But it didn't do any good; I still was going to stay at HP.
Then Allen Baum called.
Allen said, "Steve, you know, you really ought to go ahead and do it. Think about it. You can be an engineer and become a manager and get rich, or you can be an engineer and stay ari engineer and get rich." He told me he thought it was absolutely possible for me to start a company and stay an engineer. He told me I could do it and never get into management.
That was exactly what I needed to hear. I needed to hear one person saying that I could stay at the bottom of the organization chart, as an engineer, and not have to be a manager. I called Steve Jobs right away with the news. He was thrilled.
And the next day I came in early, walked over to a couple of friends at HP, and told them, "That's it, I am going to leave HP and start Apple."
Then I realized, Oh, you should always tell your boss first. So I went over to tell him quickly, but he didn't show up at his table. I waited and waited, and finally it was like four in the afternoon, and he still wasn't at his table. Everybody kept coming up to me
as I waited there, saying, "Hey, I hear you're leaving," and I didn't want my boss to hear it from someone else.
Finally my boss showed up near the end of the day. I told him I was leaving to start my own company. He asked me when I wanted to go. I told him, "Right away." So he took me over to human resources and they interviewed me and all of a sudden I was gone. It was that quick.
But I never doubted my decision. I mean, I'd made my decision. Apple was the main thing for me from that point on.
• o •
Just before we met Mike, Steve and I made plans to move Apple from his house and my apartment to a real office. We had something like $10,000 in the bank from the Apple I sales, so we were able to do this. The office was on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, just a few blocks away from where the huge Apple campus would eventually be on Bandley Drive.
Then, when Mike joined us, we had even more money in our account. We moved into our little office. There were about five or six desks around. There was a little room to set up a lab bench to do some testing and debug work. It was a real long lab bench. And we had our key staff in place. Steve, me, Mike Markkula, Rod Holt, and, now, a guy named Mike Scott.
We'd hired Mike Scott to be the president just before Mike Markkula got there. (So now we had two Steves and two Mikes.) Mike, or "Scotty," as we called him, was a guy with experience running things. He came from National Semiconductor, where he'd been a director.
I think a lot of people have forgotten him today, but Mike was Apple's president and leader for four years—he took us public four years later.
We had this idea that we would announce and show the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire, which was about four months away. The Faire, started by Jim Warren, another
Homebrew member, would be in San Francisco in January of 1977.
So I had four months to finish things up. I was completing the 8K bytes of code we had to release to Synertek, the company that was going to make the ROMs for the Apple II. Those were the ROMs that would make it an Apple II running BASIC.
Then there was the project surrounding the plastic case. We were going to be the first computer ever in a plastic case. I did not have to deal with this at all, thank god. It was a rough project. Steve Jobs, Rod Holt, and Mike Scott dealt with that. They had a guy in Palo Alto who was signed up to make plastic cases for us. The process was time-consuming and laborious, and it turned out there was a limit to what this guy could do. He was using a process to build the cases, but it turned out he could only do a really small number per day.
It was only about three days before the West Coast Computer Faire that we got our first three plastic cases as samples. They came in, and we actually assembled the whole complete computer with the board inside. It sort of looked like what the Apple II would look like, and now we could show it off at the Faire.
Finally, in the days before the West Coast Computer Faire, Mike Markkula explained how we would all have to dress up nicely, how we should appear and look, how we should act. He coordinated how we would talk to people and show them things.
Of course, on the side, I started thinking of how I could do a prank at the show. First, I wrote a little joke program that would tell jokes about people's ethnicity. Then I set up a huge prank that would take a lot more effort than just a regular joke. And I thought I would play this joke on the big company that started it all for me. Fin talking about the company that made the Altair: the MITS Corporation.
• o •
Well, we had a list of everyone who was going to show computers and equipment at the West Coast Computer Faire, and I thought it was so strange that MITS wasn't going to be there.
I thought, What a great opportunity to pull a prank on them!
I got an idea from something I'd read in the Pentagon Papers. There was a part in there all about political trickery and a guy named Dick Tuck who played dirty tricks, clever little psychological tricks like putting out fake memoranda, fake notices to alarm people that were written in such a way that they couldn't really be denied as being lies. So I decided I'd put out a fake memo of my own—a fake ad, like a leaflet, for a fake product from MITS. After I heard from Mike Markkula that we were going to hand out twenty thousand brochures for the Apple II, I realized it would be possible to get thousands and thousands of fake ads out.
The first thing I did was call Adam Schoolski, who was a thirteen-year-old phone phreak when I'd first met him a few years earlier. He'd gone by the handle Johnny Bagel. Anyway, I told him that I wanted to do this prank but didn't want to do it near the San Francisco Bay Area. I had a lot of good experience with pranks by then, and I knew that you don't get caught if you keep people out of the loop, you don't do things nearby, and you keep a level of secrecy. And this was going to be a major prank, I told Adam, because I wanted to print up eight thousand leaflets to distribute. I was able to come up with the $400 I needed to print eight thousand copies on different colors of paper.
Adam and I made it together. The product we made up was called the Zaltair. You see, there was a new company at the time, called Zilog, that was making a cliip that was compatible with the Intel 8080. It was called the Z-80, and at the time there were lots of hobby computers coming out that were built around it. They were called the Z-this and the Z-that. All these companies were always using Z words. So I came up with the Zaltair, a made-up computer that was also built around the Z-80.
I came up with all kinds of dumb computer-y Z words, too. Like Bazic. And Perzonality. Then I needed copy for the leaflet. I looked in a computer magazine,
Byte
, for an ad that was the worst ever. And 1 found it. It was from a company called Sphere. And it said dumb stuff like, "Imagine this. Imagine that. Imagine some other thing." So I wrote copy that said, "Imagine a race car with five wheels." I made up the stupidest things any idiot dork would laugh at, but if they saw it in a nicely done leaflet with good fonts, they would think it's all real and legitimate. Imagine something going faster than the speed of light. Imagine a banjo with six strings. I came up with the dumbest things.
Also, I made a play on what was called the S-100 bus, the connection the Altair used to plug in expansion boards. I named the Zaltair's equivalent the Z-150 bus. I wrote, "We have 150 slots. We call it the Z-150 bus." I even said it was compatible with the S- 100 bus, but with 50 extra pins. If you think about this, these are just the dumbest statements, but I knew people would read stuff into it as if these were fantastic advances, just because our leaflet was going to look so professionally created.
Then I decided to make this prank on the MITS Corporation look like Processor Technology had done it. After all, they did a competing computer, the SOL. I got this idea from my experience at the University of Colorado, when I was able to make it look like another guy had jammed the TVs in my class. Two pranks for the price of one! So the way I did this was I made up a totally phony quote that would raise anybody's eyebrows. They would think, Whoa. What the hell is he saying? I attributed it to the president of MITS, Ed Roberts, and put it at the top in italics.
The quotation was completely and utterly nonsensical: "Predictable refinement of computer equipment should suggest online
reliability. The elite computer hobbyist needs one logical option- less guarantee, yet." You see? The first letter of each word in those two sentences spells out Processor Technology!
Then, on the reverse side of the paper, I put a comparison chart. That was the common way magazines like
Byte
would compare computers. How fast are they? How big are they? How much RAM do they have? What processor do they use? Well, in my chart I made up the dumbest categories. Like, I had a category just generally called "hardware." A computer would get from 1 to 10. Then, software. I rated these computers on uniqueness, on personality, on just the dumbest, most generic terms you would never see a computer rated on. I gave the Zaltair a 1 in every category, of course, and I always made the Altair come in second. Then all the computers that were actually better than the Altair would rate behind that. That way, it looked like they were worthless by comparison, even though anybody at that show probably knew that the competitors were so much better. Of course, I included the Apple II.
I hoped it would look like MITS was lying in their comparison chart anyway.
I realized that, man, this was so big, and there was no way I could get caught at this thing. I couldn't let it happen. I had two young friends, Chris Espinoza and Randy Wiggington, who knew about it—they were teenagers back then. And I told each of them that, no matter what, they could never tell anyone about it. Even if you get called by the police and they tell you that your partner told them everything, you should still deny everything. We are going to stonewall this, I told them, and never ever admit it to anyone.
Adam Schoolski lived in Los Angeles but he came up for the Faire. And when the four of us got there with the eight thousand handouts, we saw these huge tables where all the companies were putting out their brochures and flyers. We brought two thousand in at first and just set them on a table like what we were doing was normal. And then we went around the Faire, kind of chuckling a little.
But Adam came up to me an hour later and told me the whole box was gone. Carton and everything. Gone.
So we went to our hotel and got another box of two thousand and brought them in. We stood around and watched until eventually some guy walks up, looks at one of the handouts, then picks up the box and takes it away. So we realized that a representative was there from MITS after all, intercepting them!
Now, we went back to the hotel and got a bunch more handouts. This time we didn't just put the carton down. Instead we carried them in our hands, under our coats, in our backpacks, and we put them in pay phones, corners, tables and everywhere. All over the Faire. We would find stacks of handouts—other companies' real handouts—and slip a few of ours underneath. So if somebody ran over right away, they wouldn't think we had slipped in bad stuff. Onesy, twosy, and we didn't get caught.
Thank god Steve and Mike didn't find out I'd done this. Mike, at least, would've said,
u
No, don't do pranks. Don't do jokes. They give the wrong image to the company." That's what any professional type would've said. But hey, they were dealing with Steve Wozniak. I did take work seriously—I had engineered a fantastic product, and everyone knew it—and I was serious about starting a company and introducing a product. But to me, that goes along with having fun and playing jokes. I'd spent my whole life like that. If you think about it, even a lot of the personality of the Apple computer was about fun. And that really came about just because my style was to have fun. Jokes make things worth doing.
I couldn't stop laughing the next day at Apple when Steve saw the comparison chart and started talking all positively about how we actually didn't perform too badly in the comparison. We were pretty lousy, of course, like everyone else but my made-up Zaltair, but he said,
u
Hey, we didn't do too bad, because, after all, we rank better than some of the others." Oh my god. Randy Wiggington had to run out of there, we were in such tears of laughter!
And the next night, which was the regular Wednesday night Homebrew meeting, I couldn't wait to see if people had caught on. Sure enough, someone held my thing up in the air and started talking about the Zaltair, saying he'd called the company and this was a fake. A hoax.
It turned out about a third of the people in there, a couple hundred, had actually gotten the handout. So it did get around.
About a week later, Gordon French, who started Homebrew and by now had left his job at Processor Technology, was lacking around Apple to see if there was any consulting work he could do for us. I remember thinking he was just such a nice, pleasant, easygoing guy.
I took the opportunity and said to him, "Oh, did you ever hear about that Zaltair that got introduced?" I could barely hold my laughter when I asked him.