Imagine it’s 1983. We’re on the doorstep of what would be Apple’s third official campus, located in the bustling Bandley Drive neighborhood in Cupertino. It’s springtime in California, the day looks spectacular. The building in front of us is Bandley 3, a futuristic space – for the time – surrounded by green spaces. It is in this place that the extravagances began, the follies. At this point, Apple really started being Apple, and Jobs went wild.
This building is the pure story of the brand, initially built to house the engineering teams, everything changed when in January 1983 Steve Jobs decided that the macintosh team It had to be different from the rest of the company’s equipment. They needed bigger rooms, new space. They made one instead. lair. This place was far from any concept traditional known office.
Fortune dedicated its cover to the Macintosh computer with a photo of the Bösendorfer piano and the pirate flag created by Susan Kare that you find upon entering the building.
It seems that Fortune magazine was very clear about the differential of this site, and when in 1984 – coinciding with the launch of the Macintosh – they had to interview the team, one of the iconic photos was taken at the reception of the building. It features some of the creators of the Mac and two unique items in Apple mythology: the pirate flag created by designer Susan Kare and a Bösendorfer plan that you were right when you entered.
That wasn’t the only thing you were going to find there.
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Just during that year, a teenager Glenn Leibowitz – now a successful publicist and writer – asked him, during a visit to his sister, to take him to see these Apple offices. They had no invitation and there was nothing to do there. Perhaps, having been lucky enough to see the caption that this young man was beginning to be Steve Jobs.
They drove to Cupertino, and without thinking about it, they walked into the offices of Bandley 3. Perhaps like someone staring curiously at a new planetthis kid was hallucinating with what he saw there, just inside the lobby: two arcade cabinets, with the legendary Defender and Jout video games. In these machines, you could perfectly well find Wozniak or Steve Burrell playing a few games.
Woz playing Defender at Bandley 3 reception
The games were not randomly selected (Is there anything randomly picked from Apple?): Defender tries to defeat several waves of aliens on a fictional planet, where you must protect a brave group of astronauts at all costs. Something like this was happening at Apple, against Lisa’s team, such a big rivalry was building up that they even stole the pirate flag and demanded a ransom from them for it. The Macintosh computer was, like this teenager, a strange new world full of attackers They still didn’t quite understand what they were doing.
While Defender was a game where defense was learned, Joust was the opposite: it was one of the first collaborative games Two players where they must advance through enemy lines, ruthlessly defeating dangerous vulture-riding opponents. When Leibowitz wrote that he had seen all of this in the home of a tech company like Apple, he was amazed: “How strange, I remember thinking. That’s great.”
The Steve Jobs Motorcycle Everyone Should See
The first image of the most curious object in this room first appeared in a National Geographic report back then, when we talked about the growing migration to Silicon Valley of tech enthusiasts and how Apple was becoming “the Volkswagen of IT”.
It was common to see Jobs driving his BMW R60/2 instead of his Mercedes. For him, it was like flying through Cupertino.
Dressed in Adidas sneakers, jeans and a casual shirt, it was common to see Steve Jobs with one of his most prized possessions at the time: a BMW R60/2 motorcycle from 1966. Although he also had a late-model Mercedes, Jobs always preferred to drive around in his BMW. It was like palmar For Cupertino, this feeling of freedom was not only a personal taste, it also seemed to be an inspiration for him.
This motorcycle seemed a design treasure and industrial build: it’s one of BMW’s most memorable classic motorcycles, and its commanding aesthetic also seemed to ooze style and strength. Jobs got it, and that’s why he left his motorcycle parked inside from Bandley Lobby 3: to serve as inspiration and curiosity for everyone who comes to work at Apple every day – or who comes to visit.
Next to this piano which evoked the artistic part of the group. Of these arcade terminals which they warned of team fighting spirit. Under the pirate flag they invited people to think differently. Many also thought the idea was to impress Hartmut Esslinger, an industrial designer they wanted to hire to create the next generation of Macintosh after the original’s introduction.
With all this, Jobs’ goal was almost to build a bodegon intentions, where any other company has its logo and everything is cold and corporate. The Jobs’ BMW motorcycle parked at reception He was an icon of strength – also of power – and he had that rogue side that we loved so much in this madman, this genius.
He didn’t have much to do with other tech company executives at the time, as his own friends said at the time: “He hasn’t changed. In a checkered shirt and jeans, he still prefers to ride his motorbike to my house, sit and drink wine together and talk about what we’ll be doing when we grow up. Doesn’t sound bad for someone who’s done change the world.
