Jay Elliot

"By the time Jobs had left, Apple had already started building strong ties in Japan. Jobs had visited Tokyo frequently in the early 1980s, enamored with the Sony Walkman and the emergence of automated manufacturing capabilities. Jay Elliot recalls being with Jobs at a traditional kaiseki multicourse dinner with executives from Sony at an over-the-top restaurant that hosted only one group per night. The start was inauspicious. Elliot, six-four and wearing size 14 shoes, couldn’t fit into the ceremonial attire. “They didn’t know what to do about it—they were so upset,” Elliot recalls. He and Jobs sat on tatami mats and wore ritualistic masks between courses. The highlight, he says, was being given an ornate wooden hammer to break open a clay pot, revealing a delicately cooked dish inside."

"“SCI really is what made it operate—it was really the essence, the glue, of what made the computer run,” says Jay Elliot, who worked at both IBM and Apple in the 1980s. “They really introduced automated manufacturing.”"