At the rehearsal the night before the launch, nothing was working well. Jobs hated the way the animation scrolled across the Macintosh screen, and he kept ordering tweaks. He also was dissatisfied with the stage lighting, and he directed Sculley to move from seat to seat to give his opinion as various adjustments were made. Sculley had never thought much about variations of stage lighting and gave the type of tentative answers a patient might give an eye doctor when asked which lens made the letters clearer. The rehearsals and changes went on for five hours, well into the night. “He was driving people insane, getting mad at the stagehands for every glitch in the presentation,” Sculley recalled. “I thought there was no way we were going to get it done for the show the next morning.”
Most of all, Jobs fretted about his presentation. Sculley fancied himself a good writer, so he suggested changes in Jobs’s script. Jobs recalled being slightly annoyed, but their relationship was still in the phase when he was lathering on flattery and stroking Sculley’s ego. “I think of you just like Woz and Markkula,” he told Sculley. “You’re like one of the founders of the company. They founded the company, but you and I are founding the future.” Sculley lapped it up.
The next morning the 2,600-seat auditorium was mobbed. Jobs arrived in a double-breasted blue blazer, a starched white shirt, and a pale green bow tie. “This is the most important moment in my entire life,” he told Sculley as they waited backstage for the program to begin. “I’m really nervous. You’re probably the only person who knows how I feel about this.” Sculley grasped his hand, held it for a moment, and whispered “Good luck.”
As chairman of the company, Jobs went onstage first to start the shareholders’ meeting. He did so with his own form of an invocation. “I’d like to open the meeting,” he said, “with a twenty-year-old poem by Dylan—that’s Bob Dylan.” He broke into a little smile, then looked down to read from the second verse of “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” His voice was high-pitched as he raced through the ten lines, ending with “For the loser now / Will be later to win / For the times they are a-changin’.” That song was the anthem that kept the multimillionaire board chairman in touch with his counterculture self-image. He had a bootleg copy of his favorite version, which was from the live concert Dylan performed, with Joan Baez, on Halloween 1964 at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall.
Sculley came onstage to report on the company’s earnings, and the audience started to become restless as he droned on. Finally, he ended with a personal note. “The most important thing that has happened to me in the last nine months at Apple has been a chance to develop a friendship with Steve Jobs,” he said. “For me, the rapport we have developed means an awful lot.”
The lights dimmed as Jobs reappeared onstage and launched into a dramatic version of the battle cry he had delivered at the Hawaii sales conference. “It is 1958,” he began. “IBM passes up a chance to buy a young fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox was born, and IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.” The crowd laughed. Hertzfeld had heard versions of the speech both in Hawaii and elsewhere, but he was struck by how this time it was pulsing with more passion. After recounting other IBM missteps, Jobs picked up the pace and the emotion as he built toward the present:
It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, after initially welcoming IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM-dominated and-controlled future and are turning back to Apple as the only force who can ensure their future freedom. IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?
As he built to the climax, the audience went from murmuring to applauding to a frenzy of cheering and chanting. But before they could answer the Orwell question, the auditorium went black and the “1984” commercial appeared on the screen. When it was over, the entire audience was on its feet cheering.