LaserWriter II Read online

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  The elevator is crowded. Not with people. With an eighteen-inch monitor, two keyboards, a bulbous shape swaddled in a garbage bag, and a curvy black laptop. The laptop is tucked under the chin of a man with tears in his eyes.

  Bong. Everyone gets out of the elevator, though the building has eight more floors till the roof. Photos of Albert Einstein, Picasso, and Gandhi are tacked to the walls. Down the hall, a door is propped open by a defunct dot matrix printer.

  Inside the fourth floor, a red lever is pushed for a green ticket. There are no walls, the space is full—full of people and machines, old and new. Wooden theater seats snap open and shut. A redheaded woman sways on a porch swing, drinking cold Coca-Cola from a bottle. Next to her on the swing, in the sweetheart seat, is a Quadra 700 tower.

  “19” is shouted, and the number flicks to life, displayed in black and white on a modified Mac Plus computer mounted near the ceiling. Below the Mac a girl wears red sneakers and holds no computer. 19 is Claire’s age, not her ticket. Her ticket says “29,” but she doesn’t need it. She folds the ticket until she can fold it no more and puts it deep in one of her many pockets.

  Next to her people read magazines and newspapers, they stare at the pressed tin ceilings and wood floors, at plastic dinosaurs arranged in the dirt of a ficus, at the Mac Plus, waiting for its number to advance, they stare everywhere but at each other. This is after all New York City.

  Glances are stolen.

  Especially at the woman eating a sack of hulled sunflower seeds one at a time, and David Bowie in the corner listening to a Discman.

  Claire worries: They will call 29, and no one will answer. When they advance to number 30 she will be told she screwed up by taking the green ticket. “NO JOB FOR YOU.” will scroll across the Mac Plus, and a sad Mac with “x”s for eyes will flash on and off, making a death chime.

  “20” is called. The redhead and her Quadra 700 waddle up to the section of the room marked “Intake.”

  An employee with purple hair yells out “29,” and Claire looks up.

  Apple was founded on ripping off phone companies. Steve Jobs and Woz built the personal computer, but first they built pocket-size blue boxes—blue boxes that tricked telecom computers into placing calls to Italy and beyond.

  The early days of Apple were filled with Nerf balls, remote control cars, and pirate flags. Susan Kare, the designer of the sad Mac icon, made portraits that were 32 pixels wide for fun. The plastic case of the first Macintosh computer was cast with the signatures of its developers, because it was a work of art. Claire’s family had this first Mac, and an Apple IIc before it, and then whatever computer Apple made next, forever.

  Claire remembers the fragile floppy disks that held her favorite games. One let her construct pinball machines that could then be played. She would drag all the flippers and bumpers onto a rectangle, trying to make the white dot ricochet forever. She learned what typhoid, cholera, and dysentery were from playing The Oregon Trail, a game built of manifest destiny and paragraphs of green text. In MacPaint, Claire used the selection tool to draw squares over and over, mesmerized by the marching ants of the marquee.

  No death chime sounds.

  The employee with purple hair advances the number on the Mac Plus and calls out “30.” A woman whose favorite color must be black stands up with ticket 30 and a laptop in her tattooed hands.

  Claire stands, too. She walks toward the door. A woman in an apron decorated with a giant question mark sits on a stool keeping watch over the waiting room. Claire approaches her but is beat to it by a man. He asks Question Mark about picking up his repaired computer. Claire recognizes the man, but she doesn’t know from where. He is skinny with bulging eyes and a sort of painful voice. Question Mark points the man to a counter beside her.

  Claire didn’t notice the counter before, despite a hanging sign that says “PICK UPS,” and a large arrow that bounces on a spring.

  Familar man frees up Question Mark and begins to talk with the worker behind the Pick Up counter.

  “He is a plumber … or an actor?” Question Mark says in a soft whisper to Claire, who thinks the same thing but doesn’t say it out loud.

  “Are you ticket 29?” Question Mark asks. Claire takes a moment. “Um. I’m here for a job interview. The listing was on a Mac message board?” “Ahh, okay, you need to see David.”

  There is a commotion at the Pick Up counter. Claire and Question Mark look over.

  “You just said ‘Hey aren’t you an actor, aren’t you Steve Buscemi?’” familiar man says, his painful voice agitated.

  “Yes, but to pick up a machine you need ID. It is the rule. I need to write the number down. You could be pretending to be Steve Buscemi to get his computer, which aside from being valuable has personal information,” the man working the Pick Up desk explains.

  “Can you make an exception? I am clearly Steve Buscemi.”

  “Hang on.”

  The Pick Up desk worker slides over to Question Mark and they huddle in place.

  “Can I skip the ID part?” Pick Up worker asks.

  “Maybe you should ask David,” Question Mark says. “No, I’m scared of David. Could you just come over and make sure it really is Steve Buscemi? And we’ll put it in the notes and then both initial it?” “You mean so we both can get in trouble?” “Customer is wait-ting,” Pick Up worker says, tilting his head toward Steve Buscemi.

  Question Mark turns to Claire. “I’ll be right back, can you make sure everyone who enters takes a ticket?”

  Claire nods.

  “Hang on, you need a ticket,” Claire says, and points to the ticket machine.

  “Do you know how long the wait will be?” a woman asks, taking a ticket.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Don’t you work here?”

  “No, not really.”

  Question Mark returns. She launches into a small speech on the fluid nature of identity and the soul. The speech concludes with the fact that David’s office is near the bathroom.

  Shelves of vintage radios and telephones make up the bounds of the office. A man whose suspenders curve around his belly introduces himself as David. Claire shakes his hand and notices he has no shoes on. They sit down at his old oak desk, in old oak chairs that swivel.

  A wire runs above David’s desk. Claire stares at the floating line that has a set of clips and some kind of motor attached. David sees her staring and grabs a baby-blue Sony microfloppy disk from a drawer. He clips the disk to the wire and gives it a little tug. The motor starts and the disk begins to float leftward toward another oak desk. “That’s Dick’s desk,” David explains as he tugs at the wire again, making the disk float back to them.

  “So why do you want to work at Tekserve?” David asks, putting the microfloppy back in his drawer.

  “I love Macs,” Claire says before the drawer can close.

  David asks if she has any technical
training or mechanical ability.

  She has no training but is pretty sure she is mechanical. Claire mentions drilling a hole into her desk to hold a pencil, and that she repaired her father’s gray plastic suitcase with epoxy.

  “Have you ever used FileMaker?” David asks.

  “No, I don’t even know what it is,” Claire answers.

  The interview is over.

  Louis J. Schweitzer was rich: the best kind of rich. He bought his wife gondolas, theaters, and a taxi medallion. He gifted his barber with a shop in exchange for the promise of haircuts any time of day for life. When Louis’ favorite radio station played too many ads, he bought it and replaced the ads with poetry.

  The radio station was WBAI, and a few years after buying it, in 1960, Louis gave the station to the Pacifica Foundation, a nonprofit radio network located in Berkeley, California. Listener sponsored with no ads, Pacifica could do whatever it wanted, which was to fight McCarthy and broadcast the Beat poets, in full.

  Pacifica took over WBAI and turned it from a classical station to a counterculture hub with a mishmash of programming. Every weeknight from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. WBAI aired a show called Radio Unnameable, hosted by Bob Fass. It was a new kind of radio. Yes, music was played, but sometimes backward, or two records at the same time. There were long calls from listeners, with political rants encouraged. The show was unscripted and flowed from Bob Fass’s lips in a steady stream. Unnameable was beloved by night-shift workers, anarchists, musicians, and David.

  In ninth grade, David began volunteering on Unnameable. He was a technical kid and felt at home in the studio, with its knobs and switches.

  David edited tape loops, like Bob Fass saying, “less is sometimes more” over and over. He made recordings of the show, but mostly he hung out. When Fass learned that David was doing speed, he scolded him and told him not to take that awful drug, acid was much better. Soon David was volunteering at the station on weekends, too, making field recordings of events like Earth Day, answering the phones for pledge drives, and harboring a crush on the neopagan journalist Margot Adler.

  After turning on and tuning in, David dropped out. He was kicked out of his prep school for underachieving. It was 1970, and he was 17 years old. He went to work at WBAI full-time as a radio engineer, riding his bike to 30 East 39th Street from his parents’ apartment on 78th and West End.

  WBAI was to move into an old church on East 62nd Street, though first the church had to be built out with studios and circuits. David helped do this, and so did Dick, a new employee. Dick was older and raised in Queens. He had graduated from college and landed a dream job as an engineer at RCA. But RCA was working with the military, and Dick wore bell-bottoms. So he dropped out, crossed the country and back, listening to antiwar radio nonstop.

  Drinking Coca-Cola was David’s religion. An old Coke machine came with the church. It dispensed cans. David, being devout, converted the machine to bottles.

  The nave was split into control rooms and filled with equipment. Soon the church was up and running. Dick was hired as a full-time employee. He and David continued to work together along with another technician named Mike.

  When Mike’s car backed up, it would warn pedestrians with a “ding dong ding dong.” He had wired a doorbell to the reverse of his car engine.

  Mike was a self-taught genius.

  This was partly because he had dropped out of high school.

  He helped friends wire their electric meters to run backward, he hooked his telephone up to his stereo so he could dial a song, and he built sound consoles that were mythic in the music industry.

  Across the country, in a kitchen in San Jose, California, Margaret Wozniak thought her son might like an article that she read in Esquire magazine. It was fall of 1971, and the article was “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” by Ron Rosenbaum.

  At the time, all telephones had dial tones, and most were the size of an adult shoe. A band of misfits known as “phreaks” figured out you could trick the phone company into placing free calls. The phreaks discovered that the entire telephone system was controlled by a combination of six master tones.

  2600 hz was the key frequency. It was the sound used to switch into the system. The tone made the phone company think the call had hung up, but it hadn’t. It was as if the phreak hid behind a dinosaur, avoiding the flashlight’s beam, getting to spend all night in the museum.

  This 2600 hz tone was first made by a blind boy with perfect pitch named Joe who whistled it into his receiver. When kind volunteers came to read aloud to the boy, he requested technical telephone manuals rather than adventure novels like Treasure Island.

  Soon a plastic whistle that came as a prize in a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal was discovered to blow at exactly 2600 hz. Electronic organs were used, recorded to a cassette and played back at a higher speed. Phreaking started to spread. “Blue boxes” were created—an electronic device loaded with all the tones needed, at the push of a button.

  Halfway through the article that his mom recommended, Steve Wozniak (Woz), a freshman in college, could hardly contain himself. He called his 17-year-old friend Steve Jobs and read the rest of the story aloud.

  The first blue box Woz and Jobs built almost worked. But the box was analog made, with resistors and capacitors that were imprecise, their frequency fluctuating with hot and cold.

  Woz decided to design a digital blue box that would be more reliable. It was a sweep of brilliance that used computer chips, a quartz crystal, and minimal power consumption.

  One of the first free calls Woz and Jobs made was to the Pope. Jobs thought they could sell the blue boxes for $150 a pop, and he was right.

  Woz has said that his blue box circuit was the most elegant he ever designed, more beautiful than even the ones he later made for the Apple I and II.

  Claire had eight siblings. She was the middle child. Unless you counted the twins as one birth, like her mother did.

  But sharing the Apple II was easy—half the tribe wasn’t interested in the box and the other half understood how special it was. And with that special understanding came the absolute knowledge that it was a human right to be shared equally.

  The first phone call Claire received was when she was 10 years old.

  Claire was sitting on the floor making an ugly pot holder on a loom. She wore a black hat with a brim that touched halfway down her spine and became her shoulders.

  The phone mounted on the wall rang, and her little sister answered. Its pink coiled cord swayed in her sister’s hands, but it turned out to be a call for their older sister. Her older sister got on and found that the caller was looking for their brother, who after some time came to the phone and was asked for his younger brother, and this went on and on until the person on the other end of the phone asked for Claire.

  And everyone immediately realized it was a prank call.

  “Maybe tell them I am dead,” Claire said.

  “Oh I see you want to speak to Claire? She died last week—you just missed her,” her brother said and hung up.

  It used to be there was one phone company, “Ma Bell,” and she made sure every single telephone call cost money to make. Even a prank call.

  Unlimited calling plans didn’t exist, save if you had a blue box or the ability to whistle in perfect pitch. Every time you dialed a phone there was a charge, unless the person on the other end was someone like David. Unbeknownst to his mom, David had installed a black box on their line. With a black box it still cost money to make outgoing calls, but every call the phone received was 100% free for the person calling. Bob Fass had one, too.

  This was a goodwill thing, the person calling might not even know. The black box should have been orange because it was pretty much the opposite of a blue box.

  When the Vietnam War ended, WBAI lost its pull. There was a pivot toward salsa music and a staff revolt. Dick, David, and Mike left the station and started a company together called Current Designs.

  In the beginning they ran the com
pany from Dick’s loft on West 23rd Street. It was a floor-through with plants pressed against the windows and Persian cats curled atop vintage radios. Rather than a couch, Dick had an old porch swing bolted to the ceiling.

  Current Designs’ big client was Acoustiguide. Acoustiguide provided audio tours for museums across the world using specially designed tape players. These tape players were manufactured at Dick’s dining room table.

  At first, they just altered existing tape players, making the mechanisms quieter and the machines more sturdy. A Bulgarian named Lyuben was hired to help the three with soldering. Then another employee was added, and another, until they were renting the floor below and building the tape players from scratch.

  It was the early eighties. Personal computers had just been born but were thick in the air. Dick, David, and Mike went to every computer store in New York they could. This wasn’t hard, there were only a few stores in existence. IBM, Commodore, Sinclair, Zenith—none of the computers were right. Then in January of 1984 at Macy’s department store on a white pedestal they found their Goldilocks Planet.

  The Macintosh was marketed by Apple as “insanely great.” The beige box had no hard drive—its system software lived on a floppy disk and ran only two programs. It was insane. Dick, David, and Mike each bought one on the spot.

  All the other personal computers used a command line. They wouldn’t do anything until you typed a command. When the machines booted up, a cursor blinked blankly at you. When the Macintosh booted up, a miniature Macintosh smiled at you.

  Current Designs started drawing their circuit diagrams in MacPaint and sending them to Japan to be manufactured. The drawings wowed the Japanese, who sent back perfect components. The Macintosh went from 128k to 512k. A LaserWriter printer was added, software accelerators were installed. Soon the machines became involved in all of Current Designs’ projects.