Month: July 2013

I forgot to tell you something in my previous post…about how Steve and his team became pirates. In a sense.

See, Steve is rebellious, I don’t know if you noticed. A rebellious jerk. And who wants a person like that?

Well, everyone, if he’s with Apple, that is. And what a better way to fuel rebellion then to pretend you’re a bunch of pirates! It be pleasurable, mates. Arr!

This actually went a little far though. During the building of the Mac, Steve Jobs got this itch. A bad itch. He wanted to become a pirate. So he got the rest of his team to do it to, because why not?

Well, they didn’t exactly get on a ship and go out to sea to plunder gold and burn down villages, but they did fly a skull-and-crossbones flag off the top of the building. I think he was trying to tell other people that he rocked and they sucked. And well in his mind they all sucked because Macintosh.

There was another piece of Apple that played along very heavily with this…that was the Lisa team.

I was going to write about this later, but I forgot about the pirate thing, and I realized I was going to have to mention this but I wanted to structure my posts and well there goes my idea.

Okay! Bear with me class! We’re going back a bit. To before the Mac.

Steve had a daughter named Lisa. I don’t think he’ll admit it, and it’s kinda stupid…but he didn’t spend any time with her. In fact if you were talking about his family and you questioned him about his daughter…he would most likely struggle to come up with anything juicy. It wasn’t the best father-daughter relationship ever.

Then a quirk happened. One random time ago when Steve Jobs probably wasn’t even thinking about his daughter, he decided to name his next computer (After the Apple II but before the Mac ) the Lisa. I don’t know. I have the book next to me this time, but this is probably too convoluted for me to understand so I’m not even going to check it. Bite me if you will.

Anyway, Steve split the Lisa team from the Mac team once he got the idea for the Mac, and the pirates began. After the Jolly Roger was flown by the Mac team, the Lisa team took it down, and held it for ransom. Literally. It was stupid, and it probably made a lot of people more stressed than they should be, but…Apple was having fun, and Steve loved it.

This burst of nonsense extended down to the interviews. Yeah…just read it.

You are the interviewee. You’re very professional and you will jump at the chance to work at Apple. But you gotta be good. Responsible. It is a company that impressed everyone with an amazing display, there has to be a whole lot of great management techniques and professionalism going on.

You’re in your black suit and tie, you’re standing up straight, you look for all the world like a man with passion that’s going to get through any and all obstacles to amaze everyone with insanely great products.

You walk into the interview room and…what’s this? Steve is there…but he isn’t dressed in a black suit like you are. No, he seems to have ditched the rules and is dressed in street clothes. You shrug this off warily. Act professional, or else they won’t hire you.

You sit down in a chair, waiting for the interview to start. Steve immediately jumps to the first question.

“How old we’re you when you lost your virginity?”

Oh…dear. That wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Was that the first question…virginity? What the hell kind of interviewers were these people? (By the way, I’m not joking. This is what happens. It’s a gyp.) You ask a very appropriate question: “What did you say?!” Steve dosen’t back down.

“Are you a virgin?”

…what answer do they want? A yes? Does Apple promote religious practices or make computers? What the hell is going on??

—

The simple answer is…Steve is screwing with him. I’m not kidding. Steve is being an asshole, not just because he can, but because that guy is way too professional to work at Apple.

How? Why? For the same reason Steve became a pirate: He’s a kid who likes screwing around and building amazing things. Like Edison, but with way more spunk and a Reality Distortion Field to boot.

Keep in mind, this is all before the Mac. This guy is a gem.

And that’s why I love him.

In the next part, I think I’ll talk about the reality distortion field.

Steve Jobs legacy began…when he was abandoned as a child. Well, not strictly abandoned, but adopted. He never knew he was adopted for a very long time, in fact, after he found out, he labeled his original parents not his “real” parents, and he considered his foster parents, as he put it “my parents 100%”. Wether this is supposed to be heartwarming or cruel I don’t know.

From an early age, he was pressed to understand the concept of creating products that are beautiful. And everything about it had to “work”, to make people fawn over it and love it, even for the parts that no one would see, such as the circuitry.. His dad (foster dad) was a carpenter, and Steve was very interested in how his dad built things. He built a dresser at one point, and he stressed about how the back of the dresser should look as good and work as good as the front.

Things really started when Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak (Hey, that name was in the iPad’s dictionary!). Steve wanted to collaborate with Wozniak almost right away…but first they pulled a bunch of pranks at school, including building a device that copied the tones of a phone. They used this to trick the automated phone system into making long-distance calls for free. That thing really cut it out for them then, they knew they could work together and build great things.

So what better way to connect pranking and genius than to start a company? They fretted over what to call it for a while, but Steve picked…Apple Computer. Hmmm…apples and computers…as different as a bear and a bird. As Steve put it, the word “apple” instantly gives a sense of familiarity to the concept…but then you hear the word “computer”, and your brain stutters a little, and thinks over it. It gets you interested, and that sense of familiarity grows as you continue to process “apple…computer”.

Enter the Apple I and the Apple II! Painstakingly crafted plastic boxes with keyboards that are hooked up to a monitor for people to enjoy a black background and green block text. Sound like crap? That’s because it was all people had back then……or so they thought.

Steve wanted better…but then again he always wanted better. He searched and searched…and found Xerox. Yes, Xerox, the copier company. They had a graphical interface and a bunch of demos to show Steve. They showed him part of it. That should’ve kept Steve from raiding them, but Steve somehow knew he was being kept from the main event, and demanded more. They did, they showed him…a little more. Steve got excited, but still felt that it was lacking. So, reluctantly, Xerox showed him the whole package. Steve made like a bat out of hell and copied their entire codebase…basically.

The first real graphical personal computer, the Macintosh, was underway. More people were introduced to the team, and things were peachy. Appley. Whatever. There was just one problem. Steve wanted…sorry, demanded…that instead of boring rectangles for boxes and buttons and things, the corners of those buttons should be rounded. Sounds simple, right? Well…the Macintosh digital artist said that the code to create rounded rectangles in real-time would be too complicated to create and would work really slowly (Keep in mind, this is in a time where normal people couldn’t even display an image on a screen without using text). Steve dragged the artist outside, and flung him around at different rounded rectangles: Street signs, billboards, building corners, you name it. Steve basically went “Look you pinhead, rounded corners are everywhere, here here here here and right in front of your bloomin’ face at all times! MAKE IT WORK!!” You might think Steve is a jerk. And you’d be right. But you’d be wrong in thinking that the artist responded any of the following ways: Quit the team, got mad and got into a fight, or sat down on the ground crying and became emo the rest of his life. Nope. Instead he rushed into his office, and came back one or two weeks later, with a perfect demo about drawing rounded rectangles in real-time, really fast. I’m not even joking. He was pretty proud of himself.

This is the first instance of Steve Jobs’ so-called “reality distortion field”. Remember that.

But this makes no sense, right? You can’t cut yourself on a button on a screen, why the hell do you need the corners rounded?? Friendliness. Yeah, friendliness. Remember that as you read on, and maybe it’ll make sense.

Apple was going to be big, and Steve knew it. Didn’t matter if anything he did didn’t make a lick of sense, he pressed on and through everything. To the point of this: one time at something I’m not even going to mention, Steve said “I want the Macintosh to be the first computer to introduce itself!”

This is STILL at the time where people can’t even imagine a 1024×768 monitor resolution! And Steve wants a computer to start TALKING??

Well, both the rounded rectangles and the talking made it.

The presentation. As beautifully crafted as Steve Jobs’s products. Steve talks to the audience for a while about Apple…then the lights dim. Steve slides a floppy disk into a white box with a screen. Before it begins, Steve says “Everything you’re about to see is generated in real-time by this box.”. The audience waits for the disk to load. Then, “Titles” by Vangelis starts up on the stage speakers. The audience chuckles…because they have no idea what they’re in for. At the proper music beat, the Mac’s screen goes white, and large sans-serif letters scroll across the screen: “MACINTOSH”. The audience had never seen this, was never expecting this, and had never thought they were going to see or expect this. Until this point, at best they had seen hacked-together looking images using letters and punctuation. Even the scrolling was good: It wasn’t jerky or refreshing itself line-by-line…it literally looked at through two people were carrying the word MACINTOSH across the screen (without the jolting obviously). The audience burst into applause, but the program wasn’t done. A new screen came up, with the word “MACINTOSH” at the top against a space background. Then a most interesting thing happened: the Mac started writing out “Insanely great!”…in cursive. In purple. Pixel-by-pixel. And really really fast for bit mapped animation at the time. And it still wasn’t done. It had a bunch of really nice static images…but at that point, I don’t think it mattered anymore. The Mac had proved its point: It was insanely great. “Titles” continued to play to the end as the audience sat, mostly in silence, not wanting this to end (in the video I saw of the presentation, the camera focused on the Mac screen the whole time, but I’m sure some of the audience members began to cry). Finally the Mac finished, the music stopped, and the audience let out their happiness very loudly.

The audience may have thought that was all, but Steve thought otherwise. Not caring that it may fail, Steve jumped straight into the Mac introducing itself. He said “I’ll love to tell you more about the Mac…but actually, let’s have the Mac speak for itself.” Not knowing what the hell he meant by that, the audience waited in silence as Steve slotted another floppy into the drive. The screen went white again, and a bunch of small text appeared. It might have been too small to read…but it didn’t matter, for the Mac started speaking and reading the text in a slow, robotic voice. It’s first words were: “Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.” Immediately, the crowd screamed its approval. The Mac had not only set a milestone in graphics, it had set one in generated sound. I don’t think the audience entirely grasped it, but what the Mac had done was, for the first time, detect the order of letters in words, and translate them into understandable speech. And even though the Mac plowed ahead in the speech without waiting for the audience to stop, even though there was nothing else, even though everyone might have had to wait a long time before getting one…nothing mattered except the Mac. Steve had impressed everyone with the only words he knew: Insanely great.