Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

Author:Leslie Berlin [Berlin, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2017-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

The quality of Apple’s efforts was especially striking given that the event inspiring them was the first West Coast Computer Faire at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, a weekend-long conference advertised on mustard yellow hand-illustrated flyers headlined “SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA—WHERE IT ALL STARTED—FINALLY GETS ITS ACT TOGETHER.” But the Faire organizers thought as many as ten thousand people might attend,40 so Apple paid for a booth one visitor described as “big, and flashy, and right in front.”41 Markkula knew that the Faire would mark not only the debut of the Apple II and the company itself, but also that of a rival machine: the Commodore PET.

Markkula coached Jobs and Wozniak ahead of the Faire’s opening day. They needed to dress nicely and trim their beards, he said.VII He had them practice their pitches for the Apple II and walked them through what he saw as the computer’s most attractive features. He learned only years later that despite his attempts to orient the young Apple cofounders to serious business endeavors, Wozniak had devoted considerable energy during the Faire to an elaborate prank that involved printing and distributing eight thousand flyers about a fake computer. Wozniak later reminisced, “Thank god Steve and Mike didn’t find out I’d done this. Mike, at least, would’ve said, ‘No, don’t do pranks. Don’t do jokes. They give the wrong image to the company.’ ”42

By weekend’s end, more than twelve thousand people had attended the Faire, many of them not hobbyists but onlookers curious to know more about computers. The visitors were an ideal audience for the Apple II, the only machine on the floor that a reporter described as so easy to use that “you don’t really have to know anything beyond how to hit a switch.” (The Commodore PET, by contrast, was more of an overgrown calculator, with tiny calculatorlike buttons instead of a keyboard and no capacity to expand to accommodate printers or drives.)43 When a reporter asked Markkula, who was staffing the booth on Sunday morning, to describe the market that Apple was pursuing—“somebody that wants to do programming, play games, or what?”—Markkula replied, “All of the above and more. We really want to be the computer company, not the small-business computer company or something else—just the personal computer company!” He explained that the Apple II would be ready to ship in a few weeks and that the $1,298 price (more than $5,100 in 2016) included two game paddles and a padded carrying case.44

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