The one that sticks with me was the demo to the engineering team of "Aqua". A small team had been developing the new "lickable" user interface that was called Aqua. Before the release of OS X with the new UI, Jobs assembled the engineers that worked on the OS that would be tasked with carrying the UI throughout with their frameworks/apps.
In typical Steve fashion he had a slide-preso for the reveal. He began with a kind of simplified history of the computer user-interface: starting with the command-line. His next slide showed the graphical user interface popularized, surprise, by his earlier Apple Macintosh.
The NeXt slide (ha ha) showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, the NeXT user interface. A "boo" from one of the engineers in the crowd.
Jobs froze and the showman tone of his voice was gone, "Who said that? Who booed?" He was clearly enraged. He stared into the audience, scanning the faces of the engineers. I think he followed that with some expletives and a claim that the NeXT UI was an amazing step in UI design but I was still kind of in shock myself.
When I came back to Apple in 2000, I remember walking to visit a friend from Eazel (John Harper) who was working on CoreAnimation and seeing your office. I was totally star struck, way more than having to deal with Steve every week. I mean, you are the guy who wrote Glider!
Ha ha, and Harper is a fucking rock star. He's a quiet guy but I recall chatting with him once about music — I thought it was awesome that he was into Elliott Smith.
I heard about that meeting from someone who was also there -- supposedly Steve also said in response to the booing something to the effect that "what the hell has Apple done in the last ten years?"
In typical Steve fashion he had a slide-preso for the reveal. He began with a kind of simplified history of the computer user-interface: starting with the command-line. His next slide showed the graphical user interface popularized, surprise, by his earlier Apple Macintosh.
The NeXt slide (ha ha) showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, the NeXT user interface. A "boo" from one of the engineers in the crowd.
Jobs froze and the showman tone of his voice was gone, "Who said that? Who booed?" He was clearly enraged. He stared into the audience, scanning the faces of the engineers. I think he followed that with some expletives and a claim that the NeXT UI was an amazing step in UI design but I was still kind of in shock myself.