Authors: David Beers
The Woz of mythology is the man who won by daring to thumb his nose at authority (the authority revered by his father). Woz the boy planted shrill sound devices behind the classroom TV, made sirens blare in driver’s ed. Woz put a metronome in a friend’s locker and laughed to see the principal grab the ticking box and run outside with it close to his chest, sure he was saving the school from a bomb. “The teachers always said, ‘We know Wozniak did this, but he’s too bright to catch.’ I never got
caught,” he once said. Woz, one quarter shy of an engineering degree, spurned the university and started Dial-A-Joke from his apartment. Woz, for a while, sold electronic “blue boxes” that illegally jimmied into phone networks; a pal was the notorious “Captain Crunch” who reveled in stealing long distance time from great corporations like AT&T.
All of this made me glad to know, nearly twenty years after the invention of the Apple computer, that finally I would be meeting the myth of Woz in person. This is why I returned to the Valley in the autumn of 1994. At the cluttered office he keeps in a nondescript business park just off the freeway in Los Gatos, Woz had granted me an audience. I was by then a Lockheed son who had spent much of my life seeking release from the customs and assumptions of the tribe of my father. What, I wanted to know, had made Woz do the same in such dramatic and legendary fashion? I was there, in a sense, to further polish the myth, to fit it neatly into my own private mythology of my tribe and its history. Why, I asked, did he so obviously relish challenging authority?
Woz seemed perplexed by my questions. He wanted me to know that he was a prankster by personality, yes, but not a rebel by ideology. “Challenging authority. I don’t like that phrase,” Woz said. The wide face he’d inherited from his father, Woz continued to mask with a full beard, albeit a better trimmed beard than seen in all those famous photos from Apple’s early years. “I don’t really like to challenge authority, but I don’t like to accept something only because someone says they have authority. In other words, I really do like to be skeptical.”
He reminded me that before Apple happened, Woz the dropout, Woz the phone phreaker, had taken a job at Hewlett-Packard. This he’d done because designing circuits for calculators gave him what his father had: “security” in a big company with plenty of “quality” projects to hold his attention. “I was so happy,” Woz remembered, “when other people at Hewlett-Packard said, ‘You could work here for life and just be an engineer, not go into management.’ ”
Populist rhetoric, Woz assured me, was not the draw that kept him coming back to Homebrew meetings; it was the room full of tekkies. The Homebrewers tipped Woz off to the availability of suddenly cheap microprocessor chips. Gratefully, he photocopied his evolving computer designs and passed them around for suggestions. And when Woz brought out an actual, working Apple I, the Homebrewers explained to him the miracle of his machine.
“All of a sudden the people in the club were talking along political lines, of individuals having these powerful tools that previously were kept from them, that they were going to be able to write better software than the big companies, that they were going to do more for the world and basically turn things upside down.…”
“Yes,”
I said (the legend coming back into focus).
“… so there was a strong pro-individual type thinking in our club. And I loved hearing that because it was true!”
“Then it
was
true,” I chimed in (reciting myth from memory), “that the Apple computer grew out of this very philosophy of yours.…”
Woz was perplexed again. “I have to think about that,” he said, his tone that of someone who really does like to be skeptical. “No,” he corrected me. “I just love computers.”
Woz had never wanted to found a sociotechnological revolution, not even, at first, a company. That, he said, is why, even after the Apple I, he had continued to cling to Hewlett-Packard, to stay with his sure thing in a great corporation. Political talk certainly could not pry him loose. “In college I basically decided not to be involved in politics,” said Woz. “The system goes on and we’re going to have a really decent life no matter who’s elected.” Caring about politics, Woz had concluded, is a recipe for frustration, wasted emotion.
“I love computers. I love computing. I love any time I can get on a computer.…”
As I listened to Woz I was reminded of the conversation I’d had with his silver-haired father the day before. Jerry Wozniak
had spoken in similar terms about his Lockheed work, absorbing work about which he’d never felt the slightest moral qualm, even when he had helped design the guidance system for a nuclear missile. He had exuded a startlingly pure attraction to the technical challenges Lockheed had offered him. He had confused me at the time by saying of his son, the mythical Woz, “He’s done a lot of things I would never do, but I just feel kind of akin to him.”
Jerry Wozniak had added that he felt not at all akin to Steve Jobs. The other Steve, whose parents were not blue sky but blue collar, was the one who finally managed to pry Woz away from Hewlett-Packard with pleading and cajoling. Steve Jobs did not find it presumptuous to imagine himself rich and famous and the boss of his own corporation. This flew in the face of Lockheed culture, a culture that expected modest egos of its employees, egos that fit neatly side by side in cubicle after cubicle, patient egos. And that is why Jerry Wozniak did not feel akin to Steve Jobs. That is why he remembered seeing in young Steve Jobs, in fact, a character flaw.
“He’d say, ‘Start at the top.’ Now, most people would start at the bottom and work up, you know? But he just never thought of it that way at all.”
As Jerry told me this, we were sitting in the dining room of the house he and his wife had recently purchased after living for twenty-eight years in the house where Woz grew up. The new house was spacious but not ostentatious, a rather large ranch house next to other expensive ranch houses across the road from one of the last orchards in the Valley. “Steve Jobs just thought you should start at the top and we thought that was a character flaw.” Jerry shrugged. “But he did it.”
The father’s instincts were shared by the son. Before founding Apple, Woz the loyal employee first offered his personal computer idea to unimpressed superiors at Hewlett-Packard.
The father’s instincts lingered in the son long after he’d become famous. “Steve Jobs and I were very different. He just wanted to be at the top,” Woz told me. “And I just wanted to be
at the bottom. No one ever worked for me at Apple except one technician.”
I heard in Woz the sound of myth crumbling. Perhaps the Lockheed son was not so different from his father. Perhaps the son had never, after all, consciously sought to turn his father’s world upside down.
Was there ever a time, I asked Woz, when you could have seen yourself working at Lockheed?
“Oh, absolutely,” he answered. “I just assumed Lockheed was electrical engineers like my dad, and from the time I was very young, I was going to be an electrical engineer. I knew I was good at it and I knew I liked it and I just figured, ‘I’m going to be an engineer.’ ”
I
f sheer talent rescued Jerry Wozniak from Lockheed’s early 1970s layoffs, my father believed that he and hundreds of other crank turners survived for a different reason. His life preserver was his security clearance. To bid on any new secret program, Lockheed needed to assure the government it had the personnel to do the work. Therefore management found it necessary, if not particularly efficient, to keep a lot of “ticketed” workers around even when projects were scarce. When contracts rolled in, the same imperative bent common sense the other way. Somewhere in the Lockheed complex there was a big room called “the icebox” where perfectly able-bodied engineers spent weeks and months doing nothing but reading mystery novels and learning musical instruments and running their own side businesses over the phone. They were waiting for their clearances to come through. Until then, Lockheed paid them full salaries to kill time.
“Waste” and “efficiency” were relative notions in the culture of Lockheed, a culture that assumed government should guarantee profit even when jobs ran well over budget. “Cost-plus” contracting, it was called. When a project was done, Lockheed
figured its costs, tacked on a profit “plus,” and submitted its bill. Within this construct, the primary goal was to make products not cheaply but to military specifications, specs that called for back-up systems for back-up systems and for materials capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. Lockheed would build one or a few machines that marked the culmination of years of R&D, esoterica tricky, by its very nature, to price up front. Every time a part was respecified or redesigned along the way, that made other parts obsolete, threw the latest estimates out the window. Such a culture would seem to invite sloth and cheating and, of course, taxpayers have been angered by such revelations since the earliest days of aerospace. Jerry Wozniak, for one, never did understand what all the complaining was about.
“I’ve never seen this pork barreling stuff. This business about waste and how inefficient things can be.” At Lockheed, he said, “I’ve just never seen it. Although it
is
hard doing business with the government. The tendency all the way up the line is: don’t make a mistake, because you get penalized for mistakes. So we take extreme precautions to guarantee against making mistakes. And does that increase the cost? You bet!” But in the end, as Jerry saw it, the taxpayers always got what they paid for—even if they did have to take it on faith. “The stuff I worked on,” Jerry assured me, “was
very unusual stuff.
”
Here, now, is where the mythology of Woz and his miraculous machine finds powerful allure, because
very unusual stuff
is precisely what Jerry’s son managed to invent using a twenty-dollar microprocessor chip and twelve screws to hold the whole thing together. The first batch of fifty Apples was financed not by federal millions, but on thirty-day credit chits from parts suppliers. This gave Woz and Jobs exactly a month to hand-assemble their machines and sell them to a retailer and pay off their suppliers out of the proceeds. Myth and fact record that in Steve Jobs’s garage the two friends soldered and wired like manic dervishes until, with a day to spare, they’d
done
it.
How much more thrilling is this story of creation than anything Jerry Wozniak could tell me, his work cloaked as it was in
bureaucratized blackness? (“What did you and my father do together at Lockheed?” I asked Jerry. “We weren’t in the plumbing business,” was all he said.)
How much more thrilling to imagine
very unusual stuff
created by kids in a garage. More thrilling, as well, to see the marketplace transform, in a few short years, the very unusual into the quite usual. Unlike missiles or satellites or lunar modules, the personal computer could be touched, could be put to use by virtually
anyone
. Once we had, why shouldn’t America prefer the myth of Woz to the myth his father (and my father) lived by?
Every now and then during the early go-go years of Apple Computer, Jerry Wozniak would drop by his son’s company and shake his head in disbelief at what he saw there. Without days of meetings, without supervisors even checking off, “individuals were making decisions on the spot. They had to.”
Jerry would compare this to what he had known all his days working in aerospace. “There’s a limit to how independent you can be at Lockheed because if you’re cutting against the grain too much, it is not going to work well for you, it is not going to work well for the others.” Yet everyone at Apple seemed to run hard and even rudely against the grain when designs were up for grabs. And after decisions were made, well, Jerry had put in some long hours at Lockheed, but everyone at Apple seemed to be twenty-five and devoid of a home life, seemed to want nothing but to work around the clock to get the product out the door and onto shelves and into the hands of as many people as possible.
The Woz had taken what his father had taught him and he had made it his own and then he had given it over to a friend with the character flaw of a presumptuous ego. Now, between the world of the son and the world of the father, there was, Jerry concluded, “no comparison.”
F
or some years after the invention of the personal computer, my family paid little notice to the tribe of Woz. When we finally
woke to the commercial electronics boom in the Valley, we were confused by what came with it. The new tribe seemed to glorify impermanence, an idol we found hostile, even perverse. Their buildings were called “tilt-ups” because they were constructed of slabs of concrete, the slabs poured on the ground, then tilted up to make a place of work virtually overnight. Tilt-ups were populated by well-paid technicians who nevertheless scorned loyalty, “job hopping” every few years to other tilt-ups where more money or promotions awaited. Tilt-ups also housed instant assembly lines staffed by immigrant women easily fired when sales went slack or when a union drive (never successful) threatened. And tilt-ups were full of temp workers who came and went in rhythm to the short-lived “product cycles” of commercial electronics. By the early 1980s, Silicon Valley led the country in temporary employment.
My family found alien what the tribe of Woz caused around us, the rush to personalize the microchip and get it to the marketplace. Blue sky technology was built in secret for the state; its incomprehensibility was part of its appeal. But now suddenly everyone was a start-up schemer, racing to be the first to invent some new peripheral or interface, gadgets too “friendly” to too many “users” to hold any mystique for us. When the start-ups became big electronics companies, they still looked foreign to us. In their competition for the best minds, they held out odd visions of Utopia, “campuses” where ponytailed renegades ruled and everyone played volleyball at lunch. The same firms made a virtue of “lean and mean,” farming out what they could to Third Worlders to whom they felt no obligation. To my family, this all seemed so un-Lockheed, so un-Catholic.