THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD 2 page

+ 5 = 9, etc.). Hertzfeld recalled that when Atkinson fired up his demo, everyone was impressed

except Jobs. “Well, circles and ovals are good,” he said, “but how about drawing rectangles with

rounded corners?”

“I don’t think we really need it,” said Atkinson, who explained that it would be almost

impossible to do. “I wanted to keep the graphics routines lean and limit them to the primitives that

truly needed to be done,” he recalled.

“Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!” Jobs said, jumping up and getting more

intense. “Just look around this room!” He pointed out the whiteboard and the tabletop and other

objects that were rectangular with rounded corners. “And look outside, there’s even more,

practically everywhere you look!” He dragged Atkinson out for a walk, pointing out car windows

and billboards and street signs. “Within three blocks, we found seventeen examples,” said Jobs. “I

started pointing them out everywhere until he was completely convinced.”

“When he finally got to a No Parking sign, I said, ‘Okay, you’re right, I give up. We need to

have a rounded-corner rectangle as a primitive!’” Hertzfeld recalled, “Bill returned to Texaco

Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing

rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast.” The dialogue boxes and windows on

the Lisa and the Mac, and almost every other subsequent computer, ended up being rendered with

rounded corners.

At the calligraphy class he had audited at Reed, Jobs learned to love typefaces, with all of their

serif and sans serif variations, proportional spacing, and leading. “When we were designing the

first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me,” he later said of that class. Because the Mac was

bitmapped, it was possible to devise an endless array of fonts, ranging from the elegant to the

wacky, and render them pixel by pixel on the screen.

To design these fonts, Hertzfeld recruited a high school friend from suburban Philadelphia,

Susan Kare. They named the fonts after the stops on Philadelphia’s Main Line commuter train:

Overbrook,

Merion, Ardmore, and Rosemont. Jobs found the process fascinating. Late one afternoon he

stopped by and started brooding about the font names. They were “little cities that nobody’s ever

heard of,” he complained. “They ought to be world-class cities!” The fonts were renamed

Chicago, New York, Geneva, London, San Francisco, Toronto, and Venice.

Markkula and some others could never quite appreciate Jobs’s obsession with typography. “His

knowledge of fonts was remarkable, and he kept insisting on having great ones,” Markkula

recalled. “I kept saying, ‘Fonts?!? Don’t we have more important things to do?’” In fact the

delightful assortment of Macintosh fonts, when combined with laser-writer printing and great

graphics capabilities, would help launch the desktop publishing industry and be a boon for Apple’

s bottom line. It also introduced all sorts of regular folks, ranging from high school journalists to

moms who edited PTA newsletters, to the quirky joy of knowing about fonts, which was once

reserved for printers, grizzled editors, and other ink-stained wretches.

Kare also developed the icons, such as the trash can for discarding files, that helped define

graphical interfaces. She and Jobs hit it off because they shared an instinct for simplicity along

with a desire to make the Mac whimsical. “He usually came in at the end of every day,” she said.

“He’d always want to know what was new, and he’s always had good taste and a good sense for

visual details.” Sometimes he came in on Sunday morning, so Kare made it a point to be there

working. Every now and then, she would run into a problem. He rejected one of her renderings of

a rabbit, an icon for speeding up the mouse-click rate, saying that the furry creature looked “too

gay.”

Jobs lavished similar attention on the title bars atop windows and documents. He had Atkinson

and Kare do them over and over again as he agonized over their look. He did not like the ones on

the Lisa because they were too black and harsh. He wanted the ones on the Mac to be smoother, to

have pinstripes. “We must have gone through twenty different title bar designs before he was

happy,” Atkinson recalled. At one point Kare and Atkinson complained that he was making them

spend too much time on tiny little tweaks to the title bar when they had bigger things to do. Jobs

erupted. “Can you imagine looking

at that every day?” he shouted. “It’s not just a little thing, it’s something we have to do right.”

Chris Espinosa found one way to satisfy Jobs’s design demands and control-freak tendencies.

One of Wozniak’s youthful acolytes from the days in the garage, Espinosa had been convinced to

drop out of Berkeley by Jobs, who argued that he would always have a chance to study, but only

one chance to work on the Mac. On his own, he decided to design a calculator for the computer.

“We all gathered around as Chris showed the calculator to Steve and then held his breath, waiting

for Steve’s reaction,” Hertzfeld recalled.

“Well, it’s a start,” Jobs said, “but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some

lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.” Espinosa kept refining it in response to

Jobs’s critiques, day after day, but with each iteration came new criticisms. So finally one

afternoon, when Jobs came by, Espinosa unveiled his inspired solution: “The Steve Jobs Roll

Your Own Calculator Construction Set.” It allowed the user to tweak and personalize the look of

the calculator by changing the thickness of the lines, the size of the buttons, the shading, the

background, and other attributes. Instead of just laughing, Jobs plunged in and started to play

around with the look to suit his tastes. After about ten minutes he got it the way he liked. His

design, not surprisingly, was the one that shipped on the Mac and remained the standard for fifteen

years.

Although his focus was on the Macintosh, Jobs wanted to create a consistent design language

for all Apple products. So he set up a contest to choose a world-class designer who would be for

Apple what Dieter Rams was for Braun. The project was code-named Snow White, not because of

his preference for the color but because the products to be designed were code-named after the

seven dwarfs. The winner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer who was responsible for the

look of Sony’s Trinitron televisions. Jobs flew to the Black Forest region of Bavaria to meet him

and was impressed not only with Esslinger’s passion but also his spirited way of driving his

Mercedes at more than one hundred miles per hour.

Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a “born-in-America gene

for Apple’s DNA” that would produce a

“California global” look, inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex

appeal.” His guiding principle was “Form follows emotion,” a play on the familiar maxim that

form follows function. He produced forty models of products to demonstrate the concept, and

when Jobs saw them he proclaimed, “Yes, this is it!” The Snow White look, which was adopted

immediately for the Apple IIc, featured white cases, tight rounded curves, and lines of thin

grooves for both ventilation and decoration. Jobs offered Esslinger a contract on the condition that

he move to California. They shook hands and, in Esslinger’s not-so-modest words, “that

handshake launched one of the most decisive collaborations in the history of industrial design.”

Esslinger’s firm, frogdesign,2 opened in Palo Alto in mid-1983 with a $1.2 million annual contract

to work for Apple, and from then on every Apple product has included the proud declaration

“Designed in California.”

From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark of passionate craftsmanship is making sure that

even the aspects that will remain hidden are done beautifully. One of the most extreme—and

telling—implementations of that philosophy came when he scrutinized the printed circuit board

that would hold the chips and other components deep inside the Macintosh. No consumer would

ever see it, but Jobs began critiquing it on aesthetic grounds. “That part’s really pretty,” he said.

“But look at the memory chips. That’s ugly. The lines are too close together.”

One of the new engineers interrupted and asked why it mattered. “The only thing that’s

important is how well it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”

Jobs reacted typically. “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A

great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s

going to see it.” In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again

reiterated that lesson from his father: “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of

drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and

nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on

the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way

through.”

From Mike Markkula he had learned the importance of packaging and presentation. People do

judge a book by its cover, so for the box of the Macintosh, Jobs chose a full-color design and kept

trying to make it look better. “He got the guys to redo it fifty times,” recalled Alain Rossmann, a

member of the Mac team who married Joanna Hoffman. “It was going to be thrown in the trash as

soon as the consumer opened it, but he was obsessed by how it looked.” To Rossmann, this

showed a lack of balance; money was being spent on expensive packaging while they were trying

to save money on the memory chips. But for Jobs, each detail was essential to making the

Macintosh amazing.

When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a

ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a

Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each

Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures

were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs

called them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went first. Jobs waited until last, after

all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed his name in

lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he toasted them with champagne. “With moments like

this, he got us seeing our work as art,” said Atkinson.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

BUILDING THE MAC

The Journey Is the Reward

Competition

When IBM introduced its personal computer in August 1981, Jobs had his team buy one and

dissect it. Their consensus was that it sucked. Chris Espinosa called it “a half-assed, hackneyed

attempt,” and there was some truth to that. It used old-fashioned command-line prompts and didn’t

support bitmapped graphical displays. Apple became cocky, not realizing that corporate

technology managers might feel more comfortable buying from an established company like IBM

rather than one named after a piece of fruit. Bill Gates happened to be visiting Apple headquarters

for a meeting on the day the IBM PC was announced. “They didn’t seem to care,” he said. “It took

them a year to realize what had happened.”

Reflecting its cheeky confidence, Apple took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal with

the headline “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” It cleverly positioned the upcoming computer battle as a

two-way contest between the spunky and rebellious Apple and the establishment Goliath IBM,

conveniently relegating to irrelevance companies such as Commodore, Tandy, and Osborne that

were doing just as well as Apple.

Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil

empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect

foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere business competition, but as a spiritual

struggle. “If, for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is

that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years,” he told an

interviewer. “Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation.”

Even thirty years later, reflecting back on the competition, Jobs cast it as a holy crusade: “IBM

was essentially Microsoft at its worst. They were not a force for innovation; they were a force for

evil. They were like ATT or Microsoft or Google is.”

Unfortunately for Apple, Jobs also took aim at another perceived competitor to his Macintosh: the

company’s own Lisa. Partly it was psychological. He had been ousted from that group, and now

he wanted to beat it. He also saw healthy rivalry as a way to motivate his troops. That’s why he

bet John Couch $5,000 that the Mac would ship before the Lisa. The problem was that the rivalry

became unhealthy. Jobs repeatedly portrayed his band of engineers as the cool kids on the block,

in contrast to the plodding HP engineer types working on the Lisa.

More substantively, when he moved away from Jef Raskin’s plan for an inexpensive and

underpowered portable appliance and reconceived the Mac as a desktop machine with a graphical

user interface, it became a scaled-down version of the Lisa that would likely undercut it in the

marketplace.

Larry Tesler, who managed application software for the Lisa, realized that it would be

important to design both machines to use many of the same software programs. So to broker

peace, he arranged for Smith and Hertzfeld to come to the Lisa work space and demonstrate the

Mac prototype. Twenty-five engineers showed up and were listening politely when, halfway into

the presentation, the door burst open. It was Rich Page, a volatile engineer who was responsible

for much of the Lisa’s design. “The Macintosh is going to destroy the Lisa!” he shouted. “The

Macintosh is going to ruin Apple!” Neither Smith nor Hertzfeld responded, so Page continued his

rant.

“Jobs wants to destroy Lisa because we wouldn’t let him control it,” he said, looking as if he

were about to cry. “Nobody’s going to buy a Lisa because they know the Mac is coming! But you

don’t care!” He stormed out of the room and slammed the door, but a moment later he barged

back in briefly. “I know it’s not your fault,” he said to Smith and Hertzfeld. “Steve Jobs is the

problem. Tell Steve that he’s destroying Apple!”

Jobs did indeed make the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one with

incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible with the

Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of keeping Jobs in harness.

End-to-end Control

Jobs’s reluctance to make the Mac compatible with the architecture of the Lisa was motivated by

more than rivalry or revenge. There was a philosophical component, one that was related to his

penchant for control. He believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its

software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked

on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality. The best products, he

believed, were “whole widgets” that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored

to the hardware and vice versa. This is what would distinguish the Macintosh, which had an

operating system that worked only on its own hardware, from the environment that Microsoft was

creating, in which its operating system could be used on hardware made by many different

companies.

“Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn’t want his creations mutated inauspiciously by

unworthy programmers,” explained ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber. “It would be as if someone off the

street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.” In

later years Jobs’s whole-widget approach would distinguish the iPhone, iPod, and iPad from their

competitors. It resulted in awesome products. But it was not always the best strategy for

dominating a market. “From the first Mac to the latest iPhone, Jobs’s systems have always been

sealed shut to prevent consumers from meddling and modifying them,” noted Leander Kahney,

author of Cult of the Mac.

Jobs’s desire to control the user experience had been at the heart of his debate with Wozniak

over whether the Apple II would have slots that allow a user to plug expansion cards into a

computer’s motherboard and thus add some new functionality. Wozniak won that argument: The

Apple II had eight slots. But this time around it would be Jobs’s machine, not Wozniak’s, and the

Macintosh would have limited slots. You wouldn’t even be able to open the case and get to the

motherboard. For a hobbyist or hacker, that was uncool. But for Jobs, the Macintosh was for the

masses. He wanted to give them a controlled experience.

“It reflects his personality, which is to want control,” said Berry Cash, who was hired by Jobs

in 1982 to be a market strategist at Texaco Towers. “Steve would talk about the Apple II and

complain, ‘We don’t have control, and look at all these crazy things people are trying to do to it.

That’s a mistake I’ll never make again.’” He went so far as to design special tools so that the

Macintosh case could not be opened with a regular screwdriver. “We’re going to design this thing

so nobody but Apple employees can get inside this box,” he told Cash.

Jobs also decided to eliminate the cursor arrow keys on the Macintosh keyboard. The only way

to move the cursor was to use the mouse. It was a way of forcing old-fashioned users to adapt to

point-and-click navigation, even if they didn’t want to. Unlike other product developers, Jobs did

not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were

wrong.

There was one other advantage, he believed, to eliminating the cursor keys: It forced outside

software developers to write programs specially for the Mac operating system, rather than merely

writing generic software that could be ported to a variety of computers. That made for the type of

tight vertical integration between application software, operating systems, and hardware devices

that Jobs liked.

Jobs’s desire for end-to-end control also made him allergic to proposals that Apple license the

Macintosh operating system to other office equipment manufacturers and allow them to make

Macintosh clones.

The new and energetic Macintosh marketing director Mike Murray proposed a licensing

program in a confidential memo to Jobs in May 1982. “We would like the Macintosh user

environment to become an industry standard,” he wrote. “The hitch, of course, is that now one

must buy Mac hardware in order to get this user environment. Rarely (if ever) has one company

been able to create and maintain an industry-wide standard that cannot be shared with other

manufacturers.” His proposal was to license the Macintosh operating system to Tandy. Because

Tandy’s Radio Shack stores went after a different type of customer, Murray argued, it would not

severely cannibalize Apple sales. But Jobs was congenitally averse to such a plan. His approach

meant that the Macintosh remained a controlled environment that met his standards, but it also

meant that, as Murray feared, it would have trouble securing its place as an industry standard in a

world of IBM clones.

Machines of the Year

As 1982 drew to a close, Jobs came to believe that he was going to be Time’s Man of the Year. He

arrived at Texaco Towers one day with the magazine’s San Francisco bureau chief, Michael

Moritz, and encouraged colleagues to give Moritz interviews. But Jobs did not end up on the

cover. Instead the magazine chose “the Computer” as the topic for the year-end issue and called it

“the Machine of the Year.”

Accompanying the main story was a profile of Jobs, which was based on the reporting done by

Moritz and written by Jay Cocks, an editor who usually handled rock music for the magazine.

“With his smooth sales pitch and a blind faith that would have been the envy of the early Christian

martyrs, it is Steven Jobs, more than anyone, who kicked open the door and let the personal

computer move in,” the story proclaimed. It was a richly reported piece, but also harsh at times—

so harsh that Moritz (after he wrote a book about Apple and went on to be a partner in the venture

firm Sequoia Capital with Don Valentine) repudiated it by complaining that his reporting had been

“siphoned, filtered, and poisoned with gossipy benzene by an editor in New York whose regular

task was to chronicle the wayward world of rock-and-roll music.” The article quoted Bud Tribble

on Jobs’s “reality distortion field” and noted that he “would occasionally burst into tears at

meetings.” Perhaps the best quote came from Jef Raskin. Jobs, he declared, “would have made an

excellent King of France.”

To Jobs’s dismay, the magazine made public the existence of the daughter he had forsaken,

Lisa Brennan. He knew that Kottke had been the one to tell the magazine about Lisa, and he

berated him in the Mac group work space in front of a half dozen people. “When the Time reporter

asked me if Steve had a daughter named Lisa, I said ‘Of course,’” Kottke recalled. “Friends don’t

let friends deny that they’re the father of a child. I’m not going to let my friend be a jerk and deny

paternity. He was really angry and felt violated and told me in front of everyone that I had

betrayed him.”

But what truly devastated Jobs was that he was not, after all, chosen as the Man of the Year. As

he later told me:

Time decided they were going to make me Man of the Year, and I was twenty-seven, so I actually cared

about stuff like that. I thought it was pretty cool. They sent out Mike Moritz to write a story. We’re the

same age, and I had been very successful, and I could tell he was jealous and there was an edge to him.

He wrote this terrible hatchet job. So the editors in New York get this story and say, “We can’t make

this guy Man of the Year.” That really hurt. But it was a good lesson. It taught me to never get too

excited about things like that, since the media is a circus anyway. They FedExed me the magazine, and I

remember opening the package, thoroughly expecting to see my mug on the cover, and it was this

computer sculpture thing. I thought, “Huh?” And then I read the article, and it was so awful that I

actually cried.

In fact there’s no reason to believe that Moritz was jealous or that he intended his reporting to

be unfair. Nor was Jobs ever slated to be Man of the Year, despite what he thought. That year the

top editors (I was then a junior editor there) decided early on to go with the computer rather than a

person, and they commissioned, months in advance, a piece of art from the famous sculptor

George Segal to be a gatefold cover image. Ray Cave was then the magazine’s editor.

“We never considered Jobs,” he said. “You couldn’t personify the computer, so that was the

first time we decided to go with an inanimate object. We never searched around for a face to be

put on the cover.”

Apple launched the Lisa in January 1983—a full year before the Mac was ready—and Jobs paid

his $5,000 wager to Couch. Even though he was not part of the Lisa team, Jobs went to New York

to do publicity for it in his role as Apple’s chairman and poster boy.

He had learned from his public relations consultant Regis McKenna how to dole out exclusive

interviews in a dramatic manner. Reporters from anointed publications were ushered in

sequentially for their hour with him in his Carlyle Hotel suite, where a Lisa computer was set on a

table and surrounded by cut flowers. The publicity plan called for Jobs to focus on the Lisa and

not mention the Macintosh, because speculation about it could undermine the Lisa. But Jobs

couldn’t help himself. In most of the stories based on his interviews that day—in Time, Business

Week, the Wall Street Journal, and Fortune—the Macintosh was mentioned. “Later this year

Apple will introduce a less powerful, less expensive version of Lisa, the Macintosh,” Fortune

reported. “Jobs himself has directed that project.” Business Week quoted him as saying, “When it

comes out, Mac is going to be the most incredible computer in the world.” He also admitted that

the Mac and the Lisa would not be compatible. It was like launching the Lisa with the kiss of

death.

The Lisa did indeed die a slow death. Within two years it would be discontinued. “It was too

expensive, and we were trying to sell it to big companies when our expertise was selling to

consumers,” Jobs later said. But there was a silver lining for Jobs: Within months of Lisa’s launch,

it became clear that Apple had to pin its hopes on the Macintosh instead.

Let’s Be Pirates!

As the Macintosh team grew, it moved from Texaco Towers to the main Apple buildings on

Bandley Drive, finally settling in mid-1983 into Bandley 3. It had a modern atrium lobby with

video games, which Burrell Smith and Andy Hertzfeld chose, and a Toshiba compact disc stereo

system with MartinLogan speakers and a hundred CDs. The software team was visible from the

lobby in a fishbowl-like glass enclosure, and the kitchen was stocked daily with Odwalla juices.

Over time the atrium attracted even more toys, most notably a Bösendorfer piano and a BMW

motorcycle that Jobs felt would inspire an obsession with lapidary craftsmanship.

Jobs kept a tight rein on the hiring process. The goal was to get people who were creative,

wickedly smart, and slightly rebellious. The software team would make applicants play Defender,

Smith’s favorite video game. Jobs would ask his usual offbeat questions to see how well the

applicant could think in unexpected situations. One day he, Hertzfeld, and Smith interviewed a

candidate for software manager who, it became clear as soon as he walked in the room, was too

uptight and conventional to manage the wizards in the fishbowl. Jobs began to toy with him

mercilessly. “How old were you when you lost your virginity?” he asked.

The candidate looked baffled. “What did you say?”

“Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat there flustered, so Jobs changed the subject.

“How many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled, “The poor guy was turning varying

shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straightforward technical question.” But

when the candidate droned on in his response, Jobs broke in. “Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble,” he

said, cracking up Smith and Hertzfeld.

“I guess I’m not the right guy,” the poor man said as he got up to leave.

For all of his obnoxious behavior, Jobs also had the ability to instill in his team an esprit de corps.

After tearing people down, he would find ways to lift them up and make them feel that being part

of the Macintosh project was an amazing mission. Every six months he would take most of his

team on a two-day retreat at a nearby resort.

The retreat in September 1982 was at the Pajaro Dunes near Monterey. Fifty or so members of

the Mac division sat in the lodge facing

a fireplace. Jobs sat on top of a table in front of them. He spoke quietly for a while, then walked

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