Bill Atkinson came to Apple in 1978, after Jobs had convinced him to quit his PHD program in neuroscience at UC San Diego. He had become known for designing computer programs that made 3-D maps of mouse brains. It was cutting-edge work. but Jobs pooh-poohed it: “What you’re doing is always going to be two years behind. Think how fun it is to surf on the front of a wave, and how not fun it is to dog-paddle on the tail edge of that same wave.” Atkinson wanted to surf. Two weeks later, he was at Apple, where he soon became Jobs’s regular dinner partner and sounding board, and a star engineer on Apple’s follow-up to the Apple II, the Lisa.

Jobs’s main way of motivating people wasn’t merely fear, but rather capriciousness, which was both scarier and far more magnetic. “Steve would say you were great one day, and an idiot the next,” recalled Bruce Horn, part of the team that went on to create the drag-and-drop method of moving files around. Atkinson seemed to float above Jobs’s ire, and below it too. buried in his work. Peers would tell him that Jobs was using him, exploiting Atkinson’s obvious talents and energies. But Atkinson mostly didn’t notice. He was working too hard. “A good tube toothpaste wants to be totally squeezed out,” Atkinson told me with a shrug.

– User Friendly, Cliff Kuang