Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine Page #2

He was the first person I met

that knew more electronics than I did.

And one of the things that Woz and I did

was we built blue boxes.

One day I picked up a magazine,

and I started reading a story

about phone phreaks and blue boxes.

When phone phreaks

have a convention,

as they did in the ballroom

of a seedy New York hotel lately,

masks are given out at the door.

People don't give their right names.

The blue box was a little device that

put special tones into anybody's phone

and those tones would connect you

anywhere you wanted.

Halfway through reading this,

I called Steve Jobs over

and started reading it to him

over the phone.

There's a way to fool

the entire telephone system

into thinking you were

a telephone computer

and to open up itself and let you call

anywhere in the world for free.

You could call from a pay phone,

go to White Plains, New York,

take a satellite to Europe.

And you'd go around the world

and call the pay phone next door.

Shout in the phone,

be about 30 seconds,

it'd come out the other end

of the other phone.

And he's like, "Hello,"

There's a lag and, "Hello, how are you?"

"I'm fine." You know?

Why, one might wonder,

would someone want to do that?

To rip off the phone company.

And these were illegal, I have to add.

In college, I had a blue box

of my own. It was important

because long-distance phone calls

were really expensive back then.

It was also a way

of sticking it to the man.

This would become an important

selling point for Jobs, too,

even as he left

the technical work to others.

Well, I had this blue box design.

I did a trick in there

that I've never done that good a trick

in any other design in my life.

And Steve Jobs said,

"Hey, why don't we sell them?"

You know, you rapidly run

out of people you want to call,

but it was the magic that two teenagers

could build this box

for $100 worth of parts

and control hundreds of billions

of dollars of infrastructure

in the entire telephone network

in the whole world.

We could sort of influence the world,

you know?

Control it, in the case of blue boxes,

but something much more powerful

than controlling.

Influencing, in the case of Apple.

And they're very closely related.

I really do, to this day,

feel that if we hadn't had had

those blue box experiences,

there never would have been

an Apple computer.

I think Jobs

was always a storyteller.

There was always this sense

that he was constructing a persona.

The first time I sat down

with him to work on a story,

he immediately asked me

if I had read

Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure

of Scientific Revolutions."

I think he was assimilating

into this personality,

this notion that he had found in Kuhn.

The random result

that eventually creates

a paradigm shift where everybody

one morning wakes up,

and they think the new way.

And I believe that he thought

that he was a paradigm shifter.

That was part of his story. He wanted

to have a foot in both worlds.

He wanted to be the renegade,

but he also wanted to be legit.

This is the video deposition

of Steven P Jobs.

We are on the record at 9:22am.

Can we just sort of briefly go over

your employment history after 1973?

I was employed by Atari,

a maker of video games.

- What timeframe?

- I don't know. Early '70s.

Creativity is a lot about anarchy.

I had been in the video-game

business two years

and our corporate culture

was really "work hard, play hard."

The true original sin of Apple

literally takes place

before the company is founded.

Jobs had left Reed College

and now he was back in Silicon Valley.

Woz was working at HP.

I was such a nerd.

When I finished designing calculators

at Hewlett-Packard in the daytime,

I would work on my own little projects.

I saw "Pong" in a bowling alley,

and I said,

"I know logic design,

and I know electronics of televisions."

"I'll use my home TV, snake a wire in,"

and I built myself a "Pong."

Steve came back from Reed College

and saw that I had built

my own Pong game.

And so that gave him the idea

to go down to Atari.

And he went down,

and he showed them the board

and he wound up with a job.

Steve came in and said,

in typical Steve Jobs fashion,

"I'm not going to leave

until you hire me."

And I really appreciated his intensity.

He had one speed. Full on.

I had one little project

that everyone kept turning down.

It was a project called "Breakout."

And finally I said,

"Steve, hey, do this for me."

In the back of my mind,

I knew that Woz was coming over all

the time after working at HP all day,

and I thought,

"OK, I'll put Steve on the night shift."

"Woz will come over. I'll get

two Steves for the price of one."

Steve said, "Nolan Bushnell

of Atari wants another game built."

But we only had four days, Steve said.

When a game is made out of chips

and it's not a program,

four days is, like, impossible.

This is months' worth of work.

I did the entire design,

and then Steve would breadboard

my design for a little while.

We were up four days and nights

non-stop. Both got mononucleosis.

And we got "Breakout" delivered

to Atari, and they paid for it.

Later on,

Woz and I were out to dinner.

He was talking about Breakout,

and I said, "Well, you know,

you guys got paid pretty well for it."

He looked at me puzzled, and I said,

"Yeah, I mean,

you did such a good job."

"I think there was at least

a $5,000 bonus that you guys got."

So, yeah, he was paid $7,000,

and he told me that we were paid $700,

and he wrote me a check for $350.

You know, and that hurts

because we were friends.

And do you do that to a friend?

If he'd said, "I need the money,"

I would have said, "Take it all."

I was happy to be on the project.

I think that Steve...

...was very driven

and would very often take

shortcuts to achieve his goals.

Then in time we'll tell who has fell

And who's been left behind

When you go your way

And I go mine

Apple was a sitcom.

It was a 30-year sitcom.

And Steve was the main character.

This was written in December 1976.

In fact it starts out saying,

"Who's Apple," so that was very early.

He and Woz came in.

Steve had long hair down his back.

He had a Ho Chi Minh beard,

cutoffs, Birkenstocks.

And Wozniak was maybe a little bit

upscale from that, but not much.

I used to like Intel's advertising,

So I called them up one day,

and I said, "Who does your advertising?"

They said, "Well, Regis McKenna."

"What's a Regis McKenna?"

They said, "No, it's a person."

Wozniak had a technical article

on the Apple II.

He wanted us to try to get it

placed into a magazine.

Nobody could read it. It was

all technical jargon and so forth.

And so I told him

I'd have to rewrite it,

and he wasn't happy about that.

He said, "No one's going to rewrite

my stuff."

I said, "Well,

then there's nothing I can do for you,

so you might as well leave."

Steve called back,

and he pretty much convinced me

that he would be the person

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