Not long before Steve Jobs’ second coming to Apple in 1996 he was giving a talk to The Stanford Graduate School of Business’ High Tech Club at the home of a student. For three hours he sat in the lotus position on the floor in front of the living-room fireplace answering questions good-naturedly. Afterwards, the host, a young MBA candidate named Steve Jurvetson, asked the legendary figure to autograph his Macintosh keyboard which had already been signed by Apple cofounder Steve Woznyak.  

Steve Jobs said he’d do it, but only if first he could remove all the unnecessary keys that his successors had added in a foolish effort to make the Mac more like a Microsoft-Intel PC. He despised the long row of so-called function keys (like “F1”) and the cluster of navigational arrow keys which were clunky alternatives to the more intuitive process of using a mouse to explore menus and icons. So Jobs pulled his car keys out of his pocket and began scooping into the computer keyboard, violently disgorging all the keys that offended him. “I’m changing the world one keyboard at a time”, he said with a straight face. Only then when he had mutilated the apparatus, did he take a pen and scribble his autograph on it. He was making a statement: he still had an intensely proprietary feeling about Apple’s computers and he yearned to restore the company in accordance to his vision. 

Alan Deutschman, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, 2001