Grass is greener for Mac designer

Thirty-six years after working on a project that would change the world of computing, Jerry Manock is bringing his expertise to Grassometer, a Trinity College start-up which has developed a device to analyse grass growth for farmers, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

JERRY MANOCK’S design work for one Steve in California is so elegant that it has earned a place in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Now he’s working with another Steve in Ireland, on a much smaller scale project, but one that he thinks will also have “profundity”.

Famed as the man who designed the original Mac (now in MOMA’s collection), the amiable and chatty Manock is bringing his design expertise to Grassometer, a Trinity College start-up founded by Steven Lock which has developed a device to analyse grass growth for farmers (see panel).

“The more I heard about it from Steve, the more interesting it sounded,” says Manock. “I’ve always been interested in projects with some profundity – projects that can help mankind. I immediately had a feeling that this could help farmers and help communities around the world. I thought, this is something I could get involved with.”

Some 36 years ago, he took a call from a different Steve, the youthful Steve Jobs, chief executive of a new company called Apple. “There were only five people in the company when he called in December ’76 and said he needed a computer designed – and would need to produce some as well – by the time of the West Coast Computer Fair in April. Of course, everyone else had said, ‘You’re crazy’. But I’d just started a design company and didn’t know any better, and said yes.”

The computer was the Apple II, the device that would launch Apple’s fortunes. For their first meeting, Jobs invited him along to a Stanford University gathering of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club. “I walked up and introduced myself to him. There were a number of others there, and Jobs would go in a circle, talking to people. And he’d come back to me and pick up the conversation at exactly the point where he’d left off. He had six conversations going at once – he was just so sharp.”

Manock successfully did the design and also was able to have numerous handmade models of the Apple II in time for the fair.

Everyone else’s computers looked like they were built from homemade kits, he recalls, while the Apple IIs had sleek, tooled covers and were lined up to evoke a production line.

Jobs wanted Manock to join Apple, but he decided he preferred to get his then-generous $20 an hour consulting fee.

“I could have been employee number six. I think when Apple went public, the guy who was employee number six made $75 million overnight.”

He went on to design a number of peripherals for the Apple II, and then designed the Apple III, a computer that turned out to be a flop after initial circuit board problems gave it a bad reputation. Manock initially believed the problem was his fault and expected to be fired (later it emerged that it was not his board design, but an issue with the way the boards were hand soldered).

Instead, Jobs reassigned him to a new, secretive project: the Macintosh.

“The exciting part was the secrecy,” he says – the entire development team was sent off to work in a separate ‘skunk works’ building, away from the main Apple offices. The initial intention was to focus on portability, and create a computer with a built-in handle, and a keyboard that could fold up to protect the screen.

But Jobs decided that the emphasis was instead going to be on producing a computer with a very small desktop footprint.

Was Manock annoyed at the sudden shift? “I was used to that kind of change at Apple,” he smiles. The emphasis for the Mac was going to be on the user. “It had to be a great user experience – that was a given with all Apple products.”

Manock lovingly recalls small design details, such as the small stretch of smooth plastic that stood out from the textured casing to help guide your hand to the on/off switch, the air vents with a pocket-like design that would prevent a child from sticking an object inside and risking a shock, and the neatly laid out peripheral sockets on the back of the machine.

“That was one of Steve’s criteria: ‘That’s going to be sitting on someone’s desk, and a visitor is going to see the back of the computer’. The back had to be attractive.”

Manock also famously chose the putty colour for the casing – Pantone colour number 453. “I’d worked at HP before I started my own business. At HP, they had a whole group that did nothing but specify colours. At the time, they were mostly brown and beiges. I knew people could live with those colours.”

Was he there to see Jobs launch the Mac in 1984? “That’s like asking, were you there at the birth of your first child,” he laughs. “I was there – we all were there, he had the whole group stand up. I remember I cried a lot.”

He recalls Jobs with much affection. “Very early on, he said he wanted Apple design to be equal with Sony and Mercedes-Benz. And he was willing to spend money to do it. Never in my entire time at Apple was I refused people or money. I remember I went to him asking for about $800,000 to spend on the original tooling of the Mac. He just said. ‘Okay – here’s my signature’.”

Jobs was also very hands-on in the product development process. “That was key – he’d come around, and walk up behind your desk. There was one time when he walked up behind me and looked at what I was doing

and said, ‘What’s that crap?’ I was just tongue-tied. He’d get disgusted and walk away. A lot of times people would get defensive. Those people had a very short time at Apple.

“But I realised what he was looking for. After that incident, I sent over a note explaining that yesterday, I hadn’t really been able to tell him the detail of what I was working on, but now I could go into it for him, and he was happy with that.

“He was just too young at the time to know how to interact and engage with you. But he was also a very generous and human type of person.”

He still has his original Apple contract, signed by Jobs.

Manock left Apple in 1984, and now runs his company, Manock Comprehensive Design, Inc, from Vermont. He also teaches integrated product design to business students at the University of Vermont.

“But I’m very hesitant to take on new projects. This profundity thing is very important to me – I don’t want to waste time making junk. I want to do things that make a difference.”

Jerry Manock invites start-ups to "show and tell" their hardware, prototypes or rough drawings to him at the Science Gallery, June 7th at 6.30pm. Limited free tickets at Sciencegallery.com

TURNING AN IDEA INTO REALITY WOULDN’T IT BE GREAT IF [GRASSOMETER] WORKED LIKE SOMETHING FROM APPLE?

TV PRODUCER Steven Lock got the idea for his new technology company, Grassometer, after finishing a series of programmes on farming for TV3.

Farmers, he says, are naturally obsessed with the grass they grow for their livestock because it is closely linked to the quality of milk and meat produced.

With design expertise provided by Jerry Manock, and funding from Enterprise Ireland's Innovation Voucher scheme, the company has created a small, ultrasound device that clips to a farmer's boot and analyses grass growth as the farmer walks.

The data are beamed via Bluetooth to a mobile handset which displays the location of the field and can automatically graph information on the grass, the herd, weather, milk output and other farming details. These can be uploaded to the cloud and shared.

How did the famed Mac designer end up working with a tiny Irish start-up?

"We'd been working away at a proper business plan, says Lock. The reference point everybody used was, wouldn't it be great if worked like something from Apple? So I was driving back from Belfast and I was thinking, 'Apple, Apple, how would you make it work like something from Apple'."

When Lock got home and went to his computer, one of the first things he saw was an email alert for an article in which Jerry Manock talked about his time at Apple, working for Steve Jobs (right).

"I was reading it and thinking, this guy is brilliant; all that inside/outside thinking about the design for the Mac. And then I thought, if you want to think like Apple, and work like Apple, maybe I should talk to the guy who did this for Apple."

On impulse, he sent Manock an email. "Five minutes later, to my amazement, he responded. We started exchanging emails, and he came back and said, 'I want to be involved'," says Lock.