Those Are Air Bubbles

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D.B. Grady writing for the Atlantic:

When engineers working on the very first iPod completed the prototype, they presented their work to Steve Jobs for his approval. Jobs played with the device, scrutinized it, weighed it in his hands, and promptly rejected it. It was too big. The engineers explained that they had to reinvent inventing to create the iPod, and that it was simply impossible to make it any smaller. Jobs was quiet for a moment. Finally he stood, walked over to an aquarium, and dropped the iPod in the tank. After it touched bottom, bubbles floated to the top. "Those are air bubbles," he snapped. "That means there's space in there. Make it smaller."

Great Steve Jobs Quote from 1995

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Courtesy of John Siracusa:

Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You'd actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that 'I haven't built one of those but I could. There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I've built two other Heathkits so I could build that. Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot

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Touching story and thoughts from John Gruber:

After the WWDC keynote four months ago, I saw Steve, up close. He looked old. Not old in a way that could be measured in years or even decades, but impossibly old. Not tired, but weary; not ill or unwell, but rather, somehow, ancient. But not his eyes. His eyes were young and bright, their weapons-grade intensity intact. His sweater was well-worn, his jeans frayed at the cuffs. But the thing that struck me were his shoes, those famous gray New Balance 991s. They too were well-worn. But also this: fresh bright green grass stains all over the heels. Those grass stains filled my mind with questions. How did he get them? When? They looked fresh, two, three days old, at the most. Apple keynote preparation is notoriously and unsurprisingly intense. But not so intense, those stains suggested, as to consume the entirety of Jobs’s days. There is no grass in Moscone West.

Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison Prank Email Computer Consultant in 1998

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A very old article on CNN.com, circa 1998. This is priceless:

The newspaper reported Wednesday that Jobs and Ellison, who is also chairman and CEO of Oracle Corp., both sent e-mail messages to Michael Murdock, a Burlingame, California-based computer consultant, two days before Christmas, telling him he had the job. "OK. You can have the job. -- Larry," was one message sent to Murdock, who has been conducting an e-mail campaign for the top job, the Chronicle reported. Jobs reportedly wrote, "Yep, Mike, it's all yours. When can you start?"