alt Hacker NewsSteve Jobs and Stephen Wolfram were friends for years. Mathematica shipped preinstalled on early NeXT systems.
SJ recommended some of the UI bits of the notebook. Particularly the separators between cells.
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I used Mathematica on a NeXT computer back in 1991. It was a beautiful machine to work on. I did a student project where I simulated the flow of the boundary of a plane region over time (like how the shape of a drop of oil in water changes over time) and it was very, very easy to write in Mathematica with cool graphics.
(Theo Gray is in there too; he built the notebook interface, was introduced by SJ to show it at some event. Theo's parents were math profs in Urbana and I studied under his dad one summer, house-sat, and I too had NeXTstep access and Mathematica since it was ubiquitous there)
How could I forget this! He also recommended the name.
Wolfram had come up with some normal techie names "computron", "math-o-matic" or whatever. SJ said No those suck, use something simple like Mathematica.