Steve Jobs is remembered as a man of great ideas, a genius; but also as someone who was difficult to deal with. Steve had a reputation of an individual who pushed people very hard, often to the point where they couldn’t take it anymore and broke down.
Not so well known are the little ways in which Steve motivated those around him. Here’s one of my favourite Steve Jobs anecdotes.
This one takes us back to May 1981, the time when the Lisa (precursor to the original Macintosh) was being developed.
Bill Atkinson was back then an engineer at Apple working on Lisa’s GUI. This was a time when computers ran on text-based commands, and graphical elements like button and clickable menus (or the mouse, for that matter) were all but unheard of. So coming up with a program that could draw on screen was a new task, made challenging by limitations of the hardware.
Bill came up with a way to draw circles and ovals on screen. He devised a clever way to workaround the computer’s limitations and draw ovals very quickly. Excited with his accomplishment, he was eager to show it off to Steve Jobs.
Bill fired up his demo and it quickly filled the screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve.
“Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?”, said Steve.
“No, there’s no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard to do, and I don’t think we really need it”, Bill seemed a little miffed that Steve wasn’t raving over the fast ovals and wanted more still.
Steve suddenly got more intense. “Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!”. And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. “And look outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you look!”. He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.
When Steve and Bill passed a no-parking sign with rounded corners, it did the trick. “OK, I give up”, Bill pleaded. “I’ll see if it’s as hard as I thought.” He went back to work.
Bill Atkinson returned the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles.
Over the next few months, rounded rectangles worked their way into various parts of the user interface, and soon became indispensable.
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