We’re back with another Amazing Apple Anecdote for you to savor. This week we find out about a shortage of Apple Lisas, which lead to employee Bruce Horn taking one right off another employee’s desk at the order of Steve Jobs.
Bruce Horn recalls:
When I joined the Mac group, we were still very small, working in what we called Texaco Towers–a nondescript office building behind a Texaco station at the corner of De Anza and Stevens Creek, in Cupertino, long since gone.
The software group had offices on one side of the office building, and the hardware group was on the other side. Our offices were quite spare. One room toward the front of the building had a line printer (one of those old, big, noisy impact printers) that was driven by an Apple II. To print out your sources, you had to write them to an Apple II disk, run a program to swap the bytes or do some other manipulation, and then put it in the Apple II which would then run the line printer.
Of course, to print out sources, you had to write some code. I was ready to go, and I had been on the Mac team for several weeks but still hadn’t gotten a Lisa, the development machine we used. The Lisa was still under development, and the prototypes were very difficult to obtain. I was starting to get a little frustrated and complained to Andy Hertzfeld at one point that maybe I should go work for a *real* company that could provide the appropriate tools for their software developers.
Andy mentioned this to Steve Jobs. Steve immediately said, “Well, should we fire him?” Andy replied “No, just get him a computer!”
Later that day I received a note from Steve to go to a particular office in another Apple building; there would be a Lisa on the desk, and I could take that one and use it. I went over to the other building and found the office.
The nameplate on the office door said, “John Couch.” John was the head of the group developing the Lisa. I wasn’t sure that this was really OK, but I had a note from Steve if anybody asked, so I walked into the office, unplugged the computer, and carted it away.
I still don’t know to this day whether Steve had arranged this with John, or if John came back to the surprise of an empty desk, but I did get a lot of use out of that machine, maybe more than John ever did.
If anything this story shows just how ruthless Jobs was, not afraid to fire anyone. You wonder what happened to John Couch, but you would get the feeling that it wasn’t anything good. That’s it for this week but we’ll be back soon with more. For now enjoy!
