Researching Mitchell Waite

His career began in 1977 when he met Steve Jobs at the Home Brew Computer Club at Stanford University. Jobs introduced the Apple I to the group and Waite was one of the first to purchase the single board personal computer at the Byte Shop in San Rafael. By this point Waite had published several computer books and was working on a book about computer graphics. Jobs found out about an elaborate weather station Waite had running on his houseboat in Greenbrae, California and attached to the Apple I, and invited himself up to see it. When Jobs arrived he spent the entire time bragging about the new Apple II he had developed with Steve Wozniak. It was 10X better than the Apple I he claimed and invited Waite to come to Cupertino to see it.

Waite met Jobs at the new offices of Apple Computer. Impressed with his books Jobs offered Waite a job as Apple's head of documentation, along with stock options. Waite accepted and asked if he could come in later in the morning since he lived in Marin county. Jobs told him that if he worked at Apple he had to be there 24 x 7. Waite balked, and told Jobs he could not live in Cupertino's asphalt jungle. Jobs was infuriated, called him a bozo and said he was blowing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Waite told Jobs he felt he would be successful on his own one day as a writer or publisher but would still love to do something else to help Apple. Jobs told him to meet with Mike Markkula and Mike assigned Waite a job writing a magazine article comparing the Apple II to the Commodore 64 and learning the Commodore apart with a stiletto knife. After that Waite decided he was not destined to work in the computer industry but rather wanted to create new kinds of books and so he worked even harder at being a writer.

After writing 5 books on his own he began working with more of his friends in the hobby world. He enlisted his old College of Marin professors to help him write books about programming languages and soon has a reputation as one of the major shakers in the burgeoning computer book industry.

He established Mitch Waite Group at 1977, which has published more than 130 titles in the computer programming field. The company was later sold to Simon & Schuster. Waite also created the website WhatBird and later developed iBird, a bird field guide app for iOS and Android. iBird apps: http://www.ibird.com