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 of 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.
His extensive work in user-interface testing and design, including publishing the first edition, in September, 1978, and seven subsequent editions of The Apple Human Interface Guidelines, played an important role in the direction of Apple's product line from the early days of Apple into the 1990s.