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

CHAPTER EIGHT
XEROX AND LISA
Graphical User Interfaces
A New Baby
The Apple II took the company from Jobs’s garage to the pinnacle of a new industry. Its sales rose 
dramatically, from 2,500 units in 1977 to 210,000 in 1981. But Jobs was restless. The Apple II 
could not remain successful forever, and he knew that, no matter how much he had done to 
package it, from power cord to case, it would always be seen as Wozniak’s masterpiece. He 
needed his own machine. More than that, he wanted a product that would, in his words, make a 
dent in the universe.
At first he hoped that the Apple III would play that role. It would have more memory, the 
screen would display eighty characters across rather than forty, and it would handle uppercase and 
lowercase letters. Indulging his passion for industrial design, Jobs decreed the size and shape of 
the external case, and he refused to let anyone alter it, even as committees of engineers added 
more components to the circuit boards. The result was piggybacked boards with poor connectors 
that frequently failed. When the Apple III began shipping in May 1980, it flopped. Randy 
Wigginton, one of the engineers, summed it up: “The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived 
during a group orgy, and later everybody had this bad headache, and there’s this bastard child, and 
everyone says, ‘It’s not mine.’”
By then Jobs had distanced himself from the Apple III and was thrashing about for ways to 
produce something more radically different. At first he flirted with the idea of touchscreens, but he 
found himself frustrated. At one demonstration of the technology, he arrived late, fidgeted awhile, 
then abruptly cut off the engineers in the middle of their presentation with a brusque “Thank you.” 
They were confused. “Would you like us to leave?” one asked. Jobs said yes, then berated his 
colleagues for wasting his time.
Then he and Apple hired two engineers from Hewlett-Packard to conceive a totally new 
computer. The name Jobs chose for it would have caused even the most jaded psychiatrist to do a 
double take: the Lisa. Other computers had been named after daughters of their designers, but Lisa 
was a daughter Jobs had abandoned and had not yet fully admitted was his. “Maybe he was doing 
it out of guilt,” said Andrea Cunningham, who worked at Regis McKenna on public relations for 
the project. “We had to come up with an acronym so that we could claim it was not named after 
Lisa the child.” The one they reverse-engineered was “local integrated systems architecture,” and 
despite being meaningless it became the official explanation for the name. Among the engineers it 
was referred to as “Lisa: invented stupid acronym.” Years later, when I asked about the name, 
Jobs admitted simply, “Obviously it was named for my daughter.”
The Lisa was conceived as a $2,000 machine based on a sixteen-bit microprocessor, rather than 
the eight-bit one used in the Apple II. Without the wizardry of Wozniak, who was still working 
quietly on the Apple II, the engineers began producing a straightforward computer with a 
conventional text display, unable to push the powerful microprocessor to do much exciting stuff. 
Jobs began to grow impatient with how boring it was turning out to be.
There was, however, one programmer who was infusing the project with some life: Bill 
Atkinson. He was a doctoral student in neuroscience who had experimented with his fair share of 
acid. When he was asked to come work for Apple, he declined. But then Apple sent him a 
nonrefundable plane ticket, and he decided to use it and let Jobs try to 
persuade him. “We are inventing the future,” Jobs told him at the end of a three-hour pitch. 
“Think about surfing on the front edge of a wave. It’s really exhilarating. Now think about dog-

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paddling at the tail end of that wave. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as much fun. Come down here 
and make a dent in the universe.” Atkinson did.
With his shaggy hair and droopy moustache that did not hide the animation in his face, 
Atkinson had some of Woz’s ingenuity along with Jobs’s passion for awesome products. His first 
job was to develop a program to track a stock portfolio by auto-dialing the Dow Jones service, 
getting quotes, then hanging up. “I had to create it fast because there was a magazine ad for the 
Apple II showing a hubby at the kitchen table looking at an Apple screen filled with graphs of 
stock prices, and his wife is beaming at him—but there wasn’t such a program, so I had to create 
one.” Next he created for the Apple II a version of Pascal, a high-level programming language. 
Jobs had resisted, thinking that BASIC was all the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson, “Since 
you’re so passionate about it, I’ll give you six days to prove me wrong.” He did, and Jobs 
respected him ever after.
By the fall of 1979 Apple was breeding three ponies to be potential successors to the Apple II 
workhorse. There was the ill-fated Apple III. There was the Lisa project, which was beginning to 
disappoint Jobs. And somewhere off Jobs’s radar screen, at least for the moment, there was a 
small skunkworks project for a low-cost machine that was being developed by a colorful 
employee named Jef Raskin, a former professor who had taught Bill Atkinson. Raskin’s goal was 
to make an inexpensive “computer for the masses” that would be like an appliance—a self-
contained unit with computer, keyboard, monitor, and software all together—and have a graphical 
interface. He tried to turn his colleagues at Apple on to a cutting-edge research center, right in 
Palo Alto, that was pioneering such ideas.