Toward the end of August 1984, my six month leave of absence (see Leave of Absence) was drawing to a close, and I still hadn't decided whether I would return to Apple. I continued to feel very close to the company, so it wouldn't be easy for me to turn in my badge, but I didn't see a reasonable alternative.

Either way, I was sure that I would continue to write software for the Macintosh, which was still brand new and overflowing with exciting opportunities for innovative applications (see Thunderscan). I was confident that I could earn more money working independently than Apple was willing to pay me, even if you counted the appreciation of stock options, but financial matters were not my paramount consideration.

The main issue was that I wanted to be able to continue to make a difference in the Mac's evolution and I felt that no matter what I did on my own, it could only have a small fraction of the impact of work done for Apple. Even though things had gone relatively well so far, the Mac's long term success was far from certain, and it was entirely dependent on the moves that Apple made to evolve the platform.

Many of my closest friends were still working on the Mac team, so I heard a lot about what was going on at Apple. I usually drove down to Cupertino to visit them once every week or two, hanging out in the Bandley 3 fishbowl (see Spoiled?), tentatively at first, but growing more comfortable when I saw that I was still welcome there. I lived next door to Mac hardware designer Burrell Smith, in separate houses on the same lot near downtown Palo Alto, so I heard about Burrell's trials and tribulations at work on a daily basis. Unfortunately, the news wasn't very encouraging.

The Mac team had merged with the Lisa team in Feburary 1984, a few weeks before I started my leave, creating a single large division. At the time, Steve Jobs claimed that the merger would help to transform the rest of Apple to be more like the Mac team, but to me it seemed like the opposite had occurred. The idealistic version of the Macintosh team that I yearned for had apparently vanished, subsumed by a large organization of the type that we used to make fun of, riven with bureaucratic obstacles and petty turf wars.

The core software group was still recovering from the intense effort to ship (see Real Artists Ship) and hadn't done very much all spring and summer, suffering from a classic case of massive post-partum depression. The LaserWriter printer was the current main focus of development, along with the AppleTalk network required to support it, and the core software team didn't have much to do with either. No one had set a compelling new goal for the team, and now it was just drifting.

Burrell Smith had completed the LaserWriter digital board and moved on to work on the "Turbo Macintosh", a new Macintosh digital board featuring a custom chip that supported 4-bit/pixel gray scale graphics and a fast DMA channel to interface an internal hard drive. But Burrell frequently complained of sparring with engineering manager Bob Belleville and others on his staff over trivial design decisions. He thought that Bob didn't really want to add a hard drive to the Mac, favoring the development of a Xerox style "file server" instead, and was therefore trying to surreptitiously kill the Turbo project. I didn't think that Burrell would put up with it much longer; as he phrased it, he was "asymptotically approaching liberation" from Apple.

The one saving grace was that Bud Tribble had finally completed his six year M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Washington and decided to forgo practicing medicine in favor of returning to his old job at Apple as Macintosh software manager, working for Bob Belleville. In July 1984, he moved into a spare bedroom at Burrell's house in Palo Alto, next door to mine, so I got to see him frequently. I still had the highest respect for Bud, and I loved to show him whatever I was working on because he always managed to improve it with an insightful suggestion or two.

I had mixed feelings about returning to the lumbering Macintosh division, but Bud was a strong link to the good old days and I thought that perhaps we could establish a little outpost in the large organization where the original Macintosh values could prevail. But that didn't seem possible if Bud worked for Bob Belleville, my nemesis whom I blamed for many of the problems. The only solution I could think of was for Bud to work directly for Steve Jobs instead of working for Bob. Bud was all for it, but only Steve could make it happen. I called Steve's secretary Pat Sharp, and arranged to have dinner with Steve and Bud to discuss my possible return to Apple.

We met in the lobby of Bandley 3 and walked to an Italian restaurant on De Anza Boulevard a few blocks away. Steve seemed a bit preoccupied, and I was nervous about how he would react to what I had to say, because I had to implicitly criticize him to make my case. After we ordered dinner I cleared my throat and tentatively plunged ahead.

"As you know, I care a lot about Apple, and I really want to return from my leave of absence. I'd love to work for Bud again, but things seem really messed up right now." I paused for a moment as I gathered my resolve. "The software team is completely demoralized, and has hardly done a thing for months, and Burrell is so frustrated that he won't last to the end of the year..."

Steve cut me off abruptly with a withering stare. "You don't know what you're talking about!", he interrupted, seeming more amused than angry. "Things are better than ever. The Macintosh team is doing great, and I'm having the best time of my life right now. You're just completely out of touch."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing, or tell if Steve was serious or not. I looked to Bud, who communicated his bewilderment with an apologetic shrug of his shoulders, but I could see that he wasn't going to corroborate my views.

"If you really believe that, I don't think there's any way that I can come back," I replied, my hopes for returning sinking fast. "The Mac team that I want to come back to doesn't even exist anymore."

"The Mac team had to grow up, and so do you," Steve shot back. "I want you to come back, but if you don't want to, that's up to you. You don't matter as much as you think you do, anyway."

I saw that we were so far apart that there was little point in continuing the conversation. We finished dinner quickly and walked back to Apple without further discussion.

Actually, quitting was easier than I thought it would be; I just called up Apple's HR department and let them know that I wouldn't be coming back. I didn't even have to sign any paperwork or turn in my badge, which I still have today, almost twenty years later. I had thought it would feel devastating to finally resign, but instead I actually felt relieved for the situation to be resolved, and optimistic about writing Macintosh software on my own.

Steve Jobs was not the most considerate individual at Apple, and he had lots of ways to demonstrate that. One of the most obvious was his habit of parking in the handicapped spot of the parking lot - he seemed to think that the blue wheelchair symbol meant that the spot was reserved for the chairman.

Whenever you saw a big Mercedes parked in a handicapped space, you could be sure that it was Steve's car (actually, it was hard to be sure otherwise, since he also had a habit of removing his license plates). This sometimes caused him trouble, since unknown parties would occasionally retaliate by scratching the car with their keys.

Anyway, the story is that one day Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, who had recently transferred to Cupertino from Paris, had just parked his car and was walking toward the entrance of the main office at Apple when Steve buzzed by him in his silver Mercedes and pulled into the handicapped space near the front of the building.

As Steve walked brusquely past him, Jean-Louis was heard to declare, to no one in particular - "Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped...".

One day in October 1983 I got a phone call at my desk at Apple from the Cupertino police department saying something like, "You reported that Mercedes parked in the handicapped space at your lot at Apple. Well, we sent a car out there but we can't really tow it away because the handicapped space is improperly designated."

I had no idea what he was talking about. A few hours later, I found out that Apple's other cofounder, Steve Wozniak, who was a prolific prankster, called up the Cupertino police and reported that a silver Mercedes was illegally parked in a handicapped space and told them the person reporting it was Andy Hertzfeld, giving them my phone number at work. I decided not to inform Apple's facilities department about the improperly marked space, just in case Woz decided to try it again.

Innovation often requires discarding finished work when a better solution comes along. Each new improvement may impact prior work, so you have to be willing to retool the older parts of a design to better integrate the newer parts as they emerge. One example of this for the Macintosh was the development of font manager, which had to be rewritten a few different times as the system evolved.

Bill Atkinson's QuickDraw graphics package did all the work of measuring and drawing text, but it didn't want to deal with system-dependent details like reading from the file system. The font manager's main job was to load fonts for QuickDraw, given a font family, a size and a style, so Quickdraw could just blast out characters without having to worry about how fonts are stored and loaded.

The initial implementation of the font manager simply included a few built-in fonts that were linked with the system, and it returned the system font if you requested one that wasn't built-in. The initial system font that we used through most of 1981 was one that we borrowed from Smalltalk called "Cream".

In the spring of 1982, the first implementation of our user interface software was beginning to come together. We wanted to allow application writers to use a variety of fonts, so we had to provide a way to load fonts from disk and cache them in memory. We also had to load hunks of code called "drivers" in a similar fashion, so Larry Kenyon and I collaborated on some code to load and cache objects from disk that we called the "object manager" that was used by the font manager.

Bill Atkinson had recently given Quickdraw the ability to scale bitmaps, including text, so we added support in the font manager for scaled fonts, which included heuristics to find the font that best satisfied a given request, if none were perfect. If we didn't have a font at the requested size, we could make one by scaling. But scaled text looked kind of lumpy, so we added a way for an application to choose if it wanted it or not.

Meanwhile, Bruce Horn was busy implementing the resource manager. I should have realized it sooner, but by the fall of 1982, it was becoming obvious that there would be lots of benefits if fonts and drivers became resources. We'd save space by discarding our "object manager" code, and simplify the system by eliminating lots of separate files; applications could even transparently contain their own fonts if they wanted to. I devised a simple scheme to encode the font family and size into a resource ID, and rewrote the font manager to be based on resources. Resource IDs were 16 bits long, with the high bit reserved, so the font manager ended up supporting a universe of 128 font families in 128 different sizes, which seemed like plenty at the time.

We added a number of refinements to the font manager in 1983, like a routine to make it easy to build the font menu, but the basic design didn't change very much, and that's what we ended up shipping with in January 1984. The software team was exhausted from the final push, and not all that much development happened during 1984, as some of the old-timers like myself left the company (I went on leave of absence in March 1984) and new hires like Burt Sloan and Ernie Beernick got up to speed. I certainly didn't think I'd be working on the font manager anymore.

In early 1985, Jerome Coonen was getting the software team revved up to do a 128K version of the ROM, that would eventually ship with the Mac Plus in January 1986. It incorporated lots of bug fixes, and some newer subsystems like Appletalk and a better, hierarchical file system. There was so much extra space available that it even incorporated a ROM-based resource file for system resources, to speed up booting and save memory. Jerome solicited my suggestions for improvements, and I responded with a pretty long list.

Among other things, I suggested a major overhaul of the font manager. The LaserWriter, with its superb Postscript imaging system, had made the font situation on the Macintosh pretty complicated, with different subsystems for the screen and printing, and the limitations of the font manager made it hard to get things right. We needed to support fractional pixel widths so the screen could better match the printer, and provide a better scheme for mapping fonts to resources that wasn't limited to 128 fonts. But I was disappointed that the team didn't decide to implement any of my font manager suggestions because development time was growing short and it seemed like too much work.

Even though I was no longer an Apple employee (see Things Are Better Than Ever), I was still in close touch with the company, since Burrell Smith was my best friend and next door neighbor (we had bought two houses on the same lot in Palo Alto in April 1983). Bud Tribble had finished medical school and returned to Apple in his old role of software manager in August 1984, and was living in a spare room at Burrell's house, so I saw him frequently as well. And every once in a while, without advance warning, Steve Jobs would show up at my doorstep for an impromptu visit on a weekend afternoon.

On one such visit, in late February 1985, Steve asked me what I thought of the 128K ROM effort. I complained that it wasn't ambitious enough, and mentioned the font manager changes when Steve asked for an example. But I didn't expect his response.

"If you think that's so important, why don't you go ahead and do it yourself", Steve told me. "There would be time to get it done if you pitched in. Maybe we could give you a few Macs in exchange for doing it."

I told him I'd think about. Bud Tribble came by the next day to discuss it with me, and I agreed to develop a new font manager for the 128K ROM in exchange for three 512K Macintoshes, which I had Apple ship directly to my brothers and sister as gifts. All the code for the new ROM was supposed to be completed within a month, so I'd have to drop what I was doing to get the font manager done in time.

Pretty soon, I had the new font manager going, which used a new resource type called "FOND" to describe all of the properties of a font family, including the resource IDs of the font bitmaps. This allowed us to support tens of thousands of font families instead of a mere 128 like the old design. I also got the fractional width support going, but I needed some changes in QuickDraw to make it so applications could actually use it.

I talked with Bill about implementing the required changes and was surprised to find that he was reluctant to do it. In fact, even though we had identified a number of bugs, Bill didn't want to change QuickDraw at all, arguing that any sort of change at all would mess up existing applications. Finally, while I was down at Apple to attend a coordination meeting, Bud, Steve Capps and I all ganged up on Bill, telling him that if he didn't want to maintain QuickDraw, he'd have to let one of us do it. Bill said he'd think about it overnight, and we planned to meet again the next afternoon to decide what to do.

We were all surprised when Bill showed up at Apple the next day, excited to give us a demo of ovals drawing almost twice as fast as they used to. Apparently, when he started looking at the code yesterday evening he got excited about working on QuickDraw again. He started to fix the bugs we identified, and one thing led to another, and he soon he saw a half dozen ways to improve things. I was happy that Bill was excited about QuickDraw again, but a little bit afraid that he had swung too far in the opposite direction.

At this point, there was only around a week left before code freeze, but it seemed like the font manager was just about finished. Bill implemented measuring with the fractional widths, and it seemed to work great. But then, the evening before we were going to freeze the code, I got a call from Bill at around 8pm.

"Hey, Andy, I've got some great news. I can speed up text drawing by more than 40%! But I need a little help from the font manager."

It turns out that Bill had realized that, on the average, since most text was lower case, characters only used around half of the total height of the strike bitmap - only a few characters had descenders, and most didn't go all the way to the top, either. QuickDraw usually could just skip the blank parts in the characters, saving lots of time.

QuickDraw didn't have time to measure the tops and bottoms of the characters on the fly, but it was a perfect job for the font manager, which could do it once, right after it loaded a new font into memory. For each character, it calculated an offset and a length, telling Bill where to start and stop the drawing. Bill told me the format of the table that he'd like the font manager to supply, and asked me if I thought I could do it.

I thought that it was crazy to attempt something like this with the freeze scheduled in less than 16 hours, but it was such a cool idea that I told Bill that I'd give it a try. I went out for dinner, bought two six packs of Diet Coke, and started implementing the font measuring code around 10pm. I came up with a nice, efficient way to do it, iterating through the strike bitmap a longword at a time, and, eight diet Cokes later, I thought I had it working just about the time the sun was rising; I even had enough time to sleep for a few hours before meeting Bill at Apple at 10am.

We crossed our fingers when we tried it out, but luckily both of our parts worked the first time, with Bill's tests showing that we achieved the projected 40% speed-up. Of course, the code freeze ended up slipping for other reasons, so we didn't really have to rush like we did, but the urgency made it a little bit more fun, I guess.

The original Macintosh enjoyed robust sales following its spectacular launch in January 1984 (see The Times They Are A-Changin'). Steve Jobs defined success as selling 50,000 units in the first 100 days, which was a high hurdle for a brand new computer with only a handful of applications available. In fact, Apple was able to sell more than 72,000 Macintoshes by end of April, and continued to ramp up to sell over 60,000 units in June 1984 alone.

I travelled to the 1984 National Computer Conference show in June 1984 with the Mac team, sharing a hotel room with Burrell Smith, even though I was on leave of absence (see Leave Of Absence). Apple had assembled over a dozen small software developers who had written cool applications for the Macintosh, to display them at the trade show. Steve Jobs was ebullient, and thought that the sprouting applications and blossoming sales meant that we had turned the corner. When I ran into him on the floor of the show, he put his arm around my shoulder and exclaimed, "Look at all these applications! We did it! The Macintosh has made it!"

High sales spurred even rosier predictions for the upcoming holiday season. But as summer turned into fall, Macintosh sales began to decline. For a couple of months, the University Consortium (see What's A Megaflop?) kept volumes high by selling tens of thousands of low cost Macs to college students, but by Thanksgiving 1984, sales had slowed significantly. The marketing team forecast selling over 75,000 Macs per month for the important holiday season, but actually they didn't even break 20,000 units per month. In December 1984, the Apple II still accounted for about 70% of Apple's revenues.

As the new year dawned, Steve Jobs seemed oblivious to the slowing sales, and continued to behave as if the Macintosh was a booming, unqualified success. His lieutenants in the Macintosh division, which had swelled to more than 700 employees, had to deal with a growing reality gap, reconciling the ever-changing audacious plans for world domination emanating from their leader with the persistent bad news from the sales channel.

Meanwhile, the Macintosh engineering team had not been very productive. The Mac was crying out for an internal hard drive, and some kind of high bandwidth port to attach it to, but there weren't any significant upgrades on the horizon, even though the basic hardware hadn't changed (except for additional RAM) for a year. In the fall of 1984, Steve Jobs tried to rally the remains of the original Mac team around the "Turbo Mac" project, featuring a new digital board with custom chips and fast I/O for an internal hard drive to be designed by Burrell Smith. But Burrell felt that engineering manager Bob Belleville was flinging lots of gratuitous obstacles in his path, and it eventually became so frustrating that he quit the company in February 1985 (see Are You Gonna Do It?).

The only upcoming new product was the LaserWriter printer, based on Canon's 300 dots/inch laser printing engine, with a digital board designed by Burrell Smith and software written by Adobe, a new company founded by Xerox alumni John Warnock and Chuck Geschke. Like the Macintosh itself, Adobe's Postscript software at the heart of the LaserWriter was years ahead of its time, and was capable of producing exquisitely beautiful pages. Unfortunately, the LaserWriter had one major flaw: its retail price was over $7,000, almost triple the cost of a Macintosh.

Joanna Hoffman, the Mac team's original marketing person, transfered from international marketing back to the main product marketing group in early 1985, to help deal with the growing crisis. At the first sales meeting that she attended, she was surprised to see that the sales forecasts for the upcoming quarter were unchanged from six months ago, when things were still looking good, and were almost four times what they were currently selling. Everybody was informally assuming more realistic numbers, but no one had the heart to cut the official forecast, because they were afraid to tell Steve about it. Joanna immediately slashed the forecasts, to the relief of the sales and manufacturing team.

The weak sales were beginning to put pressure on the relationship between Steve Jobs and John Sculley for the very first time. They had gotten along fine when everything was going well, but hitherto they never had to deal with much adversity. Unfortunately, in early 1985 the personal computer market was descending into one of its periodic downturns, and even Apple II sales were starting to falter. Steve did not take criticism very well, and sometimes reacted to suggestions for improving Macintosh sales as if they were personal attacks. Their relationship began to sour as John put pressure on Steve to address the Macintosh's problems.

Steve Jobs had never suffered fools gladly, and as the pressure mounted, he became even more difficult to work with. Employees from every part of the company began to approach John with complaints about Steve's behavior, including some of Steve's direct reports in the Macintosh Division. John felt especially strongly about building more compatibility bridges with the IBM PC, an approach which Steve disdained. John began to view Steve as an impediment toward fixing Apple's problems, and the board of directors were urging him to do something about it.

Steve had often professed that he preferred working with small teams on new products, and that he didn't really want to run a large organization with hundreds of employees. Apple's board felt that he should hand the reins of the Macintosh division over to a professional management team, and return to his core strength as a new product visionary.

Steve had recently met an interesting character named Steve Kitchen, who was introduced to him by Steve Capps. Steve Kitchen was a fast talking, enthusiastic entrepreneur who had developed a couple of successful Atari video games. He claimed to have recently invented a revolutionary flat screen display technology that could facilitate portable computers. Steve Jobs was intrigued by the prospect of developing a lightweight portable computer, years ahead of its time, and he considered having Apple buy the technology and start a research organization called "Apple Labs" to develop it. But he seemed ambivalent, sometimes enthusiastic about starting Apple Labs, but other times he seemed determined to prove that he could manage the large division.

The conflict came to a head at the April 10th board meeting. The board thought they could convince Steve to transition back to a product visionary role, but instead he went on the attack and lobbied for Sculley's removal. After long wrenching discussions with both of them, and extending the meeting to the following day, the board decided in favor of John, instructing him to reorganize the Macintosh division, stripping Steve of all authority. Steve would remain the chairman of Apple, but for the time being, no operating role was defined for him.

John didn't want to implement the reorganization immediately, because he still thought that he could reconcile with Steve, and get him to buy into the changes, achieving a smooth transition with his blessing. But after a brief period of depressed cooperation, Steve started attacking John again, behind the scenes in a variety of ways. I won't go into the details here, but eventually John had to remove Steve from his management role in the Macintosh division involuntarily. Apple announced Steve's removal, along with the first quarterly loss in their history as well as significant layoffs, on Friday, May 31, 1985, Fridays being the traditional time for companies to announce bad news. It was surely one of the lowest points of Apple history.

I was shocked when I heard the news that morning from a friend at Apple, and immediately drove down to Cupertino to see what was going on, and commiserate with my friends. I was aware of the problem with Macintosh sales, but it was still inconceivable to me that the board could oust Steve Jobs, who was clearly the heart and soul of the company, difficult as he may sometimes be. It was almost impossible to imagine the Macintosh team without him at the helm. I thought that perhaps I wasn't hearing the whole story, and that something would emerge to help it make more sense.

I arrived at the Apple campus soon after Sculley's communication meeting finished, where he explained the nature of the reorganization and the accompanying layoffs. The way that people were milling around listlessly reminded me of Black Wednesday four years earlier (see Black Wednesday), when Mike Scott unexpectedly purged the Apple II group. A few folks from the Apple II division who resented Steve's superior attitude seemed elated, and a few others saw the shake-up as an opportunity for personal advancement, but most of Apple's employees were sombre and depressed, feeling sad and uncertain about the future.

Lots of people had varying stories about what had actually happened. I thought that maybe it meant that Steve had decided to pursue AppleLabs, and that maybe I could come back to Apple to work on a small team again. I was anxious to talk to Steve himself, and find out his take on it, and I wasn't the only one. Bill Atkinson, Bud Tribble, Steve Capps and myself arranged to visit Steve at his house in Woodside for dinner on Sunday evening, two days after the reorganization was announced.

I had never been to Steve's house in Woodside before. It was a 14-bedroom, 17,250 square foot Spanish colonial style mansion built in 1926 that Steve had purchased around a year ago, in 1984. We knocked on the door and waited a few minutes before Steve appeared and led us inside. The massive house was almost completely unfurnished, and our footsteps echoed eerily as he led us to a large room near the kitchen, with a long table, one of the few rooms that had any furniture.

We stood around the kitchen chatting, as Steve prepared some food. His girlfriend Tina was there, who I had met a few times before; I was impressed by her mix of kindness and intelligence. Bill started chatting with Tina as I finally got a chance to ask Steve about the reorganization.

"So what really happened at Apple?", I asked him, even though I was scared to bring it up so directly. "Is it really as bad as it looks?"

"No, it's worse", Steve replied with a pained expression. "It's much worse than you can imagine."

Steve was adamant about blaming John Sculley for everything that had happened. He felt that John had betrayed him and he had little faith that Sculley or anyone else could manage Apple without him. He said that his role as chairman was completely ceremonial, and it left him with no actual responsibilities. In fact, Apple had already moved his office from Bandley 3 to Bandley 6, a small building across the street that was almost empty. The new office was so remote from day to day operations that it later was nicknamed "Siberia".

We had a pleasant dinner, huddled around one end of the long table, mainly reminiscing about the good old days developing the Mac but occasionally engaging in grim speculation about Apple's future. Steve had arranged for some gourmet vegetarian food to be delivered, and we drank some excellent wine. Dessert consisted of handfuls of locally grown Olson's cherries, grabbed from a large wooden crate that Steve kept in the kitchen.

After dinner, we retired to another room that had an expensive stereo system and an elaborate model of the mostly underground house that Steve planned to build to replace the one we were standing in. I had brought along a copy of Bob Dylan's new album with me, "Empire Burlesque", which was just released earlier that week, because I knew that Steve, like myself, was a big Bob Dylan fan, although Steve thought that Dylan hadn't done anything worthwhile since "Blood on the Tracks" a decade ago. I placed the album on a hi-tech turntable that seemed to be mounted on aluminum cones and played the last song, "Dark Eyes", which was slow and mournful, with a sad, fragile melody and lyrics that seemed relevant to the situation at Apple. But Steve didn't like the song, and wasn't interested in hearing the rest of the album, reiterating his negative opinion of recent Dylan.

Later, when it was time to leave, we lingered outside under the beautiful summer night sky. We were all pretty emotional by then, especially Steve. I tried to convince him that the change wasn't necessarily so bad, and that I would be excited about returning to Apple to work with him on a small team again. But Steve was inconsolable, and more depressed than I had ever seen him before. As we left, I thought that it was lucky that he had Tina there to keep him company in the cavernous mansion.

It took a while for me to understand the consequences of the reorganization. The best news for me was that my nemesis Bob Belleville had resigned from Apple, because he had sided with Steve during the recent infighting and burned too many bridges to continue. Most of the rest of Steve's staff stayed on to work for Jean-Louis Gassee, who replaced Steve in the reorganized division, although Mike Murray resigned soon thereafter. Steve Jobs spent most of the summer traveling, trying to figure out what to do next. He was still the chairman of Apple Computer, but he was so at odds with the rest of its leadership that it was hard to see how he could remain there much longer.

My former wife, Laura Bachko, had been a book editor in New York and had worked on a project with Bo Derek before we moved to California. One night when Laura and I were having dinner with Steve, Bo's name came up -- as did the factoid that Bo was a heavy duty computer jockey, albeit of the IBM persuasion. Steve took this as a personal challenge; he was going convert Bo to a Mac user -- and who knew what else. Clearly the computer could be a foot in the door. He persuaded Laura to make him an appointment with Bo.

And so one day shortly thereafter, Steve piled into his Mercedes, along with a Mac, and drove down to Bo's Santa Barbara ranch, which she shared with her husband John Derek. Bo was cordial but unimpressed; she accepted the computer but remained a PC user. And apparently she did not find Steve as dashing as Steve expected she would.

Several weeks later, Steve was complaining to Laura about the lackluster impression he had made. "Look," she told him. "She's married. And besides, I don't know any woman who would want her name to be Bo Jobs."