Many famous Steve Jobs moments involve him speaking before enraptured audiences. One of my most vivid Jobs memories is of the time I saw him standing quietly at the back of one.

I was attending the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Boston in 1989, and was trapped in a throng on the show floor watching one of Pixar’s short cartoons. (The company hadn’t started making feature-length ones, and wasn’t yet a cherished icon of American entertainment.) The person next to me happened to be Jobs, who had bought George Lucas’s graphics division in 1985 and bootstrapped it into independent existence as Pixar.

I’m not sure if anyone else noticed him watching the movie and observing the crowd they were too busy being entertained.

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