The only instructions for Atari’s Star Trek game were: “1.
#Buy new mac desktop for design manuals#
There were no complicated manuals or menus. Computer games, such as Spacewar!, had been developed by hackers at MIT, but at Atari they had to be made simple enough that a stoned freshman could figure them out.
He also came to appreciate simple interfaces when he returned from India to a job on the night shift at Atari, where he worked with his friend Steve Wozniak designing video games. “The most sublime thing I’ve ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto.” “I have always found Buddhism-Japanese Zen Buddhism in particular-to be aesthetically sublime,” he told me. “You see it in his whole approach of stark, minimalist aesthetics, intense focus.” Jobs agreed.
“Zen was a deep influence,” said Daniel Kottke, a college friend who accompanied Jobs on the trip. After dropping out of college, he made a long pilgrimage through India seeking enlightenment, but it was mainly the Japanese path of Zen Buddhism that stirred his sensibilities. Jobs’ love of simplicity in design was honed when he became a practitioner of Buddhism. “It takes a lot of hard work,” Jobs said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.” As the headline of Apple’s first marketing brochure proclaimed in 1977, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Its guiding tenet was simplicity-not merely the shallow simplicity that comes from an uncluttered look and feel and surface of a product, but the deep simplicity that comes from knowing the essence of every product, the complexities of its engineering and the function of every component. In an era not known for great industrial designers, Jobs’ partnerships with Hartmut Esslinger in the 1980s and then with Jony Ive starting in 1997 created an engineering and design aesthetic that set Apple apart from other technology companies and ultimately helped make it the most valuable company in the world. That’s what we did with the iPod.”ĭistinctive design-clean and friendly and fun-would become the hallmark of Apple products under Jobs. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,” he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the Eichlers. They brought clean design and simple taste to lower-income people.” His appreciation for Eichler-style homes, Jobs said, instilled his passion for making sharply designed products for the mass market. “His houses were smart and cheap and good. “Eichler did a great thing,” Jobs told me on one of our walks around his old neighborhood, which featured homes in the Eichler style. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s vision of simple modern homes for the American “everyman,” developers such as Joseph Eichler and his imitators built houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors and lots of sliding glass doors. It was in one of the many working-class subdivisions between San Francisco and San Jose that were developed by builders who churned out inexpensive modernist tract houses in the 1950s for the postwar suburban migration. Steve Jobs’ interest in design began with his love for his childhood home.
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