NEWSWEEK WAS REELING AFTER ATTEMPTING to buy the bogus Hitler Diaries and then shamefully trying to cover the bad judgment by writing in a cover story full of cloying language, “Genuine or not, it almost doesn’t matter in the end.” The top editors, we “Wallendas”—a self-important reference to the aerial circus act—brooded about the process that had led us to such a monumental mistake, and thus we became less enterprising.
This was the context in early 1984 when Steve Jobs came to Newsweek wearing a sharp suit and a tiny bow tie. He was twenty-eight years old. He met with the Wallendas and our owner, Kay Graham, up from Washington for her weekly visit. For two hours Steve showed off the first Macintosh computer, flirting with Kay and teaching us how to manipulate the mouse and switch disks to launch applications and save work. I remember someone asking, “Why call it a mouse?”
Not long after, I had dinner with Jobs and Washington Post writer Tom Zito at Tiro a Segno, a private club in the West Village that had a shooting gallery in the basement. Zito’s father was the club president and Tom showed us around. The rifles in the basement were very old, the targets elegant. There were murals of Capri in the handsome dining room and the maître d’ looked like the dapper Argentine actor Fernando Lamas. Zito and I had dates, but Steve came alone.
When we sat down, Zito ordered a round of Negronis. It was a long way from Steve’s hometown of Cupertino, and he was circumspect, but Zito put him at ease with leading questions that let him show off without seeming arrogant. Dinner became an interview as Zito drew Steve out, and everyone’s enthusiasm mounted for his many ideas. He didn’t seem to notice, but I could see that the women found him attractive, even though he was at least ten years younger than they were. In fact, they were very interested. Maybe they would even buy one of his intriguing new computers. That, he noticed.
“What are they called?” one of the women asked.
“Macintosh,” Steve said.
“Like the apple?”
Steve said his dream was that every person in the world would have his or her own Apple computer.
“That’s going to be all about marketing,” Zito said.
“I know,” Steve said. “But I’m talking about the greatest tool ever.” He went on about how people were going to shop on his computers, and keep their own libraries, and even send messages to each other.
“What a great appliance,” I said. He was just so serious.
“Yes, but don’t call it that,” he said. “Bad marketing.”
We all nodded and Steve said he had to stay focused and pay attention to everything, marketing of course, and all the other details beyond the engineering, even the typography. The design had to have soul. If you got it right, a personal computer could be not only the best tool ever but fun, “like a bicycle for your mind”—he had come up with this after reading a Scientific American article on locomotion efficiency and was beginning to use it with reporters.
“That’s good marketing,” Zito said.
I told Steve that maybe Newsweek could do a special issue about everything he was talking about—how computers were going to change the way we lived. It couldn’t be just about him and his Macintosh, but he would be a big part of it.
“Okay,” he said, but then explained that he didn’t have much confidence in journalists getting his story right. I said I could understand that, even before he mentioned the Hitler Diaries.
Newsweek Access: The Magazine of Life and Technology came out of that dinner as a one-shot that I hoped would turn into a quarterly. I put Steve on the cover in a tiny blue-and-white bow tie. Zito did the interview:
ZITO
Is the computer business as ruthless as it appears to be?
JOBS
No, not at this point. To me, the situation is like a river. When the river is moving swiftly there isn’t a lot of moss and algae in it, but when it slows down it becomes stagnant, a lot of stuff grows in the river and it gets very murky. I view the cutthroat political nature of things very much like that. And right now our business is moving very swiftly. The water’s pretty clear and there’s not a lot of ruthlessness. There’s a lot of room for innovation.
ZITO
Do you consider yourself the new astronaut, the new American hero?
JOBS
No, no, no. I’m just a guy who probably should have been a semi-talented poet on the Left Bank. I got sort of sidetracked here. The space guys, the astronauts, were techies to start with. John Glenn didn’t read Rimbaud, you know; but you talk to some of the people in the computer business now and they’re very well grounded in the philosophical traditions of the last 100 years and the sociological traditions of the ’60s. There’s something going on [in Silicon Valley], there’s something that’s changing the world and this is the epicenter.
ZITO
Do you think it’s unfair that people out here in Silicon Valley are generally labeled nerds?
JOBS
Of course. I think it’s an antiquated notion. There were people in the ’60s who were like that and even in the early ’70s, but now they are not that way. Now they’re the people who would have been poets had they lived in the ’60s. And they’re looking at computers as their medium of expression rather than language, rather than being a mathematician and using mathematics, rather than, you know, writing social theories.
ZITO
What do people do for fun out here? I’ve noticed that an awful lot of those who work for you either play music or are extremely interested in it.
JOBS
Oh yes. And most of them are also left-handed, whatever that means. Almost all of the really great technical people in computers that I’ve known are left-handed. Isn’t that odd?
ZITO
Are you left-handed?
JOBS
I’m ambidextrous.
THE REACTION TO ACCESS was mixed. It was a handsome publication, but what was it about? Wasn’t it really kind of a cross between Popular Mechanics and Esquire? And how relevant was that? But Steve liked it—especially the cover shot, which made him look princely and brooding, even with that little bow tie.
Apple loaned me a Macintosh 128K and I took it on vacation to Florida, where I wrote my first business plan for Smart magazine on it. When Smart launched, it depended on the new desktop publishing technology available to me as a beta site for Apple and Adobe. By then Zito had moved to Silicon Valley to write a book about the early digital startups, but he became an entrepreneur himself. He was living in the best neighborhood in Palo Alto and said he couldn’t make any real money as a writer.
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