Steve Jobs

said Wigginton, who was just out of high school.
    There was also the issue of his hygiene. He was still convinced, against all evidence, that his vegan diets meant that he didn’t need to use a deodorant or take regular showers. “We would have to literally put him out the door and tell him to go take a shower,” said Markkula. “At meetings we had to look at his dirty feet.” Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues.
    Markkula was averse to confrontation, so he decided to bring in a president, Mike Scott, to keep a tighter rein on Jobs. Markkula and Scott had joined Fairchild on the same day in 1967, had adjoining offices, and shared the same birthday, which they celebrated together each year. At their birthday lunch in February 1977, when Scott was turning thirty-two, Markkula invited him to become Apple’s new president.
    On paper he looked like a great choice. He was running a manufacturing line for National Semiconductor, and he had the advantage of being a manager who fully understood engineering. In person, however, he had some quirks. He was overweight, afflicted with tics and health problems, and so tightly wound that he wandered the halls with clenched fists. He also could be argumentative. In dealing with Jobs, that could be good or bad.
    Wozniak quickly embraced the idea of hiring Scott. Like Markkula, he hated dealing with the conflicts that Jobs engendered. Jobs, not surprisingly, had more conflicted emotions. “I was only twenty-two, and I knew I wasn’t ready to run a real company,” he said. “But Apple was my baby, and I didn’t want to give it up.” Relinquishing any control was agonizing to him. He wrestled with the issue over long lunches at Bob’s Big Boy hamburgers (Woz’s favorite place) and at the Good Earth restaurant (Jobs’s). He finally acquiesced, reluctantly.
    Mike Scott, called “Scotty” to distinguish him from Mike Markkula, had one primary duty: managing Jobs. This was usually accomplished by Jobs’s preferred mode of meeting, which was taking a walk together. “My very first walk was to tell him to bathe moreoften,” Scott recalled. “He said that in exchange I had to read his fruitarian diet book and consider it as a way to lose weight.” Scott never adopted the diet or lost much weight, and Jobs made only minor modifications to his hygiene. “Steve was adamant that he bathed once a week, and that was adequate as long as he was eating a fruitarian diet.”
    Jobs’s desire for control and disdain for authority was destined to be a problem with the man who was brought in to be his regent, especially when Jobs discovered that Scott was one of the only people he had yet encountered who would not bend to his will. “The question between Steve and me was who could be most stubborn, and I was pretty good at that,” Scott said. “He needed to be sat on, and he sure didn’t like that.” Jobs later said, “I never yelled at anyone more than I yelled at Scotty.”
    An early showdown came over employee badge numbers. Scott assigned #1 to Wozniak and #2 to Jobs. Not surprisingly, Jobs demanded to be #1. “I wouldn’t let him have it, because that would stoke his ego even more,” said Scott. Jobs threw a tantrum, even cried. Finally, he proposed a solution. He would have badge #0. Scott relented, at least for the purpose of the badge, but the Bank of America required a positive integer for its payroll system and Jobs’s remained #2.
    There was a more fundamental disagreement that went beyond personal petulance. Jay Elliot, who was hired by Jobs after a chance meeting in a restaurant, noted Jobs’s salient trait: “His obsession is a passion for the product, a passion for product perfection.” Mike Scott, on the other hand, never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism. The design of the Apple II case was one of many examples. The Pantone company, which Apple used to specify colors for its plastic, had more than two thousand shades of beige. “None of them were good enough for Steve,” Scott marveled. “He wanted to create a different shade, and I had to stop him.” When the time came to tweak the design of the case, Jobs spent days agonizing over just how rounded the corners should be. “I didn’t care how rounded they were,” said Scott, “I just wanted it decided.” Another dispute was over engineering benches. Scott wanted a standard gray; Jobs