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Steve Jobs Kept Rejecting a Mac Calculator, So Chris Espinosa Built a 'Construction Set' and Let Jobs Design It Himself in About Ten Minutes
In early 1982, after Steve Jobs found new faults in Chris Espinosa's Macintosh calculator for a couple of days, Espinosa turned every visual choice into a pull-down menu; Jobs picked his settings in about ten minutes, and that design shipped as the Mac calculator through OS 9, Andy Hertzfeld recalls on Folklore.org.
Chris Espinosa was one of Apple’s earliest employees, hired at 14. In the summer of 1981, Hertzfeld writes, Jobs talked him into dropping out of UC Berkeley to join the Mac team, and he became its documentation manager in August 1981.
The Mac’s most important software was QuickDraw, its graphics package, so Espinosa started there. To learn it, he wrote a demo that drew a calculator, one of the small “desk ornaments” the team had planned. In Hertzfeld’s Desk Ornaments story, Bud Tribble’s original pitch for the idea was tiny apps that ran alongside a main one, “Like a little calculator, for example, that looked like a real calculator.”
Espinosa thought his version looked pretty good. Then he showed it to Jobs, whom Hertzfeld calls “our esthetic compass.”
“Well, it’s a start,” Jobs said, “but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.”
Espinosa said he’d keep changing it until Jobs thought it was right. “So, for a couple of days, Chris would incorporate Steve’s suggestions from the previous day, but Steve would continue to find new faults each time he was shown it.”
Then Espinosa changed the approach. The next afternoon he showed off “the Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set.” In it, “Every decision regarding graphical attributes of the calculator were parameterized by pull-down menus.” Line thicknesses, button sizes and background patterns were all a menu pick away.
Jobs started fiddling right away. “After trying out alternatives for ten minutes or so, he settled on something that he liked.”
A few months later, Hertzfeld built the calculator’s real interface, while Donn Denman handled the math. “I used Steve’s design,” he wrote, “and it remained the standard calculator on the Macintosh for many years, all the way up through OS 9.”
The story leaves open how many other Mac details got settled the same way, by giving Jobs the knobs instead of another round of mockups. Would a modern design review move faster if the reviewer could turn the dials directly?