Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy Page #5

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of the soft drinks company, Pepsi.

The two men began poles apart.

The world I came from

was hierarchical.

It was big business.

It was very competitive

and the idea of building a company

that was going to change the world

was completely foreign from anything

that I'd ever been exposed to.

How Jobs persuaded Sculley

to take the job

is the stuff of business legend.

Steve had these deep penetrating,

brown eyes

and he just stared right at me,

probably, you know, 15 inches away.

He said, "Do you want to sell sugar

water for the rest of your life,

"or do you want to come with me

and change the world?"

Kind of knocked the wind out of me,

because no-one had ever said

anything like that to me before.

Sculley was a pragmatic operator,

a marketing expert who knew exactly

what Apple should do.

What they needed was someone

who could keep the Apple II

commercially alive and generating

cash for about another three years.

After several new product lines

had failed to take off,

the income from the Apple II

was keeping the company alive.

But Apple's hopes of a revival

rested on a new home computer,

the Macintosh,

named after a variety of Apple.

Jobs set out to build a computer

that would blow IBM's PC away.

There was enough of the ordinary

corporate executive about him

to want to beat a rival.

But there was little else

conventional about Steve Jobs.

He wanted computers to be simple

and pleasurable to use.

He wanted our relationship with them

to be more human and intimate.

And that approach to technology has

been Apple's hallmark ever since.

The Macintosh team

was full of rebel spirit.

We were all young, we were all

the same age, and we all thought

we could do better

than has ever been done before.

Jobs thought it would take a year

to build the Macintosh.

In fact, it would take

more than three.

He's got a "reality

distortion field".

Steve wanted the impossible

and he was somehow able

to convince everyone

that the impossible was possible.

Jobs was determined

the Macintosh would be easy to use.

It would have a mouse

and icons on screen,

a first for an affordable

personal computer.

The story of how Jobs brought

that mouse to the world

explodes a myth about him -

That he invented revolutionary

technology.

You see, Jobs didn't

operate in an intellectual vacuum.

Nearby, in Silicon Valley, the Xerox

corporation had a research division

called PARC.

'And the function of spatial

frequency is something like this.'

It was full of free-thinking

technological radicals

and inspirational ideas.

It was just a kind of dream place.

We had a general overall

vision about what we called

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