I interviewed 150 people for my book “Apple: The First 50 Years”—and one of the most intriguing was Del Yocam. Apple hired him as director of materials in 1979, only three years after the company’s founding. “Oh, it was a mess,” he told me of his arrival. “There were product pieces, all kinds of stock, everywhere. There were all kinds of Apple II’s sitting there, not moving because of shortage of parts.”
Yocam, then 35, was a details guy. He’d worked at Ford and two minicomputer companies, so he was well-versed in parts-intensive companies. He wound up staying at Apple for ten years, rising to become chief operating officer.
The other day, Yocam, now 82, mentioned that he had some reminiscences he’d like to publish. I suggested “Pogue’s Posts!”
Here’s what he sent over. Enjoy these insights into the myth of Steve Jobs and Apple’s early years.
When Walter Isaacson phoned me to get information about Steve Jobs for his biography of Steve, I told him:
“I think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth. He wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.”
Nowhere was that truer than with Steve’s closed Macintosh computer.
When I met Steve Jobs in Bandley I that day in November 1979, it was one of the most memorable days of my life. Here I was, dressed in my best Hickey Freeman double-breasted suit and tie, hoping I wasn’t sweating too much, when this guy came up to me in a dirty T-shirt and sandals. Of course, I knew it was Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, but he looked so out of place that it made me uncomfortable. Or maybe I was out of place—a 35-year-old manufacturing executive trying to fit in at a hot new startup.
Steve asked who I was and why I was there. I told him that I was interviewing with Mike Scott, Apple’s CEO, for a manufacturing position. He said, “No, I mean, what are you doing here? What is your purpose?”
I then realized what he was asking. I told him, “I want to change the world and bring computers to all of us.”
I think that one statement allowed Steve and me to become compatriots, colleagues, and ultimately friends. Between 1979 and 1983, when John Sculley arrived, Steve and I spent an amazing amount of time together.
Steve was lost when I arrived to start work at Apple. No one wanted him around, especially management. Mike Scott had started hiring seasoned managers for each of the company’s functions: me to guide manufacturing, Ken Zerbe for finance and accounting, Gene Carter for sales, and so on.
Steve had a lot of free time on his hands. He didn’t know where to focus. He was deeply curious, but he often wore out his welcome with other managers, who were too busy or impatient to explain things to him. And Steve didn’t do himself any favors with his back-to-nature, infrequent bathing.
I was 11 years older than Steve, but that didn’t matter. We both wanted the same thing, and we were passionate about it: We wanted to bring “personal computers” to everyone.
I became a mentor to Steve. I gave him what no one else was willing to give him at that time: I listened to him and spent time with him. He asked a lot of questions, and I had a lot of answers. Steve initially sat in on my staff meetings, but that was short-lived, as he couldn’t keep quiet.
Steve came to our home and interacted with our children; he played piano with them and played ball with them outside. When we were not together, Steve would call me with his burning questions, day and night.
Steve had opened our European assembly plant in Cork, Ireland. After he toured our factory, he got excited about manufacturing. xI had worked for Ford for six years right out of college—four of them in Ford’s Management Training Program at the Los Angeles assembly plant. Steve wanted to know everything I had experienced there. He wanted to learn everything about how Ford built cars.
During the day at work, he would suggest that we take a walk. At night, when I was home in bed, Janet, my wife, would answer the phone and pass it to me. An hour or so later, she would grab the phone from me and say, “Good night, Steve.”
Steve always wanted to learn, and I tried to share my knowledge, ideas, guidance, and friendship with him. Others simply turned him down; they didn’t want him around.
And yes, we would argue. We had many ideas that the other disagreed with, but we would always find a way to accept each other’s views and move on.
Woz, of course, was the designer of the original Apple II, and his imprint was profound. Woz’s brilliance lay in knowing that he couldn’t predict what kinds of applications or peripherals people would want to add to the Apple II. Therefore, he put expansion slots on its motherboard for peripheral cards so that others could add value to the computer.
And come they did: cards that enabled key applications such as floppy-disk storage, printer output, and alternative operating systems. These applications showed potential customers what they could do with the computer. By providing open slots, Woz enabled uses we could not have predicted.
Woz’s Apple II became a phenomenal success because of all the applications others developed specifically for it.
More than anything, Steve wanted to have his own successful computer. He wanted to design, develop, and deliver a more advanced computer than the Apple II. And he wanted it to be a closed computer: He wanted to specify exactly what would be enclosed in it.
Steve and I had many discussions about the benefits and limitations of both open and closed computers. He wanted a faster processor, an advanced operating system, and specific writing and drawing applications. Steve loved the design perfection of a closed system. It meant everything worked as designed. Nothing needed to be added.
I would say to Steve, “No one person has the creative ability to design, develop, and deliver what you want to do—let alone the education and experience. And enclosing it like a toaster, with no expansion slots, is an exercise in futility.”
Steve would argue that the benefits outweighed the limitations. “The Macintosh will be more powerful, with an advanced operating system and specific applications, for a much lower price—under $1,000.” Then came the telling statement: “I can do it.”
For Steve, the closed Mac would be his baby. He wanted to prove that he could design the perfect system, fully complete without the need for expansion slots.
I tried to tell Steve that this was a control issue. He would say it wasn’t and that he believed it was the future of the company. He also said, “I will hire A players to help me, so it won’t be just me.”
Well, Steve was able to convince the board of directors that he should be allowed to build a closed Mac. And he did. It took several years, but on January 24, 1984, the Macintosh 128K was announced and shipped.
Apple was a large public company by then, with thousands of employees worldwide. The board of directors had bet big on the Mac with the famous “1984” launch ad, which ran nationally only once, during the Super Bowl. Early adopters gobbled up Macs, but then sales slowed and almost stopped completely.
The vision the Mac showed the world was brilliant. Applications such as MacWrite, MacPaint, and Microsoft Excel showed how easy computers could be. But without the ability to add a hard drive, networking, or other common peripherals—and with a final price of $2,495—it was a vision few people could afford.
Our stock price was getting hammered. Dealers were sitting on a lot of unsold inventory. The IBM PC and its many clones from Compaq, Dell, and others were eating our lunch and taking market share.
Luckily for us, the Apple II really was a cash cow. Schools would order one or two Macs to look at—but they ordered dozens, then hundreds, of Apple II models.
Despite all the press attention on the Mac, it was the venerable Apple II, with its open architecture, that kept the company afloat during this time.
Our external vision had become disconnected from the reality of the market. That created its own internal problems, too. I was running the Apple II division, and my team felt underappreciated. Everyone wanted the company to succeed, and we knew the Mac team had worked incredibly hard to launch the product.
But when the Mac failed to live up to Steve’s optimistic sales forecast, everyone had a theory about why it hadn’t worked. I heard them all: “It’s too expensive.” “Not enough memory.” And the one that rang truest: “Where are the expansion slots?”
The biggest problem with the Macintosh hardware was obvious: its limited expandability. But the problem wasn’t so much technical as philosophical. We wanted to eliminate the inevitable complexity that came with hardware expandability—for both the user and the developer—by making every Macintosh identical. It was a valid, even somewhat courageous, point of view, but it wasn’t very practical. Things were still changing too quickly in the computer industry for it to work, driven by the relentless tides of Moore’s Law.
It’s not that the vision was wrong; it was more a question of timing than anything else. In the mid-1980s, things were evolving so quickly that a closed architecture limited what was possible. We couldn’t predict the future with certainty, and an open architecture was what enabled the Apple II to continue to thrive. In perhaps the greatest irony, the Apple II’s architecture thrived for more than 15 years because it kept evolving. By the time Steve left Apple after his famous corporate showdown with CEO John Sculley in 1985, the Mac was selling at less than one-tenth of expectations.
It was only after Steve left the Mac team and I became COO—chief operating officer—that the company was able to green-light a new “Open Mac” initiative. In 1987, Apple shipped the Macintosh II, with color, more memory, a faster processor, and, most importantly, an open architecture.
The Mac II and the SE both became fast sellers, giving Apple something much more advanced than the typical IBM PC. They opened new doors for us in creative fields, including desktop publishing and graphics—fields Apple dominated for decades.
One day in early 1991, I got a call from Steve, and our friendship renewed itself. He wanted me to help him at NeXT, as president and COO. I had to smile when Steve talked about NeXT having an open architecture. Where had I heard that before?
I didn’t end up joining NeXT, but I appreciated the call, and it was good to reconnect.
When Steve finally came back to Apple in late 1996, I was cheering from the sidelines.