Steve Jobs

brochures for the Apple II. The first thing they did was to replace Ron Wayne’s ornateVictorian woodcut-style logo, which ran counter to McKenna’s colorful and playful advertising style. So an art director, Rob Janoff, was assigned to create a new one. “Don’t make it cute,” Jobs ordered. Janoff came up with a simple apple shape in two versions, one whole and the other with a bite taken out of it. The first looked too much like a cherry, so Jobs chose the one with a bite. He also picked a version that was striped in six colors, with psychedelic hues sandwiched between whole-earth green and sky blue, even though that made printing the logo significantly more expensive. Atop the brochure McKenna put a maxim, often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that would become the defining precept of Jobs’s design philosophy: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
    The First Launch Event
    The introduction of the Apple II was scheduled to coincide with the first West Coast Computer Faire, to be held in April 1977 in San Francisco, organized by a Homebrew stalwart, Jim Warren. Jobs signed Apple up for a booth as soon as he got the information packet. He wanted to secure a location right at the front of the hall as a dramatic way to launch the Apple II, and so he shocked Wozniak by paying $5,000 in advance. “Steve decided that this was our big launch,” said Wozniak. “We would show the world we had a great machine and a great company.”
    It was an application of Markkula’s admonition that it was important to “impute” your greatness by making a memorable impression on people, especially when launching a new product. That was reflected in the care that Jobs took with Apple’s display area. Other exhibitors had card tables and poster board signs. Apple had a counter draped in black velvet and a large pane of backlit Plexiglas with Janoff’s new logo. They put on display the only three Apple IIs that had been finished, but empty boxes were piled up to give the impression that there were many more on hand.
    Jobs was furious that the computer cases had arrived with tiny blemishes on them, so he had his handful of employees sand andpolish them. The imputing even extended to gussying up Jobs and Wozniak. Markkula sent them to a San Francisco tailor for three-piece suits, which looked faintly ridiculous on them, like tuxes on teenagers. “Markkula explained how we would all have to dress up nicely, how we should appear and look, how we should act,” Wozniak recalled.
    It was worth the effort. The Apple II looked solid yet friendly in its sleek beige case, unlike the intimidating metal-clad machines and naked boards on the other tables. Apple got three hundred orders at the show, and Jobs met a Japanese textile maker, Mizushima Satoshi, who became Apple’s first dealer in Japan.
    The fancy clothes and Markkula’s injunctions could not, however, stop the irrepressible Wozniak from playing some practical jokes. One program that he displayed tried to guess people’s nationality from their last name and then produced the relevant ethnic jokes. He also created and distributed a hoax brochure for a new computer called the “Zaltair,” with all sorts of fake ad-copy superlatives like “Imagine a car with five wheels.” Jobs briefly fell for the joke and even took pride that the Apple II stacked up well against the Zaltair in the comparison chart. He didn’t realize who had pulled the prank until eight years later, when Woz gave him a framed copy of the brochure as a birthday gift.
    Mike Scott
    Apple was now a real company, with a dozen employees, a line of credit, and the daily pressures that can come from customers and suppliers. It had even moved out of the Jobses’ garage, finally, into a rented office on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, about a mile from where Jobs and Wozniak went to high school.
    Jobs did not wear his growing responsibilities gracefully. He had always been temperamental and bratty. At Atari his behavior had caused him to be banished to the night shift, but at Apple that was not possible. “He became increasingly tyrannical and sharp in his criticism,” according to Markkula. “He would tell people, ‘That design looks like shit.’” He was particularly rough on Wozniak’s young programmers, Randy Wigginton and Chris Espinosa. “Steve would come in, take aquick look at what I had done, and tell me it was shit without having any idea what it was or why I had done it,”