Founders at Work.pdf

186 Founders at Work
I was very impressed with the engineering. When I looked at the floppy disk
drive for the Apple II and I saw that it was a Shugart SA-400, but it was missing
most of the chips that every other computer had in it, and realized that Woz had
hacked the thing and was doing a lot of it with a combination of software and
hardware, I was deeply impressed with the engineering. But it was not something
that I could see an average person using. I could see, probably, more
likely someone using that than a CP/M machine. Remember, this is before even
the IBM PC.
But I was ready to leave the world of computers. I was working at Coleco in
1983. At the beginning of 1984, I was calling up Lucasfilm and other people in
the film industry because I thought, “Well, the IBM PC”—which was introduced
in 1982—“is taking over the world. Its graphics display is so poorly architected.
It doesn’t even have square pixels. It has a palette of just eight primary
colors—actually two grays and six colors. Clearly, it’s being driven by business
applications and so on. My dream of where computers would go turns out to be
the wrong one. It’s not going more toward the average person; it’s going more
toward businesses. And that’s OK.” So I figured, “If I can’t do it in people’s
homes, at least I want to be involved in creating exciting experiences on the
silver screen and on television.”
Then I saw an ad in 1984 for a Macintosh, and it changed everything. I saw
that it had all this cool graphics capability. They clearly were interested in the
user experience: it was designed for an average person in simplicity; it was very
graphically oriented, albeit in black and white. I decided that there was hope.
I kept calling Apple again and again, trying to find somebody who would
talk to me, to get an interview there. Finally, Alan Kay, who I had worked under
at Atari and now was running a research group at Apple, came to visit
Connecticut to give a talk. I told him what I thought about the Macintosh and
said, “I want to make a color Mac and make it low cost.” He said, “OK, OK. I’ll
see if I can talk to somebody and get you an interview with the Mac team.” That
led to three interviews, and I ended up not working on the Mac team, but for
the team secretly making the color Macintosh.
Livingston: Then you moved out to California?
Perlman: Yes. Actually, it was the second time. I moved out here before to
work for Atari. Then that went bust, so I came back to Connecticut and worked
for Coleco.
Livingston: Do you think there are major differences for a new startup in
Silicon Valley versus the East Coast?
Perlman: Oh yeah, phenomenal differences. I can’t speak for every kind of
startup, but for something involving technology—and even a lot of things
involving content—it’s just so much easier to do it here. You have resources
here and people who understand technology. There’s a high concentration of
talent that you can draw on. You don’t have to relocate people to get them
there.