Billie Jobs

Ashley and I attended the Mac event (The Macintosh Marketing Story: Fact and Fiction, 20 Years Later) tonight at the Computer History Museum. In attendance were numerous members of the original Mac team. The best part about this event was the numerous Steve Jobs stories.

In one anecdote, Andy Cunningham recalled a trip to New York City. They arrived late and Steve, as usual, had to rearrange the furniture in the hotal room. He needed the furniture to be just right, as he could never stand the way hotel rooms were arranged. And he needed a big bowl of strawberries. With whipped cream. On the side. And a baby grand piano (despite not being able to play the piano). And some flowers of a variety he couldn’t agree on with Andy, not that it mattered, given that it was the middle of winter in NYC and nearly midnight.

The next day, the photo shoot proceeded as planned. Unfortunately, Steve hates working with photographers, and is normally extremely uncooperative. Luckily for the photographer, Steve was really into Michael Jackson at the time – in particular the song “Billie Jean”. Thus, Andy spent the entire film shoot watching Steve cooperate with the photographer in bursts of three “Billie Jean”-filled minutes, then desperately rewinding the tape to the beginning of the song.

These are not the stories you read about in Business Week.

Besides listening to the stories, I got the chance to meet two renowned pioneers in computing: Donald Knuth, and Margaret Wozniak. While you may recognize Knuth as the author of The Art of Computer Programming, the exhaustive catalog of computer science knowledge, you might wonder: who’s Margaret Wozniak?

She is the person without whom Apple would not exist: Steve Wozniak‘s mother.