More tales from Bandley 3

[adespoton]

And then there were the last minute RFI issues. Originally all was supposed to be well, but the far-field tests indicated that the case seams leaked a bit more than was allowed -I remember the term "slot antenna" being used.
The solution was to spray a coballoy (paint) coating inside the case -some were actually done using an arc-spray (metalizing) process. Both added some thickness and that caused interference at the seam, which caused difficulty on assembly. The solution was to put each Mac face down and push the back onto the bezel with a large arbor press -a stunningly manual step in an otherwise automated factory.

Hah! I remember trying to get some electronics (with a slot) through the FCC process in the late 90s, same issue. For the test piece, we wrapped it in copper, but for the production pieces, we did the same thing with coballoy. Amazing how many problems "slot antennas" can cause.

 

[Mike68k]

Love these stories. Thanks so much!!! I read the whole folklore.org and the book that had the same content. Love love these stories. Would love to hear your persona story as well. How’d you join Apple. Your different roles. Etc.

 

[KURB]

Cool man thanks for sharing. Such an interesting and pivotal time in the history of all of humanity in my opinion. The 80's were sweet. The days before technology was invasive. And people still went outside lol.

 

[Huguenot]

Love these stories. Thanks so much!!! I read the whole folklore.org and the book that had the same content. Love love these stories. Would love to hear your persona story as well. How’d you join Apple. Your different roles. Etc.

Sorry for the absence, busy rehabbing a house and being a grandpa.
OK, since you asked... I graduated from UC Davis with a degree in economics and held several jobs as a purchasing agent during the 1970s. It was easy to find work in Silicon Valley in those days, and if you got bored or pissed off where you were, another job could be found in a week or two -often at 20% more pay. Networking was key and many of us moved around a lot.
During high school I had taken some drafting classes as electives. I also was fascinated with meteorology and built pretty much all of the weather instrument kits offered by Heathkit. As it turned out, reading blueprints and familiarity with electronic assembly was a very unusual background for a buyer to have and my network grew rapidly since the design and manufacturing engineers moved around as often as we did.
Jobs included 2 years at ISS/Sperry Univac (14 mb hard disc drives the size of a washing machine) then 4 years at Amdahl Corporation (470v6 and v7 mainframe computers) and a -very- short stint at Dataproducts where we were developing a dot matrix printer under contract for IBM.
A friend from my ISS days landed at Apple in 1981 and gave me a call...
I was hired as the supervisor of the mechanical purchasing group for the Apple ][ and spent 18 months there. In late '82 I was loaned out for a day of travel with 2 engineers and help sort out a problem with the mold maker on what turned out to be the Mac rear housing.
At that point they only had a single buyer -who was great at components but had little experience (or time) to deal with tooling or the mechanical parts.
When I returned to my desk in the Mariani building I was called in to Del Yocam's (Director of Mfg) office and told I worked for the Mac group starting immediately.
My initial responsibility there was "everything not soldered to the main logic board", this included the pcb itself as well as the analog board which was purchased as an assembly.

 

[KURB]

Thank you for sharing I enjoyed reading that

 

[Huguenot]

Party at Woz's house!
This was for the 4th of July 1984 but IIRC the 4th was mid-week so the party was the weekend after. Held at the "Castle" up on Summit Rd in the Santa Cruz Mtns.
AFIK Woz had little formal involvement with the Mac project. He had crashed his Beechcraft Bonanza at the airport in Scott's Valley in early 1981 and took time off from Apple to recover and complete his degree at UC Berkeley (enrolled under the name "Rocky Clark" IIRC).
Ever generous, he offered the use of his estate to Jobs and the Mac group. Open to the whole division and their families, it was quite a party.
Wish I had pics to share but digital cameras were far in the future, though some had film cameras and pics no doubt exist somewhere.
Some memories-
The bar was set up in a huge "cathedral grove" of redwood trees. We all got nice red beer cozys as swag.
There was a network of connected ponds on the property for his then wife Candi Clark to practice with her kayaks -she had been an olympic kayaker before meeting Woz.
The main house had an indoor/outdoor pool -it started in the family room and ended out on the patio with a great view toward the coast at Santa Cruz. There was a glass roll-up type door at the mid point which could be lowered down to the surface of the water to close out the weather. Lots of our kids took advantage of it.
A corral fun of llamas they kept as pets.
A giant trampoline had been set up and Jobs spent quite a bit of time jumping on it while holding hands with many of the kids, including my then 4 year old daughter.
Wozniak had quite an affinity for the summit area. Locals may remember the Cloud 9 restaurant near the intersection of Summit and Hiway 17. When it went bankrupt in the mid '80s Woz actually bought and operated it for a few years in an attempt to keep it alive. Not sure how long, it has been open and closed under different names decades.

 

[David Cook]

A giant trampoline had been set up and Jobs spent quite a bit of time jumping on it while holding hands with many of the kids,

That's an image not usually shared about Jobs.