I gave a NeWS/Pie Menus/HyperTies/Emacs demo to Steve Jobs once, on the trade show floor at the Educom conference, right after he finally released the NeXT Machine, in November of 1988.
Sun was letting me demo NeWS and the stuff we were developing at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab on a workstation at their booth, and NeXT's booth was right across the aisle, so Ben Shneiderman rope-a-doped him and dragged him over for a demo. He jumped up and down and yelled "That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that's neat. That sucks!"
I figure a 3:1 sucks:neat ratio was pretty good for him comparing something different than his newborn baby NeXT Step, which critics had taken to calling NeVR Step, since it had been vaporware for so long until then.
When I tried to explain to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!"
Here's Ben's account (I love how he gently put it that "Jobs had little patience with the academic side of things" -- and by "engage" he meant "jump up and down and yell"):
Date: Tue, 1 Nov 88 07:55:48 EST
From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@mimsy.umd.edu>
To: hcil@tove.umd.edu
Subject: steve jobs visit
I just couldn't resist telling this story....
On Tuesday I was at the EDUCOM conference in DC and Steve Jobs was showing
NeXT...I was quite impressed...a nice step forward, improving, refining
and developing good ideas. I invited him to see our Hyperties SUN version
that we were showing at the SUN booth. The gang managed to get the new
NeWS version working and the Space Telescope looked great...Jobs spent
about a half hour with us going from positive comments such as "Great!"
to "That sucks"...he had a terrific sensitivity to the user interface
issues and could articulate his reasons wonderfully.
On Wednesday he came out to the lab and spent time looking at a few more
of our demos...the students (and me too) were delighted to have him as
a visitor.
What impresses me is that he took his ideas and really put them to work...
pushing back the frontier a bit further. His system really works and
has much attractive in the hardware and software domains. Jobs had little
patience with the academic side of things, but was very ready to engage
over interface issues.
Do check out NeXT...there are things to criticize, but I did come away
more impressed and pleased than ready to pick at the flaws.
-- Ben
From: npg@East (Neil Groundwater - Sun Consulting)
Date: Wed, Jun 27, 1990
Subject: Humor from Dennis Ritchie (at USENIX)
(Actually Dennis's latter remark was attributed by him to Rob Pike)
from Unix Today 6/25 page 5.
"..., Richie reminded the audience that Steve Jobs stood at the same podium
a few years back and announced that X was brain-dead and would soon die. "He
was half-right," Ritchie said. "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still
sucks."