“Don Melton has a long history with Steve Jobs and Apple, working at NeXT and then moving to Apple where he is known for his work on Safari and WebKit,” Kelly Hodgkins reports for MacRumors. “Melton recounted his memorable encounters with Jobs in a post he recently published on his blog.”
“Melton was not a confidant of Jobs, just an employee who had the opportunity to be around the Apple co-founder on occasion. Jobs likely thought of Melton as the “Safari Guy” and knew Melton’s real name, which was considered an honor,” Hodgkins reports. “Melton recounts the first time he met Steve Jobs at a NeXT presentation in the late 80s that unfortunately was scheduled during everyone’s lunch break. Like many encounters with Jobs, Melton remembered Jobs’ demeanor, but not a word of what he said.”
Hodgkins reports, “Melton paints Jobs not as a ‘mercurial ogre or cartoon autocrat,’ but as a very busy CEO with little time for “yes men,” timid employees or those who didn’t know what they were doing”
Read more in the full article here.
Melton’s full article, “Memories of Steve,” here.
No link to the original article? Come on guys!
The link to full text is added.
Great memoires; I like how Melton noticed humane and compassionate aspects of Jobs, which were almost completely denied by his biographer Isaacson to make Jobs’ character more of a “evil genius” cliché for the sake of bigger sales and publicity — I think it was unfair to memory of Steven.
(Let alone the fact that significant portion of questionable stories in the biography did not get comments from Steven and was printed out by Isaacson as a gospel.
Another issue was that even when Isaacson had Jobs’ comments, it was always implied that Jobs was the one untruthful, even though other parties had either grudges or publicity agendas to embellish the stories, or could be simply recollecting things wrongly.
I am not saying definitely who was right or wrong in those cases, but it is the fact that Isaacson always took side against Jobs without any actual evidence whatsoever — which professional researcher should not do — again for the sake of painting a cardboard character.)
They work now.
What a wonderful article by this guy. Genuine, amusing, interesting and above all showing a very kind hearted side of Steve Jobs without any BS. Too bad, he would have written a good book for his writing was far more interesting than that idiot Isaacson’s.
Isaacson is not an idiot, he is very smart, but his agenda was not to portray real character, but create “Jobs” that would more sensational and would sell better.
The boldest example of Isaacson cynical character is his attempt to advertise Jobs as insane on surgery example. While doing that in media tour and citing eight-month long decision to have a surgery back in 2004, Isaacson never told that the cancer was of special type that would develop extremely slowly, without spreading for as long as up to twenty years in some cases, and there was no urgency in the surgery whatsoever. And while Isaacson was telling media that Jobs decided to not do surgery for while to just “eat grass” as a cure, in reality he and his medic team had extensive researches and consultations, including with different medical scientists and facilities worldwide. In fact, Jobs was very much into science and he loved genetics (hence he had Genetech’s head as member of Board), he has read a lot about and digged in many details. He was not crazy grass eater.
Such details had to be accented by Steven Jobs widow’s statement she released back in 2011 that corrected Isaacson’s media campaign that has made Jobs look insane via hiding facts surrounding 2004’s surgery story.
Now I wish a better book comes out.
I think Steve did his best, we should all try to do are best, and I do admire his work, but he was also just a man may he rest in peace.