Bruce Tognazzini

Bruce Tognazzini
Born	Bruce Tognazzini California, United States
Residence	A Country Coach motorhome cruising the USA
Nationality	American
Occupation	Principal, Nielsen Norman Group
Spouse(s)	Julie F. Moran, MD (1986–present)

Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini (born 1945) is a usability consultant in partnership with Donald Norman and Jakob Nielsen in the Nielsen Norman Group, which specializes in human computer interaction. He was with Apple Computer for fourteen years, then with Sun Microsystems for four years, then WebMD for another four years. He has written two books, Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design, published by Addison-Wesley, and he publishes the webzine Asktog, with the tagline "Interaction Design Solutions for the Real World".

Tog (as he is widely known in computer circles) built his first electro-mechanical computer in 1957, landing a job in 1959 working with the world's first check-reading computer, NCR's ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting), at Bank of America, in San Francisco.

Tog was an early and influential employee of Apple Computer, there from 1978 to 1992. In June 1978, Steve Jobs, having seen one of his early programs, The Great American Probability Machine, had Jef Raskin hire him as Apple's first applications software engineer. He's listed on the back of his book Tog on Interface (Addison Wesley, 1991) as "Apple Employee #66" (the same employee number he held later at WebMD).

In his early days at Apple, simultaneous with his developing Apple's first human interface, for the Apple II computer, he published Super Hi-Res Chess, a novelty program for the Apple II that, despite its name, did not play chess or have any hi-res (high-resolution) graphics; instead, it seemed to crash to the Applesoft BASIC prompt with an error message, but was actually a parody of Apple's BASIC command line interface that seemingly took over control of one's computer, refusing to give it back until the magic word was discovered.

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