THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD 10 page

Hall—he wanted to outdo himself. He needed to blow away the doubters. In the weeks leading up

to the event, he drove up to San Francisco almost every day to hole up in the Victorian house of

Susan Kare, NeXT’s graphic designer, who had done the original fonts and icons for the

Macintosh. She helped prepare each of the slides as Jobs fretted over everything from the wording

to the right hue of green to serve as the background color. “I like that green,” he said proudly as

they were doing a trial run in front of some staffers. “Great green, great green,” they all murmured

in assent.

No detail was too small. Jobs went over the invitation list and even the lunch menu (mineral

water, croissants, cream cheese, bean sprouts). He picked out a video projection company and paid

it $60,000 for help. And he hired the postmodernist theater producer George Coates to stage the

show. Coates and Jobs decided, not surprisingly, on an austere and radically simple stage look.

The unveiling of the black perfect cube would occur on a starkly minimalist stage setting with a

black background, a table covered by a black cloth, a black veil draped over the computer, and a

simple vase of flowers. Because neither the hardware nor the operating system was actually ready,

Jobs was urged to do a simulation. But he refused. Knowing it would be like walking a tightrope

without a net, he decided to do the demonstration live.

More than three thousand people showed up at the event, lining up two hours before curtain

time. They were not disappointed, at least by the show. Jobs was onstage for three hours, and he

again proved to be, in the words of Andrew Pollack of the New York Times, “the Andrew Lloyd

Webber of product introductions, a master of stage flair and special effects.” Wes Smith of the

Chicago Tribune said the launch was “to product demonstrations what Vatican II was to church

meetings.”

Jobs had the audience cheering from his opening line: “It’s great to be back.” He began by

recounting the history of personal computer architecture, and he promised that they would now

witness an event “that occurs only once or twice in a decade—a time when a new architecture is

rolled out that is going to change the face of computing.” The NeXT software and hardware were

designed, he said, after three years of consulting with universities across the country. “What we

realized was that higher ed wants a personal mainframe.”

As usual there were superlatives. The product was “incredible,” he said, “the best thing we

could have imagined.” He praised the beauty of even the parts unseen. Balancing on his fingertips

the foot-square circuit board that would be nestled in the foot-cube box, he enthused,

“I hope you get a chance to look at this a little later. It’s the most beautiful printed circuit board

I’ve ever seen in my life.” He then showed how the computer could play speeches—he featured

King’s “I Have a Dream” and Kennedy’s “Ask Not”—and send email with audio attachments. He

leaned into the microphone on the computer to record one of his own. “Hi, this is Steve, sending a

message on a pretty historic day.” Then he asked those in the audience to add “a round of

applause” to the message, and they did.

One of Jobs’s management philosophies was that it is crucial, every now and then, to roll the

dice and “bet the company” on some new idea or technology. At the NeXT launch, he boasted of

an example that, as it turned out, would not be a wise gamble: having a high-capacity (but slow)

optical read/write disk and no floppy disk as a backup. “Two years ago we made a decision,” he

said. “We saw some new technology and we made a decision to risk our company.”

Then he turned to a feature that would prove more prescient. “What we’ve done is made the

first real digital books,” he said, noting the inclusion of the Oxford edition of Shakespeare and

other tomes. “There has not been an advancement in the state of the art of printed book technology

since Gutenberg.”

At times he could be amusingly aware of his own foibles, and he used the electronic book

demonstration to poke fun at himself. “A word that’s sometimes used to describe me is

‘mercurial,’” he said, then paused. The audience laughed knowingly, especially those in the front

rows, which were filled with NeXT employees and former members of the Macintosh team. Then

he pulled up the word in the computer’s dictionary and read the first definition: “Of or relating to,

or born under the planet Mercury.” Scrolling down, he said, “I think the third one is the one they

mean: ‘Characterized by unpredictable changeableness of mood.’” There was a bit more laughter.

“If we scroll down the thesaurus, though, we see that the antonym is ‘saturnine.’ Well what’s that?

By simply double-clicking on it, we immediately look that up in the dictionary, and here it is:

‘Cold and steady in moods. Slow to act or change. Of a gloomy or surly disposition.’” A little

smile came across his face as he waited for the ripple of laughter. “Well,” he concluded, “I don’t

think ‘mercurial’ is so bad after all.” After the applause,

he used the quotations book to make a more subtle point, about his reality distortion field. The

quote he chose was from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. After Alice laments that no

matter how hard she tries she can’t believe impossible things, the White Queen retorts, “Why,

sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Especially from the

front rows, there was a roar of knowing laughter.

All of the good cheer served to sugarcoat, or distract attention from, the bad news. When it

came time to announce the price of the new machine, Jobs did what he would often do in product

demonstrations: reel off the features, describe them as being “worth thousands and thousands of

dollars,” and get the audience to imagine how expensive it really should be. Then he announced

what he hoped would seem like a low price: “We’re going to be charging higher education a

single price of $6,500.” From the faithful, there was scattered applause. But his panel of academic

advisors had long pushed to keep the price to between $2,000 and $3,000, and they thought that

Jobs had promised to do so. Some of them were appalled. This was especially true once they

discovered that the optional printer would cost another $2,000, and the slowness of the optical

disk would make the purchase of a $2,500 external hard disk advisable.

There was another disappointment that he tried to downplay: “Early next year, we will have our

0.9 release, which is for software developers and aggressive end users.” There was a bit of

nervous laughter. What he was saying was that the real release of the machine and its software,

known as the 1.0 release, would not actually be happening in early 1989. In fact he didn’t set a

hard date. He merely suggested it would be sometime in the second quarter of that year. At the

first NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had refused to budge, despite Joanna Hoffman’s pushback,

from his commitment to have the machine finished in early 1987. Now it was clear it would be

more than two years later.

The event ended on a more upbeat note, literally. Jobs brought onstage a violinist from the San

Francisco Symphony who played Bach’s A Minor Violin Concerto in a duet with the NeXT

computer onstage. People erupted in jubilant applause. The price and the delayed release were

forgotten in the frenzy. When one reporter asked him immediately

afterward why the machine was going to be so late, Jobs replied, “It’s not late. It’s five years

ahead of its time.”

As would become his standard practice, Jobs offered to provide “exclusive” interviews to

anointed publications in return for their promising to put the story on the cover. This time he went

one “exclusive” too far, though it didn’t really hurt. He agreed to a request from Business Week’s

Katie Hafner for exclusive access to him before the launch, but he also made a similar deal with

Newsweek and then with Fortune. What he didn’t consider was that one of Fortune’s top editors,

Susan Fraker, was married to Newsweek’s editor Maynard Parker. At the Fortune story

conference, when they were talking excitedly about their exclusive, Fraker mentioned that she

happened to know that Newsweek had also been promised an exclusive, and it would be coming

out a few days before Fortune. So Jobs ended up that week on only two magazine covers.

Newsweek used the cover line “Mr. Chips” and showed him leaning on a beautiful NeXT, which it

proclaimed to be “the most exciting machine in years.” Business Week showed him looking

angelic in a dark suit, fingertips pressed together like a preacher or professor. But Hafner

pointedly reported on the manipulation that surrounded her exclusive. “NeXT carefully parceled

out interviews with its staff and suppliers, monitoring them with a censor’s eye,” she wrote. “That

strategy worked, but at a price: Such maneuvering—self-serving and relentless—displayed the

side of Steve Jobs that so hurt him at Apple. The trait that most stands out is Jobs’s need to control

events.”

When the hype died down, the reaction to the NeXT computer was muted, especially since it

was not yet commercially available. Bill Joy, the brilliant and wry chief scientist at rival Sun

Microsystems, called it “the first Yuppie workstation,” which was not an unalloyed compliment.

Bill Gates, as might be expected, continued to be publicly dismissive. “Frankly, I’m

disappointed,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “Back in 1981, we were truly excited by the

Macintosh when Steve showed it to us, because when you put it side-by-side with another

computer, it was unlike anything anybody had ever seen before.” The NeXT machine was not like

that. “In the grand scope of things, most of these features are truly trivial.” He said that Microsoft

would continue its plans not to write software for the NeXT. Right after the

announcement event, Gates wrote a parody email to his staff. “All reality has been completely

suspended,” it began. Looking back at it, Gates laughs that it may have been “the best email I ever

wrote.”

When the NeXT computer finally went on sale in mid-1989, the factory was primed to churn

out ten thousand units a month. As it turned out, sales were about four hundred a month. The

beautiful factory robots, so nicely painted, remained mostly idle, and NeXT continued to

hemorrhage cash.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PIXAR

Technology Meets Art

Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, and John Lasseter, 1999

Lucasfilm’s Computer Division

When Jobs was losing his footing at Apple in the summer of 1985, he went for a walk with Alan

Kay, who had been at Xerox PARC and was then an Apple Fellow. Kay knew that Jobs was

interested in the intersection of creativity and technology, so he suggested they go see a friend of

his, Ed Catmull, who was running the computer division of George Lucas’s film studio. They

rented a limo and rode up to Marin County to the edge of Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, where

Catmull and his little computer division were based. “I was blown away, and I came back and

tried to convince Sculley to buy it for Apple,” Jobs recalled. “But the folks running Apple weren’t

interested, and they were busy kicking me out anyway.”

The Lucasfilm computer division made hardware and software for rendering digital images,

and it also had a group of computer animators making shorts, which was led by a talented cartoonloving

executive named John Lasseter. Lucas, who had completed his first Star Wars trilogy, was

embroiled in a contentious divorce, and he needed to sell off the division. He told Catmull to find

a buyer as soon as possible.

After a few potential purchasers balked in the fall of 1985, Catmull and his colleague Alvy Ray

Smith decided to seek investors so that they could buy the division themselves. So they called

Jobs, arranged another meeting, and drove down to his Woodside house. After railing for a while

about the perfidies and idiocies of Sculley, Jobs proposed that he buy their Lucasfilm division

outright. Catmull and Smith demurred: They wanted an investor, not a new owner. But it soon

became clear that there was a middle ground: Jobs could buy a majority of the division and serve

as chairman but allow Catmull and Smith to run it.

“I wanted to buy it because I was really into computer graphics,” Jobs recalled. “I realized they

were way ahead of others in combining art and technology, which is what I’ve always been

interested in.” He offered to pay Lucas $5 million plus invest another $5 million to capitalize the

division as a stand-alone company. That was far less than Lucas had been asking, but the timing

was right. They decided to negotiate a deal.

The chief financial officer at Lucasfilm found Jobs arrogant and prickly, so when it came time

to hold a meeting of all the players, he told Catmull, “We have to establish the right pecking

order.” The plan was to gather everyone in a room with Jobs, and then the CFO would come in a

few minutes late to establish that he was the person running the meeting. “But a funny thing

happened,” Catmull recalled. “Steve started the meeting on time without the CFO, and by the time

the CFO walked in Steve was already in control of the meeting.”

Jobs met only once with George Lucas, who warned him that the people in the division cared

more about making animated movies than they did about making computers. “You know, these

guys are hell-bent

on animation,” Lucas told him. Lucas later recalled, “I did warn him that was basically Ed and

John’s agenda. I think in his heart he bought the company because that was his agenda too.”

The final agreement was reached in January 1986. It provided that, for his $10 million

investment, Jobs would own 70% of the company, with the rest of the stock distributed to Ed

Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and the thirty-eight other founding employees, down to the receptionist.

The division’s most important piece of hardware was called the Pixar Image Computer, and from

it the new company took its name.

For a while Jobs let Catmull and Smith run Pixar without much interference. Every month or so

they would gather for a board meeting, usually at NeXT headquarters, where Jobs would focus on

the finances and strategy. Nevertheless, by dint of his personality and controlling instincts, Jobs

was soon playing a stronger role. He spewed out a stream of ideas—some reasonable, others

wacky—about what Pixar’s hardware and software could become. And on his occasional visits to

the Pixar offices, he was an inspiring presence. “I grew up a Southern Baptist, and we had revival

meetings with mesmerizing but corrupt preachers,” recounted Alvy Ray Smith. “Steve’s got it: the

power of the tongue and the web of words that catches people up. We were aware of this when we

had board meetings, so we developed signals—nose scratching or ear tugs—for when someone

had been caught up in Steve’s distortion field and he needed to be tugged back to reality.”

Jobs had always appreciated the virtue of integrating hardware and software, which is what

Pixar did with its Image Computer and rendering software. It also produced creative content, such

as animated films and graphics. All three elements benefited from Jobs’s combination of artistic

creativity and technological geekiness. “Silicon Valley folks don’t really respect Hollywood

creative types, and the Hollywood folks think that tech folks are people you hire and never have to

meet,” Jobs later said. “Pixar was one place where both cultures were respected.”

Initially the revenue was supposed to come from the hardware side. The Pixar Image Computer

sold for $125,000. The primary customers were animators and graphic designers, but the machine

also soon found specialized markets in the medical industry (CAT scan data could be rendered in

three-dimensional graphics) and intelligence

fields (for rendering information from reconnaissance flights and satellites). Because of the

sales to the National Security Agency, Jobs had to get a security clearance, which must have been

fun for the FBI agent assigned to vet him. At one point, a Pixar executive recalled, Jobs was called

by the investigator to go over the drug use questions, which he answered unabashedly. “The last

time I used that . . . ,” he would say, or on occasion he would answer that no, he had actually never

tried that particular drug.

Jobs pushed Pixar to build a lower-cost version of the computer that would sell for around

$30,000. He insisted that Hartmut Esslinger design it, despite protests by Catmull and Smith about

his fees. It ended up looking like the original Pixar Image Computer, which was a cube with a

round dimple in the middle, but it had Esslinger’s signature thin grooves.

Jobs wanted to sell Pixar’s computers to a mass market, so he had the Pixar folks open up sales

offices—for which he approved the design—in major cities, on the theory that creative people

would soon come up with all sorts of ways to use the machine. “My view is that people are

creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never

imagined,” he later said. “I thought that would happen with the Pixar computer, just as it did with

the Mac.” But the machine never took hold with regular consumers. It cost too much, and there

were not many software programs for it.

On the software side, Pixar had a rendering program, known as Reyes (Renders everything you

ever saw), for making 3-D graphics and images. After Jobs became chairman, the company

created a new language and interface, named RenderMan, that it hoped would become a standard

for 3-D graphics rendering, just as Adobe’s PostScript was for laser printing.

As he had with the hardware, Jobs decided that they should try to find a mass market, rather

than just a specialized one, for the software they made. He was never content to aim only at the

corporate or high-end specialized markets. “He would have these great visions of how RenderMan

could be for everyman,” recalled Pam Kerwin, Pixar’s marketing director. “He kept coming up

with ideas about how ordinary people would use it to make amazing 3-D graphics and

photorealistic

images.” The Pixar team would try to dissuade him by saying that RenderMan was not as easy

to use as, say, Excel or Adobe Illustrator. Then Jobs would go to a whiteboard and show them

how to make it simpler and more user-friendly. “We would be nodding our heads and getting

excited and say, ‘Yes, yes, this will be great!’” Kerwin recalled. “And then he would leave and we

would consider it for a moment and then say, ‘What the heck was he thinking!’ He was so weirdly

charismatic that you almost had to get deprogrammed after you talked to him.” As it turned out,

average consumers were not craving expensive software that would let them render realistic

images. RenderMan didn’t take off.

There was, however, one company that was eager to automate the rendering of animators’

drawings into color images for film. When Roy Disney led a board revolution at the company that

his uncle Walt had founded, the new CEO, Michael Eisner, asked what role he wanted. Disney

said that he would like to revive the company’s venerable but fading animation department. One

of his first initiatives was to look at ways to computerize the process, and Pixar won the contract.

It created a package of customized hardware and software known as CAPS, Computer Animation

Production System. It was first used in 1988 for the final scene of The Little Mermaid, in which

King Triton waves good-bye to Ariel. Disney bought dozens of Pixar Image Computers as CAPS

became an integral part of its production.

Animation

The digital animation business at Pixar—the group that made little animated films—was originally

just a sideline, its main purpose being to show off the hardware and software of the company. It

was run by John Lasseter, a man whose childlike face and demeanor masked an artistic

perfectionism that rivaled that of Jobs. Born in Hollywood, Lasseter grew up loving Saturday

morning cartoon shows. In ninth grade, he wrote a report on the history of Disney Studios, and he

decided then how he wished to spend his life.

When he graduated from high school, Lasseter enrolled in the animation program at the

California Institute of the Arts, founded by Walt Disney. In his summers and spare time, he

researched the Disney archives and worked as a guide on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland.

The latter experience taught him the value of timing and pacing in telling a story, an important but

difficult concept to master when creating, frame by frame, animated footage. He won the Student

Academy Award for the short he made in his junior year, Lady and the Lamp, which showed his

debt to Disney films and foreshadowed his signature talent for infusing inanimate objects such as

lamps with human personalities. After graduation he took the job for which he was destined: as an

animator at Disney Studios.

Except it didn’t work out. “Some of us younger guys wanted to bring Star Wars–level quality

to the art of animation, but we were held in check,” Lasseter recalled. “I got disillusioned, then I

got caught in a feud between two bosses, and the head animation guy fired me.” So in 1984 Ed

Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith were able to recruit him to work where Star Wars–level quality was

being defined, Lucasfilm. It was not certain that George Lucas, already worried about the cost of

his computer division, would really approve of hiring a full-time animator, so Lasseter was given

the title “interface designer.”

After Jobs came onto the scene, he and Lasseter began to share their passion for graphic design.

“I was the only guy at Pixar who was an artist, so I bonded with Steve over his design sense,”

Lasseter said. He was a gregarious, playful, and huggable man who wore flowery Hawaiian shirts,

kept his office cluttered with vintage toys, and loved cheeseburgers. Jobs was a prickly, whip-thin

vegetarian who favored austere and uncluttered surroundings. But they were actually well-suited

for each other. Lasseter was an artist, so Jobs treated him deferentially, and Lasseter viewed Jobs,

correctly, as a patron who could appreciate artistry and knew how it could be interwoven with

technology and commerce.

Jobs and Catmull decided that, in order to show off their hardware and software, Lasseter

should produce another short animated film in 1986 for SIGGRAPH, the annual computer

graphics conference. At the time, Lasseter was using the Luxo lamp on his desk as a model for

graphic rendering, and he decided to turn Luxo into a lifelike character. A friend’s young child

inspired him to add Luxo Jr., and he showed a few test frames to another animator, who urged him

to make sure he

told a story. Lasseter said he was making only a short, but the animator reminded him that a

story can be told even in a few seconds. Lasseter took the lesson to heart. Luxo Jr. ended up being

just over two minutes; it told the tale of a parent lamp and a child lamp pushing a ball back and

forth until the ball bursts, to the child’s dismay.

Jobs was so excited that he took time off from the pressures at NeXT to fly down with Lasseter

to SIGGRAPH, which was being held in Dallas that August. “It was so hot and muggy that when

we’d walk outside the air hit us like a tennis racket,” Lasseter recalled. There were ten thousand

people at the trade show, and Jobs loved it. Artistic creativity energized him, especially when it

was connected to technology.

There was a long line to get into the auditorium where the films were being screened, so Jobs,

not one to wait his turn, fast-talked their way in first. Luxo Jr. got a prolonged standing ovation

and was named the best film. “Oh, wow!” Jobs exclaimed at the end. “I really get this, I get what

it’s all about.” As he later explained, “Our film was the only one that had art to it, not just good

technology. Pixar was about making that combination, just as the Macintosh had been.”

Luxo Jr. was nominated for an Academy Award, and Jobs flew down to Los Angeles to be

there for the ceremony. It didn’t win, but Jobs became committed to making new animated shorts

each year, even though there was not much of a business rationale for doing so. As times got

tough at Pixar, he would sit through brutal budget-cutting meetings showing no mercy. Then

Lasseter would ask that the money they had just saved be used for his next film, and Jobs would

agree.

Tin Toy

Not all of Jobs’s relationships at Pixar were as good. His worst clash came with Catmull’s

cofounder, Alvy Ray Smith. From a Baptist background in rural north Texas, Smith became a free

-spirited hippie computer imaging engineer with a big build, big laugh, and big personality—and

occasionally an ego to match. “Alvy just glows, with a high color, friendly laugh, and a whole

bunch of groupies at conferences,” said Pam Kerwin. “A personality like Alvy’s was likely to

ruffle Steve. They are both visionaries and high energy and high ego. Alvy is not as willing to

make peace and overlook things as Ed was.”

Smith saw Jobs as someone whose charisma and ego led him to abuse power. “He was like a

televangelist,” Smith said. “He wanted to control people, but I would not be a slave to him, which

is why we clashed. Ed was much more able to go with the flow.” Jobs would sometimes assert his

dominance at a meeting by saying something outrageous or untrue. Smith took great joy in calling

him on it, and he would do so with a large laugh and a smirk. This did not endear him to Jobs.

One day at a board meeting, Jobs started berating Smith and other top Pixar executives for the

delay in getting the circuit boards completed for the new version of the Pixar Image Computer. At

the time, NeXT was also very late in completing its own computer boards, and Smith pointed that

out: “Hey, you’re even later with your NeXT boards, so quit jumping on us.” Jobs went ballistic,

or in Smith’s phrase, “totally nonlinear.” When Smith was feeling attacked or confrontational, he

tended to lapse into his southwestern accent. Jobs started parodying it in his sarcastic style. “It was

a bully tactic, and I exploded with everything I had,” Smith recalled. “Before I knew it, we were in

each other’s faces—about three inches apart—screaming at each other.”

Jobs was very possessive about control of the whiteboard during a meeting, so the burly Smith

pushed past him and started writing on it. “You can’t do that!” Jobs shouted.

“What?” responded Smith, “I can’t write on your whiteboard? Bullshit.” At that point Jobs

stormed out.

Smith eventually resigned to form a new company to make software for digital drawing and

image editing. Jobs refused him permission to use some code he had created while at Pixar, which

further inflamed their enmity. “Alvy eventually got what he needed,” said Catmull, “but he was

very stressed for a year and developed a lung infection.” In the end it worked out well enough;

Microsoft eventually bought Smith’s company, giving him the distinction of being a founder of

one company that was sold to Jobs and another that was sold to Gates.

Ornery in the best of times, Jobs became particularly so when it

became clear that all three Pixar endeavors—hardware, software, and animated content—were

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