Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE LAUNCH
A Dent in the Universe
The “1984” ad
Real Artists Ship
The high point of the October 1983 Apple sales conference in Hawaii was a skit based on a TV 
show called 
The Dating Game.
Jobs played emcee, and his three contestants, whom he had 
convinced to fly to Hawaii, were Bill Gates and two other software executives, Mitch Kapor and 
Fred Gibbons. As the show’s jingly theme song played, the three took their stools. Gates, looking 
like a high school sophomore, got wild applause from the 750 Apple salesmen when he said, 
“During 1984, Microsoft expects to get half of its revenues from software for the Macintosh.” 
Jobs, clean-shaven and bouncy, gave a toothy smile and asked if he thought that the Macintosh’s 
new operating system would become one of the industry’s new standards. Gates answered, “To 
create a new standard takes not just making something that’s a little bit different, it takes 
something that’s really new and captures people’s imagination. And the Macintosh, of all the 
machines I’ve ever seen, is the only one that meets that standard.”
But even as Gates was speaking, Microsoft was edging away from being primarily a 
collaborator with Apple to being more of a competitor. It would continue to make application 
software, like Microsoft Word, for Apple, but a rapidly increasing share of its revenue would 
come from the operating system it had written for the IBM personal computer. The year before, 
279,000 Apple IIs were sold, compared to 240,000 IBM PCs and its clones. But the figures for 
1983 were coming in starkly different: 420,000 Apple IIs versus 1.3 million IBMs and its clones. 
And both the Apple III and the Lisa were dead in the water.
Just when the Apple sales force was arriving in Hawaii, this shift was hammered home on the 
cover of 
Business Week
. Its headline: “Personal Computers: And the Winner Is . . . IBM.” The 
story inside detailed the rise of the IBM PC. “The battle for market supremacy is already over,” 
the magazine declared. “In a stunning blitz, IBM has taken more than 26% of the market in two 
years, and is expected to account for half the world market by 1985. An additional 25% of the 
market will be turning out IBM-compatible machines.”

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That put all the more pressure on the Macintosh, due out in January 1984, three months away, 
to save the day against IBM. At the sales conference Jobs decided to play the showdown to the 
hilt. He took the stage and chronicled all the missteps made by IBM since 1958, and then in 
ominous tones described how it was now trying to take over the market for personal computers: 
“Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George 
Orwell right about 1984?” At that moment a screen came down from the ceiling and showed a 
preview of an upcoming sixty-second television ad for the Macintosh. In a few months it was 
destined to make 
advertising history, but in the meantime it served its purpose of rallying Apple’s demoralized 
sales force. Jobs had always been able to draw energy by imagining himself as a rebel pitted 
against the forces of darkness. Now he was able to energize his troops with the same vision.
There was one more hurdle: Hertzfeld and the other wizards had to finish writing the code for 
the Macintosh. It was due to start shipping on Monday, January 16. One week before that, the 
engineers concluded they could not make that deadline.
Jobs was at the Grand Hyatt in Manhattan, preparing for the press previews, so a Sunday 
morning conference call was scheduled. The software manager calmly explained the situation to 
Jobs, while Hertzfeld and the others huddled around the speakerphone holding their breath. All 
they needed was an extra two weeks. The initial shipments to the dealers could have a version of 
the software labeled “demo,” and these could be replaced as soon as the new code was finished at 
the end of the month. There was a pause. Jobs did not get angry; instead he spoke in cold, somber 
tones. He told them they were really great. So great, in fact, that he knew they could get this done. 
“There’s no way we’re slipping!” he declared. There was a collective gasp in the Bandley building 
work space. “You guys have been working on this stuff for months now, another couple weeks 
isn’t going to make that much of a difference. You may as well get it over with. I’m going to ship 
the code a week from Monday, with your names on it.”
“Well, we’ve got to finish it,” Steve Capps said. And so they did. Once again, Jobs’s reality 
distortion field pushed them to do what they had thought impossible. On Friday Randy Wigginton 
brought in a huge bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans for the final three all-nighters. When 
Jobs arrived at work at 8:30 a.m. that Monday, he found Hertzfeld sprawled nearly comatose on 
the couch. They talked for a few minutes about a remaining tiny glitch, and Jobs decreed that it 
wasn’t a problem. Hertzfeld dragged himself to his blue Volkswagen Rabbit (license plate: 
MACWIZ) and drove home to bed. A short while later Apple’s Fremont factory began to roll out 
boxes emblazoned with the colorful line drawings of the Macintosh. Real artists ship, Jobs had 
declared, and now the Macintosh team had.