In 1982, young Mac developer Chris Espinosa had a peculiar problem with Apple founder Steve Jobs. Espinosa had designed a calculator app for the Macintosh. However, Steve Jobs was never happy with the design and constantly offered new criticisms. Jobs criticized the design with comments like, “The background color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too large.” These revision cycles, which lasted days, put the 21-year-old programmer in a difficult position.
The secret behind the Mac’s iconic calculator design, which remained unchanged for years
Espinosa, tired of these endless requests for changes, came up with an elegant solution. He realized that Jobs struggled to describe exactly what he wanted, but he knew what he would like when he saw it. So he developed a special program he called the “Steve Jobs Build Your Own Calculator Kit.” This program allowed Jobs to customize every visual detail of the calculator himself.
Steve Jobs sat down in front of this special tool Espinosa had created. The program offered all visual adjustments, such as line thicknesses, button sizes, and background patterns, via drop-down menus. Jobs experimented with all the settings in about ten minutes, adjusting them to his liking, and finally found the perfect combination, satisfied with the results. After this ten-minute session, Espinosa completed the calculator’s interface using the settings Jobs had chosen.
This design, decided upon in those ten minutes, was included with the first Macintosh, released in 1984. Incredibly, it remained virtually unchanged for 17 years, until Mac OS 9 was discontinued in 2001. This “Build Kit,” developed by Espinosa in 1982, was a remarkably forward-thinking approach, allowing visual adjustments to be made without programming knowledge.
This intriguing story is a true story from Chris Espinosa, Apple’s youngest employee, who joined the company at the age of 14 (and the oldest employee still working at Apple). This incident also reveals Jobs’s management style. Although Jobs had difficulty verbally describing what he wanted, he could quickly choose what he liked when given direct control. Have you used this classic calculator design on a Mac?
