I started working at Apple about 18 months after I bought my Apple II.
I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school.
The Apple II was not designed like an ordinary product. It used crazy tricks everywhere.
I knew the Apple II was great when I bought it, but as I dug into the details it just completely blew me away the creative artistic approach that the designers had taken.
In fact when I first got my Apple II the first thing I did was turn it on and off, on and off, just because I had the power to do so, which I'd never had on a computer before.
I did some products for the Apple II, most notably the first small low cost thermal printer, the Silent Type.
Apple was our benefactor at starting General Magic, but about a year later decided they would rather BE General Magic and tried to make us blink out of existence... which we eventually did, but it took a few years.
But I think Steve's main contribution besides just the pure leadership is his passion for excellence. He's a perfectionist. Good enough isn't good enough. And also his creative spirit. You know he really, really wants to do something great.
I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement.
Scotty heard that I was thinking about quitting Apple because of his actions, so he called me into his office and asked what it would take for me to stay? I said, maybe if I could work on the Mac project, which Steve had just taken over from Jef Raskin.
