Overview
- New retrospectives from Ars Technica and 9to5Mac recount the episode from Andy Hertzfeld’s recollections.
- Espinosa’s “Construction Set” exposed line thickness, button sizes, and background patterns through pull-down menus, which Jobs tweaked for about 10 minutes.
- Hertzfeld implemented the interface months later using Jobs’ chosen parameters, while Donn Denman wrote the calculator’s mathematical functions.
- The resulting design shipped with the 1984 Macintosh and remained largely unchanged through Mac OS 9, lasting about 17 years.
- The account highlights Jobs’ preference for judging work through direct interaction rather than verbal specifications.