

Wozniak on the Motives and Rewards of Inventor and Innovator

(p. 147) The whole thing used forty-five chips, and Steve paid me half the seven hundred bucks he said they paid him for it. (They were paying us based on how few chips I could do it. in.) Later I found out he got paid a bit (p. 148) more for it–like a few thousand dollars–than he said at the time, but we were kids, you know. He got paid one amount, and told me he got paid another. He wasn’t honest with me, and I was hurt. But I didn’t make a big deal about it or anything.

Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don’t really understand why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another. But, you know, people are different. And in no way do I regret the experience at Atari with Steve Jobs. He was my best friend and I still feel extremely linked with him. I wish him well. And it was a great project that was so fun. Anyway, in the long run of money–Steve and I ended up getting very comfortable money-wise from our work founding Apple just a few years later–it certainly didn’t add up to much.
Steve and I were the best of friends for a very, very long time. We had the same goals for a while. They jelled perfectly at forming Apple. But we were always different people, different people right from the start.
You know, it’s strange, hut right around the time I started working on what later became the Apple I board, this idea popped into my mind about two guys who die on the same day. One guy is really successful, and he’s spending all his time running companies, managing them, making sure they are profitable, and making sales goals all the time. And the other guy, all he does is lounge around, doesn’t have much money, really likes to tell jokes and follow gadgets and technology and other things he finds interesting in the world, and he just spends his life laughing.
In my head, the guy who’d rather laugh than control things is going to be the one who has the happier life. That’s just my opinion. I figure happiness is the most important thing in life, just how much you laugh. The guy whose head kind of floats, he’s so happy. That’s who I am, who I want to be and have always wanted to be.
(p. 149) And that’s why I never let stuff like what happened with Breakout bother me. Though you can disagree–you can even split from a relationship–you don’t have to hold it against the other. You’re just different. That’s the best way to live life and be happy
And I figured this all out even before Steve and I started Apple.

Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.