Apple's other co-founder, Steve Wozniak, didn't feel this was right. He says it was "the right thing" to do. Insider logo The word "Insider".
Close icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. It indicates a way to close an interaction, or dismiss a notification. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Redeem your free audiobook. Alyson Shontell. Facebook Icon The letter F. There was also this implication that we were going to change the world, or we were going to change society in a significant way But, as Apple skyrocketed into an icon of the emerging computer revolution and Jobs and Wozniak became geek heroes, some of the early Apple employees got lost in the shuffle.
Once Rod Holt was hired to run engineering, he became Fernandez's boss. Fernandez was a very capable technician who helped shape the early trajectory of Apple and the products that made it a success. But as the startup transformed into a corporation, Fernandez remained a technician and increasingly ended up doing unfulfilling kinds of work. He and Holt got along well, but when Fernandez approached Holt about opportunities to move forward, there weren't many options. At that point in , Apple was up to employees and was catapulting toward an IPO.
It was an IPO that years later would create more capital than any since Ford Motor Company and would set a new all-time high by creating over millionaires. But, in as Bill Fernandez was looking for opportunities to do more at Apple, the word was starting to get around about employees getting a stock option. There was no human resources department to handle the issue and explain it to employees, but it was becoming clear to some employees that not everyone was going to get a stock option.
There were very few of us," said Kottke. Apple was not unusual in that regard. That was common.
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Secretaries did not get stock options. Hourly employees, in general, were not eligible -- only salaried engineers. So, with little hope of doing more than assembling prototypes as a technician and no prospect of getting a stock option, Fernandez decided to leave Apple just 18 months after joined the garage as the first guy that Jobs and Woz wanted to hire.
His friends were now busy and overwhelmed trying to run a company in their 20s, and quiet, humble Bill Fernandez got lost in the background. As the company grew and as we hired more and more high-level people, I became bored and dissatisfied with working at a technician level and never having the opportunity to grow into an engineer.
Bill got a job offer from some people he'd worked with after high school. They had started their own company making computer components, and they gave Fernandez the opportunity to come work for them as a product engineer. He said he also left because "it meant I could actually invent things and create things. Unfortunately, it turned out that the company and its technology needed a lot of cleaning up, which meant that Fernandez ended up doing a lot of the same kind of technician work that he was fleeing at Apple.
So, it didn't work out. After a year, Fernandez walked away, unsure of where to go next in his career. Fernandez said, "We make choices in life and choices have consequences And you go forth in life making a series of consequences. After leaving the component maker, Fernandez took his life in a completely different direction.
He got out of technology. He searched for bigger meaning. He left the country. One of those interests was the martial arts. Fernandez was a brown belt in Aikido, a Japanese form of the martial arts that is primarily defensive and centered around the concepts of peace and unity. The curiosity about Japan and the Far East that he inherited from his mother, combined with his own studies in Aikido, compelled Fernandez to leave Silicon Valley for Japan in He settled in Sapporo on the northern island of Hokkaido, which is about the same latitude as southern Alaska.
Fernandez went to Japan to do a combination of three things.
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He worked as an English teacher and tutor for adults. He studied Aikido more deeply to earn his first degree black belt. So I had a small group at a bank and a small group at an engineering firm So that was part of my day. It was preparing lessons and teaching classes. And then part of it was just immersing myself in the culture Being an American there, people were interested in that.
So people would come out of the woodwork and become my friends and sort of set up cultural experiences for me. In Japan, Fernandez also got to engage his interests as a musician and humanitarian.
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So I called it the 'Refreshing California' concert. I sang songs and showed slides of California cities and farmland and talked about what it was like, because America looms large in the Japanese psyche, and California is one of the places that's kind of famous and has kind of a character that attracts the Japanese imagination. But after two years in Sapporo, in the spring of , it was time for Fernandez to return to California. When he landed in Silicon Valley in search of work, Fernandez gravitated back toward some familiar friends.
He did some freelance and consulting work for several months, and he also reached out to Steve Jobs. Fernandez said to him, "I need a job. Have you got anything interesting? At the beginning of the year Jobs had taken over the Macintosh project. He was fighting to remain relevant within the leadership team at Apple -- which now had a bunch of experienced executives in its ranks -- and so Jobs had set up a separate SWAT team of engineers and designers to build a different kind of computer than the Apple II. For this team, he was adding technologists that he knew and trusted.
He only wanted the best. Because Fernandez had previously been an Apple employee and his name was already in the company's database, he was re-issued the same employee number he had before he left in No. Apple was a much different company the second time around, with thousands of employees, high-powered executives, a corporate infrastructure, and a growing campus of buildings in Cupertino. But Jobs separated the Macintosh team from Apple headquarters by putting the group into a two-story building several blocks away from campus.
It was next to a Texaco station, and so the team members dubbed it "Texaco Towers. While the Apple II was still selling like crazy, Jobs predicted that it was destined to run out of steam within a couple years and that Apple needed something much more audacious to remain a leader in the computer business. IBM and a flood of other companies were coming into the market with new products that were creating brutal competition.
The Macintosh project was something the Apple executives allowed Jobs to dabble with -- partially in hopes that it would develop into the company's next great product, but partially just to keep him busy and out of the way. Jobs fired up his band of rock star techies to create a new kind of computer that would change the world, unleash the latent creativity inside of people, and bring the power of the computer revolution to everyday people. While he was notoriously difficult to work with at times during this period, he could also be deeply inspiring.
It was a very creative, inventive environment where a whole lot of hard work was being done to do that and a whole lot of hard thinking about how do we accomplish our goals, and it was all motivated by wanting to do something insanely great that would serve our loved ones. There was all of that -- love, creativity, hard work, inventiveness, vision, drive. So it was a wonderful environment.
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Fernandez moved into a role similar to what he had played in the early days in the Apple garage. He was a utility man, a jack-of-all-trades, the person who filled in the gaps. One of those early roles was as the manager of the engineering lab. At another time, he was the project manager for the AppleTalk PC card. When the Mac team finally moved out of Texaco Towers and into the "Bandley 4" building on the Apple campus, Fernandez worked with the architects to plan the move and make the space a great working environment for the team.
That included "laying out the hardware lab, and building a no-doors-needed 'light lock' leading into and out of the CAD room, putting trees along the division between the main hallway and the break area," said Fernandez. And "putting planter boxes with trailing vines, etc. One of the skillsets that Fernandez was developing along the way was designing interfaces for humans -- both virtual interfaces and physical interfaces.
The Mac team turned out to be an amazing place to cut his teeth on these ideas because the team dove deeply into the concept of user interface and how to build a new one that average people could intuitively understand. They famously settled on the metaphor of a physical desk, and they imposed a tremendous amount of discipline on themselves to design a system that wouldn't confuse users. The Mac engineers went to a tremendous amount of effort to standardize the look and behavior of the different controls in the operating system.
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They thought deeply about checkboxes versus radio buttons, for example. That had a powerful force in the industry. And everyone kind of copied those patterns. When the first Macintosh computer arrived in January , it included a secret buried deep inside of it on the molding of the case. The signatures of the members of the early Mac team -- including Bill Fernandez -- were emblazoned on the lining.