MEMORIES:

Remembering Steve Jobs: Steve cared most about those engineers involved in the look and feel and the aesthetics of the product – such as the UI software team and the industrial design team. The guys doing the nuts and bolts hardware engineering – including IC Technology– were more of a “necessary evil”. That suited me just fine as finding yourself in Steve’s spotlight was frequently not a pleasant experience. That being said, the years he spent with Woz chasing down parts and hand building Apple I’s and Apple II’s gave him an appreciation for the engine under the hood – which was lacking in a number of future Apple CEOs.

Steve would regularly hold “all hands” meetings in the central atrium of the Bandley 3 building. This was a large open tiled area that later also housed the Bosendorfer piano, the BMW motorcycle, and some video games. There Steve would, among other things, exhort us to work harder. During one exchange someone said to him, “Steve, at some point we need to go home and do our laundry and pay our credit card bills”. He immediately responded saying he would have a washer/dryer installed by Monday if we wanted it, and he didn’t understand the credit card thing because he just deposited a bunch of money (I think he said something like ~$35K) in his credit card at the start of the year and never had to worry about it. The thing was – he appeared dead serious about his responses. Either that or he could deadpan so well that he fooled all of us. Steve would use the all-hand meetings to laud team members he thought were “great”. This would frequently involve very publicly handing out what we called “the grey envelopes”, containing usually some form of monetary remuneration. But Steve had an innate uncanny ability to sense whatever it was that would most motivate a subordinate – be it cash, recognition, flattery, fear – whatever.

For me the work ethic transition to the Mac group, coming straight out of grad school, was not difficult as I was used to working all hours at Berkeley, and much of the team was single. But an ethic of extreme sacrifice was cultivated – which was captured and reinforced with paraphernalia like the “90 hrs a week and loving it” T‐shirts. Marriages & mental health were too frequently a casualty of the pace and pressure. But make no mistake about it – working with a talented highly motivated team that is hell bent on “changing the world” for the better, with a large $ war chest backing them up, is infectious and exhilarating. One Saturday evening I was working late in my cubicle doing chip layout, and who should quietly appear behind me but Steve and Ted Turner. They probably had dinner together somewhere and Steve brought him to Bandley 3 for a tour. You just never knew what was going to happen or who was going to show up at Bandley 3 under the pirate flag.

Trouble at the Mac Factory – a Priority Interrupt: Walt Peschke, the manager of the IC Technology group after Martin Haeberli moved to marketing, initially insisted on initially calling the sound chip the “Foley Sound Chip” (it fortunately later became known as the Apple Sound Chip, or ASC), and when I asked why he said “so they know who to call when it breaks”. Sure enough, some months later I received a call on a Sunday evening that the Mac factory in Fremont had shut down because of a problem with the sound chip, and that there would be an emergency meeting at 8 AM in Fremont the following morning (with Debi Coleman in attendance). It turned out that the factory engineering team had cost reduced the motherboard, eliminating a couple of layers. This resulted in a significant reduction in the quality of the power planes feeding the sound chip, resulting in faulty behavior. This just goes to show the pitfalls of “designing in isolation” when dealing with larger more complex systems incorporating chips, boards, busses, and power supplies.

Apple II GS Chip Bug Chase: I was called in to help debug a problem with one of the chips in the Apple IIGS. This chip was fabbed at the AMI factory in Pocatello Idaho – so I flew to Pocatello to investigate. At one point I noticed a large plot of the chip (a gate-array) hung on a wall and I took a long close look. I asked one of my hosts “what is this signal” and pointed to a long red trace running the length of the chip and along most of one side – much of it in the padring area. He said it was a signal to implement a recent bug fix and I replied “but the whole thing is in poly”. The challenge with running signals over long distances in polysilicon (as opposed to metal) is that poly has high sheet resistance, so that signals are very slow to transition when transmitted over long wires. Problem solved. I recommend eating at the Sandpiper next time you are in Pocatello (it is still there).

The Importance of Mentors: As a newly minted bright-eyed bushy-tailed graduate student, I was fortunate to have some grizzled veterans by my side to counsel me. My consiglieres were Walt Peschke and Bob Bailey. They were far keener observers of the omnipresent political machinations than I ever was. Whenever I would ask a question about why such and such happened, or why a certain person disappeared, they would sigh and say “Pete my boy, its time for a walk” – and we would walk the nearby Cupertino residential neighborhood when we knew we would likely rendezvous with the ice cream truck and they would explain what was going on. They were full of pithy sayings, dozens of them – I only remember a few, such as “the bureaucracy will always link arms to expel the infidels”. When I excitedly told them about my plans to improve the 6502 using some caches and RISC design principles that would enable the Apple II out-perform the 68000 in the Mac, they simply said “Pete my boy, this turbo 6502 idea of yours, we have to say were behind you all the way on this one . . . way . . . . way behind you”. But probably the most memorable pearl of wisdom is what I have come to call the valley creed. Early on at Apple they took me for a walk and said “Pete my boy, there are three basic rules that apply to a career in the valley, and if you can accept these rules, then you can thrive here. If not, then you should leave” – of course I said, “Ok, what are they?”. Walt said, “#1 – there is no justice”. “#2 – there is no mercy”, and “#3 – this is the most important – are you paying close attention Pete? – #3 is . . . . no one cares”. There you have it – the valley creed.

The Importance of Fighting for the Vision When the original 128KB Mac first shipped it did not sell as well as was hoped at the initial $2500 price point, and would soon thereafter be described as “struggling”. It became clear that the business market was ripe for a WYSIWYG productivity tool, but delays in the LaserWriter laser printer were hampering adoption by the business market. So Jerome Coonen of the Mac software team was sent over to Adobe to assist with PostScript rendering speed problems – which were largely due to a large amount of floating point arithmetic calculations. Jerome, a recent mathematics PhD under Kahan at Berkeley, doubled the speed of printing on the initial LaserWriter “with artful use of custom fixed‐point arithmetic types and supporting trigonometric functions”. So the LaserWriter shipped, and the Mac found the market that would sustain it until Moore’s law enabled sufficient functionality and/or lower price to gain traction in the consumer market. A takeaway for me is that the product vision and first mover advantage are of primary importance. It is likely that the vision that is the “right vision” – once realized in product form – will initially cost more than everyone would like. But Moore’s law is so powerful and so predictable (especially in the 80’s and 90’s) that the increase in functionality and/or decrease in product cost enabled by it would allow the market to “catch up” to a product with an ASP that was initially “a little too high”. That is provided you have the confidence in the product vision to support the product initially, perhaps through lower margins and/or finding alternative initial markets (which were both done for the Mac). This was an important lesson that should have been applied to original “Slate” form factor Newton.