Are rounded rectangles actually hard? Isn't it just a matter of placing 4 quarter circles in the right places? If you can draw straight lines and you can draw ovals (and hence, the special case of circles), then you can draw rounded rects, right?
I'm 99.99% sure it's coincidence and confirmation bias, but some part of me wonders if this story played any part. But, if anyone in the southwest bought a window or glass table in that shape today, I might have played a part in doing the CAD.
I remember 48KB of memory and 4 MHz, no lowercase, no multi-tasking, only 40 columns text width, the keys were almost painfully hard to press down and you had to pay for all documentation, what little of it anywhere you could find.
“At MacHack, when most of the original team was there and
Andy told this story, Jef Raskin spoke up to say that he
had told Steve about round rectangles being everywhere,
and that's what got Steve obsessed about them.
But what I found interesting was something Bill Atkinson
said about creating the RoundRect routines. He said they
turned out to be a lot easier to create than he thought
they would be. I can't tell you how many times I've
over-estimated something easy. I think it's something
inherent in computer work.”