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Comment by joncrane | Hacker News Reader

I know that unflattering depictions of Steve Jobs are the big hits these days, but this one seemed more like an attempt to flatter that left me flat. He sounds incredibly annoying to work with and the people working with him have that hands-on-hips "oh, him!" attitude at some massively dickish moves. Blowing off peoples' ideas so glibly and pointing to the door imperiously to indicate they should leave? Threatening to ditch a demo and terrifying your employee? Ordering 300 custom made white italian dress shirts just so he could wear a brand new one each time?

I know he accomplished some cool stuff but geez.

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Hi, I'm the author. :-) You're very right, he could be incredibly frustrating to work with. I've always thought it was strange that we have so many incredible stories about working with him, but few people tell them. Or if we do, we talk about the good things he did. I was trying to do that too because I liked him and deeply miss him, but wow could he be annoying.

Hello! I have to admit that I have yet to read the article (work firewall), but I was wondering if you knew the answer to a question I've had for a while: Did Steve Jobs know how to use a UNIX CLI shell?

I don't know it personally, but having seen his technical abilities from demo videos, he definitely is capable of using UNIX CLI, in fact I do believe he can write programs if he wanted to. He is not a genius like woz, but a person with an average tech skill like most of us regular programmers, but with an additional marketing genius.

I have no doubt he was capable of learning how. But I'm more interested in his perspective... Consider a contemporary-ish reference from Andy Hertzfeld:

"... was running a character-based text editor that I viewed with the typical pious disdain of a Macintosh purist." ( https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor... )

Did Jobs share a similar bias? Did he understand why a small % of the population would want to have access to the command line (The inverse of his "mere mortals" references)? Did he take advantage of the tools provided by using a shell?

>Did he take advantage of the tools provided by using a shell?

For doing what? Filtering log files and running services? He wasn't a sysadmin (and even programmers, aside for their IDE and debugger, mostly use the shell when they wear a sysadmin hat for their own computer).

That said, the first computer Apple built was the Apple I, and II -- which only had a command line interface.

Being hard to work with may have been one of Jobs' defining qualities. The author seems to be making the point that his strengths outweighed his many shortcomings.

That buying thing extended all the way up to cars. I recall reading Steve Jobs never registered his cars. He'd simply buy one in cash from the dealer, drive on the temporary registration period, then sell the vehicle for a new one when that was up.

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