Original Mac Designer Looks Back at Steve Jobs

Jerry Manock, the designer behind the Apple II, Apple III, and earlier Macs, takes a look back at his interactions with the late Steve Jobs in an interview with Seven Days.

In 1977, when he was 33 and Apple had just five employees, Steve Jobs hired him as a consultant to design the Apple II, one of the first personal computers in history to be successfully mass produced and marketed. Manock gets credit for almost everything but the circuit board and the logic (which was engineered by Jobs' partner and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak): the machine's "thermal management, the structure, the outside aesthetics, the color - beige, Pantone 453, the color of the deep-space universe," Manock says, rattling off his contributions to the once-cutting-edge Apple II, which now looks like a yellowing typewriter on a shelf in his office.

HIGHLIGHTS:
Steve would say things like: "I was just thinking, in my career I could be the CEO of two or three billion-dollar companies." Apple had just started out, and there was no inkling of NeXT or Pixar.


Walking back from lunch one day, I said, Steve, you paid me $1800 for the Apple II, and it's getting to be more and more popular, and I really think I ought to have a royalty on that. I ought to get, like, a dollar a unit, because $1800 wasn't all that much. He never hesitated. He looked at me and said, "You're very good. But if you knew how many we thought we were going to sell in the next two or three years … You're not that good." What do you say to that? He was absolutely right. How many millions of those things did they sell? You can't ask for royalties after you've delivered the work, so it was totally stupid and naïve on my part. And he was a really incredible negotiator.

Steve was a really good motivator - of groups. He wasn't necessarily good one-on-one. He wanted to see what was going on, so he'd come up behind with no warning and say, "What's that piece of crap?" I'd start trying to explain, "Well, I had to take this into account and also this..." and get all tongue-tied. He'd just get disgusted and walk away. A lot of people took that as a negative criticism of what was being done, and then they would change it, and then they'd get fired.

When somebody asked him what kind of market share he wanted, Steve was famous for saying, "I want it all. I want 100 percent."


There's much more in the full article which can be read at the link below...


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