The Mac calculator’s original design came from letting Steve Jobs play with sliders for ten minutes

In 1982, a young Mac developer turned Jobs into a UI designer—and accidentally invented a new technique.

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[whiteknave]

Chris Espinosa started working for Apple at age 14, making him one of the company’s earliest and youngest employees.

Just one of the youngest? Who was younger? Did Apple have 13 year olds working for them?

Or did you mean, "one of the company's earliest and the youngest employee."?

 

[Drizzt321]

Yup, sounds about right. Rarely does anyone actually know what they want, or are able to communicate it. But when they can just mess around with it until they get something they like, suddenly it becomes a lot easier and simpler.

In that regard, generative AI design concept/modeling actually is a big positive in my mind, as a way to quickly prototype UI/UX to work with technical folks with to refine and implement.

 

[dennis.kext]

I really think a neat internal design/engineering exercise for Apple would be to implement the original Pre-System 7 UI in macOS(Could you imagine a classic dark mode?!). Just strip it down to the very basic elements. I really think going backwards could help them go forwards.

I don't care what skin the UI looks like(Classic, CopelandPlatinum, Aqua, Leopard or LiquidAss)... I just want to know where is a safe place to grab a window.

 

[stormcrash]

The Steve Jobs Platonic Ideal Calculator

 

[srt8driver]

In my experience, they demand "it must be simple and easy".... "and also allow these 342 different options, and 5 unique edge cases that change the 342 by a factor of 10, and it needs to be done yesterday, and why isn't it done yet, oh yea we need this other change too." At least Jobs had a vision of what he wanted, most have no clue of what they want, no desire to follow any details, and no patience....

 

[Aurich]

Knowing what you want, or knowing something is right when you see it, is an entirely different skill from being able to articulate that to someone else in a way they understand. Or really, even a way you understand.

 

[stormcrash]

I really think a neat internal design/engineering exercise for Apple would be to implement the original Pre-System 7 UI in macOS(Could you imagine a classic dark mode?!). Just strip it down to the very basic elements. I really think going backwards could help them go forwards.

I don't care what skin the UI looks like(Classic, CopelandPlatinum, Aqua, Leopard or LiquidAss)... I just want to know where is a safe place to grab a window.

Bring back title bars! Easily the most frustrating thing about "modern" ux, there's no known safe place to grab the window by, if you're lucky there's a little bit of space near the trafficlights/min/max/close buttons but that's it

 

[50me12]

I remember one of my first "real" jobs doing tech support for some big networking equipment. We had some BIG banks as customers and the east coast guys were very gruff and in your face and would even argue on calls.

As a Midwesterner I was more reserved and timid. I thought some of them were unprofessional and jerks. But after a while I realized, they were that way to each other in their organization all the time, and some would go out for drinks that same night with each other at the end of the night.

Soon I realized that their more abrupt argumentative style was a way to demonstrate HOW SURE they were that their theory on a fix or problem was correct. If they challenged you they expected if you were sure you'd push back, or forcefully correct or work with them ... not back down. If you backed down it meant you didn't care or weren't sure.

So I found that if I was very abrupt, called people out "you're wrong" even swore a little ... I became their best buddy overnight.

I don't think it was exactly that way with Steve Jobs, but I do think from hearing stories from those who worked with him if he took a swing at your work, he wanted to see you come back swinging with something better, and keep coming back until you found it. If so ... that was a guy he thought he could work with.

He even said people who care about the product (content) are very hard to work with, but it's worth it:


View: https://youtu.be/s4Cz49MLh4o?t=173

 

[dennis.kext]

Bring back title bars! Easily the most frustrating thing about "modern" ux, there's no known safe place to grab the window by, if you're lucky there's a little bit of space near the trafficlights/min/max/close buttons but that's it

Not sure why all the hate for title bars. I'm a power nerd, but I'm VERY clumsy. Like Urkel level clumsy. I can't throw my cursor, like I can on my vintage Macs. I have to plan out window moves, and then become frustrated when I miss.

 

[Mechjaz]

He even said people who care about the product (content) are very hard to work with, but it's worth it

Man, I must be one of the most valuable employees on the the planet

 

[lolnova]

As somebody who has the same obsessive attention to visual detail as Jobs and who has never been able to exercise it fully in order to build elegant software despite being naturally inclined, I really hope I can ship something pixel-perfect to my own specifications before I die.

Unfortunately I'm living on a couch and eating from food banks, and I'm not able to focus without long periods of uninterrupted quiet, which don't tend to be available when you live on a couch with zero privacy, no door you can close, etc.

I was literally just telling my therapist how none of my mom n' pop Wordpress clients give anywhere near enough of a crap to pay for their websites to have the level of visual perfection I consider "done," and that the first major app I'd build if I ever manage to learn Android development would be a pixel-perfect simple weather app for F-droid, before I took a break to read this article.

Maybe someday...

 

[Taunted Happy Fun Ball]

So good someone reimplemented it on modern MacOS:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calculator-desk-accessory/id1464969384

It was also designed to match the layout of a Mac keyboard's number pad, which in turn was designed with a "Clear" key just like the calculator. Apple took the Mac's hardware-software integration seriously.

 

[lolnova]

The Steve Jobs Platonic Ideal Calculator

Looking at it as somebody with that degree of obsessiveness, it is a really nice design for a calculator on a low-DPI display. I understand why a lot of more artsy types were drawn to MacOS in the era when they weren't shipping god-awful clusterfucks like Liquid Glass. Jobs is spinning in his grave at turbojet RPM by now.

 

[TigerAway]

I think this anecdote shows that not only did Steve Jobs have good taste, but he could also create something that he did like. He really was a creative genius.

My understanding is that Lucas Pope, one of my favorite game developers, is also a fan of creating “visual and parameterized design tools.” Creating such tools was his job at Naughty Dog. I think he also refers to this tooling as a “game within a game.”

 

[Nop666]

Bring back title bars! Easily the most frustrating thing about "modern" ux, there's no known safe place to grab the window by, if you're lucky there's a little bit of space near the trafficlights/min/max/close buttons but that's it

Indeed! Looking at you, Chrome!

 

[Taunted Happy Fun Ball]

The old Steve-styled calculator was supplemented in 1994 with the more sophisticated Pacific Tech Graphing Calculator. Its origin story is even more interesting than this one
https://www.pacifict.com/Story/

(And it is also still available for modern MacOS for free, or Windows for pay.)

(I'm just here to shill for cool calculators today. Maybe consider PCalc, too. It also has an origin story.)

 

[jthill]

[…]My understanding is that Lucas Pope, one of my favorite game developers, is also a fan of creating “visual and parameterized design tools.” Creating such tools was his job at Naughty Dog. I think he also refers to this tooling as a “game within a game.”

WIl Wright used to tell the story of how he made level design tools for this game he had in mind and found himself having so much fun at it he made that into a game. The game he was writing the tools for was called "Raid on Bungeling Bay". He called the game he made out of the level design tools "Sim City?.

 

[john_e]

My personal bugbear with present day UI is scrollbars. Don't make me scrub the mouse over every empty gap between UI elements to see which one turns into a scrollbar. Particularly not if there are two not-scrollbars in the same place, so the one I hit is the wrong one.

It's also a sad sign of how far we've come to compare the Windows 3.x control panel, that let you customize the colour and size of every UI element, with the "Well, you can have a checkbox for Dark Mode if you're lucky" typically seen today.

 

[DistinctivelyCanuck]

Oh, the simple pleasures... Missile command

 

[Purpleivan]

Bring back title bars! Easily the most frustrating thing about "modern" ux, there's no known safe place to grab the window by, if you're lucky there's a little bit of space near the trafficlights/min/max/close buttons but that's it

Along with the annoying habit a few UI designers have, of having incredibly slim scroll bars on the edge of a window, that needs almost pixel perfect precision with the mouse to control.

 

[Chuckstar]

I remember one of my first "real" jobs doing tech support for some big networking equipment. We had some BIG banks as customers and the east coast guys were very gruff and in your face and would even argue on calls.

As a Midwesterner I was more reserved and timid. I thought some of them were unprofessional and jerks. But after a while I realized, they were that way to each other in their organization all the time, and some would go out for drinks that same night with each other at the end of the night.

Soon I realized that their more abrupt argumentative style was a way to demonstrate HOW SURE they were that their theory on a fix or problem was correct. If they challenged you they expected if you were sure you'd push back, or forcefully correct or work with them ... not back down. If you backed down it meant you didn't care or weren't sure.

So I found that if I was very abrupt, called people out "you're wrong" even swore a little ... I became their best buddy overnight.

I don't think it was exactly that way with Steve Jobs, but I do think from hearing stories from those who worked with him if he took a swing at your work, he wanted to see you come back swinging with something better, and keep coming back until you found it. If so ... that was a guy he thought he could work with.

He even said people who care about the product (content) are very hard to work with, but it's worth it:


View: https://youtu.be/s4Cz49MLh4o?t=173

I had a boss at one point with whom the worst thing you could do was fail to have an opinion. Second worst was to have an opinion and be unable/unwilling to defend it.

He used to say “I want to hear your opinion and your argument. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to let you know when you’re wrong.”

 

[Boskone]

Not sure why all the hate for title bars. I'm a power nerd, but I'm VERY clumsy. Like Urkel level clumsy. I can't throw my cursor, like I can on my vintage Macs. I have to plan out window moves, and then become frustrated when I miss.

Probably people who's window use is "half screen, full screen, or minimized".

I have coworkers that don't understand why I wouldn't just have two half-screen windows on my ultrawide at home.

 

[DCRoss]

Yeah, the calculator looks fine. It also looks like roughly the same button as every basic non-scientific calculator of the day.

That it lasted from 82 to 01 feels like a tribute to Jobs' ability to stick to a decision. And nothing more.

Well, either that or a tribute to just how scared everyone at Apple was of saying "Hey, I want to get rid of the calculator that Steve designed."

 

[Woolfe]

Jobs was a dick, but at the same time he did know his shit, and I think this highlights it well. But I think Chris' approach to handling it was the true brilliance and it would be interesting to see if that maybe helped direct Jobs' approach to stuff in the future, him getting hands on with the design elements, and his insistence on certain things that would end up being key elements.

Fascinating stuff

 

[dtich]

Knowing what you want, or knowing something is right when you see it, is an entirely different skill from being able to articulate that to someone else in a way they understand. Or really, even a way you understand.

And all that is often very far removed from being able to do it yourself. In many creative fields the driver, the motive force at the top, has none of the skills to actually do the tasks and those under them can only hope and pray that they can explain what they want or, at the least, know what's right when they see it... however are left sorely disappointed more often than not. Speaking from experience on both sides of that.

 

[Boskone]

System 6 UI was designed for a floppy disk-based OS with no multitasking on a 9 inch monochrome CRT. It had no window minimizing, no ability to bring just one window forward out of multiple windows attached to a given app, no list view or aliases in Finder, and no safe place to grab a window except for the title bar. As someone who used System 6 on a Mac Plus for almost six years back in the days, I find your idea about as sensible as suggesting that an overly ornate restaurant try to “go forward” by getting rid of eating utensils.

I think you have that backwards: they were asking for their utensiles back, instead of having to try and eat everything--including the soup--with chopsticks.

Yes, it can be done. Yes, someone thinks it's a great idea. No, it's not some universally-optimum way to handle the problem.

 

[chaos215bar2]

Not sure why all the hate for title bars. I'm a power nerd, but I'm VERY clumsy. Like Urkel level clumsy. I can't throw my cursor, like I can on my vintage Macs. I have to plan out window moves, and then become frustrated when I miss.

I wouldn't consider myself clumsy in any other context, but I hate how overloaded a lot of modern Ui design has become. I see others making the same sorts of errors, so I know it isn't just me.

Consider the change on macOS a while back to allow windows to be resized from any edge as an example. Somehow I still constantly find myself moving the mouse pointer back and forth to find just the right pixel from which I can actually resize the window. And then there are times I literally watch the mouse move pixel by pixel, hit the right spot, and then switch to dragging the window instead by the time I click. It's just a giant waste of time vs. creating a dedicated area for this.

The other that gets me is backwards and forward swipes on iOS. I can literally be trying to tap near the edge of a page in, say, Safari, and somehow the OS decides to interpret a fast, probably sub-5mm "motion" as I'm just putting my finger down as a swipe, and I've completely lost the page I was viewing.

Or look at the Safari redesign, where almost on top of each other at the bottom of the screen, you have two different areas responsive to the same swipe gestures. I constantly switch apps accidentally as I'm trying to swipe between tabs.

To me, it's just unskilled design. It's easy, relatively speaking, to just stick gestures everywhere you can squeeze them. What takes real effort is paring that down to just what you actually need to get the job done, and making sure each one is clear and distinct so they don't get mixed up.

 

[Wanzerr]

My personal bugbear with present day UI is scrollbars. Don't make me scrub the mouse over every empty gap between UI elements to see which one turns into a scrollbar. Particularly not if there are two not-scrollbars in the same place, so the one I hit is the wrong one.

It's also a sad sign of how far we've come to compare the Windows 3.x control panel, that let you customize the colour and size of every UI element, with the "Well, you can have a checkbox for Dark Mode if you're lucky" typically seen today.

This 100% UI peaked with skeumorphic and predictably place elements in the 90s and 2000s, everything since then has been downhill.

 

[dennis.kext]

System 6 UI was designed for a floppy disk-based OS with no multitasking on a 9 inch monochrome CRT. It had no window minimizing, no ability to bring just one window forward out of multiple windows attached to a given app, no list view or aliases in Finder, and no safe place to grab a window except for the title bar. As someone who used System 6 on a Mac Plus for almost six years back in the days, I find your idea about as sensible as suggesting that an overly ornate restaurant try to “go forward” by getting rid of eating utensils.

I think you may have missed my point. Which was to strip it to its essential elements as an EXERCISE in UI. Kids these days(Apple's UI team) doesn't know CLI from WYSIWYG.

Also... if your Mac Plus had enough memory(1.5MB+) you can use Multi-Finder with multiple apps/windows.

 

[DJ Farkus]

In that regard, generative AI design concept/modeling actually is a big positive in my mind, as a way to quickly prototype UI/UX to work with technical folks with to refine and implement.

A valid point for prototyping. (From someone who used to muck around with paper prototyping with field users)

If only some people wouldn't immediately conflate "half-functional prototype" to "product". Or get the bright idea that engineering really isn't needed at all with "AI"

(edit: typo)

 

[zogus]

I think you may have missed my point. Which was to strip it to its essential elements as an EXERCISE in UI. Kids these days(Apple's UI team) doesn't know CLI from WYSIWYG.

Also... if your Mac Plus had enough memory(1.5MB+) you can use Multi-Finder with multiple apps/windows.

Yes, you can use multiple apps at a time on a Mac Plus under MultiFinder. You can also drink a bowl of broth by repeatedly dipping chopsticks into the soup, raising them and quickly sucking on the ends before the liquid drips off. Neither are particularly efficient or satisfying experiences. Trust me, I’ve tried both.

 

[Marlor_AU]

Believe it or not, Chris Espinosa still works at Apple as its longest-serving employee. But back in the day, as manager of documentation for the Macintosh, Espinosa decided to write a demo program using Bill Atkinson’s QuickDraw, the Mac’s graphics system, to better understand how it worked.

Manager of Documentation would have been a difficult task under Jobs. He wasn't known for a love of documentation.

I used to work with a guy who had, years previously, been a documentation manager at Claris. For one of their big software releases, they went to show off the finished version to Jobs and get his seal of approval.

The software was presented to Jobs, and he seemed generally happy enough with it. Then the team presented the documentation, which my ex-colleague was very proud of. Knowing Jobs' reputation for nitpicking on details, he'd spent days proof-reading it, and had gone to the extra effort to present a slick, perfectly bound version, reflecting what would come in the box. He handed the documentation to Jobs, who just looked at the cover, turned it over, looked at the back, then threw it straight in the bin. "If your software needs a manual, it's crap", he said. "Put the effort into the UI instead. Don't waste time explaining why it's unintuitive, fix it".

The manual shipped with the product, but they made sure documentation wasn't presented to Jobs during demos after that.

 

[Marlor_AU]

My personal bugbear with present day UI is scrollbars. Don't make me scrub the mouse over every empty gap between UI elements to see which one turns into a scrollbar. Particularly not if there are two not-scrollbars in the same place, so the one I hit is the wrong one.

What's even worse is several news websites I use that now combine horizontal and vertical scrolling elements, none of which have visible scrollbars.

The page itself scrolls vertically, then there are elements within that page that scroll horizontally, then some of those occasionally have embedded content that itself scrolls vertically. Trying to find all the content on the page is like some kind of sliding-block puzzle.

 

[Aurich]

The old Steve-styled calculator was supplemented in 1994 with the more sophisticated Pacific Tech Graphing Calculator. Its origin story is even more interesting than this one
https://www.pacifict.com/Story/

(And it is also still available for modern MacOS for free, or Windows for pay.)

(I'm just here to shill for cool calculators today. Maybe consider PCalc, too. It also has an origin story.)

PCalc is my tool of choice personally.

I didn't know it had such a long history though!

 

[keltorsori]

Every few years something comes along that sends me back down the folklore.org rabbit hole. Easily one of my favorite spots to marvel at how much a few insanely brilliant folks like Bill Atkinson (and Espinosa) can accomplish. Thanks for another trip back down memory lane (and now I know what I'll be spending the rest of my evening reading)

 

[Fred Duck]

What takes real effort is paring that down to just what you actually need to get the job done, and making sure each one is clear and distinct so they don't get mixed up.

That reminds me of something from 1997 WWDC.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying 'no' to 1,000 things. Whether its design or business strategy subtraction adds value. Nobody produces all masterpieces. You've got to edit it down and throw away the crappy stuff.

 

[sunnysocal]

Yup, sounds about right. Rarely does anyone actually know what they want, or are able to communicate it. But when they can just mess around with it until they get something they like, suddenly it becomes a lot easier and simpler.

I am an audio engineer. Sometimes, the only answer is to give control of the faders to the client.