The things that captured me were–I’ve been involved in graphics most of my life. The Apple II, most people don’t remember, was the first real color computer that you could get your hands on–a cheap one. The Macintosh, obviously, was graphics. The LaserWriter was graphics, but it was all 2D. And we’d done some 3D work at Apple, and I was certainly aware of the field. And the stuff that Ed and his team were doing was way ahead of anything I’d ever seen anyone do. And I think Pixar still holds that mantle today, and I think it’s the Mecca of high-end computer graphics.

To let the user know that the computer was busy reading from this disk, a clear visual indicator was needed. That indicator was the rainbow cursor. It’s not an abstract rainbow. It's a literal depiction of the spinning disk itself, with its iridescent reflections. [...] But its name—the "beach ball"—came from an entirely different world: [...] HyperCard. In that program, a black-and-white spinning circle signaled that a script was being executed.

[...] And so, when NeXT's technology became the foundation for Mac OS X, a historic collision occurred. The system inherited the bright, rainbow cursor from NeXT. But users, who remembered HyperCard, immediately nicknamed it the "beach ball." Thus, our monster was born: with the appearance of one parent and the name of another. This wasn't a deliberate design. It was a historical accident, a hybrid artifact with conflict encoded in its very DNA.