Cardiologist George Diamond had an idea for a piece of software that could help diagnose coronary disease. The Apple II was brand new and, in 1977, represented a huge leap in the accessibility of computing power. This is the story of how Dr. Diamond pitched his idea directly to Steve Jobs and Apple.

“With the Apple II I wrote a reasonably sophisticated program that analyzed multiple diagnostic tests using Bayes’ theorem for the diagnosis of coronary disease. Now I thought it was really great and should be marketed, but it needed to be expanded with people who really knew something more about programming than I did. So I picked up the telephone and called Apple in Cupertino. I told the secretary that I wanted to speak with somebody about a medical application for the Apple II computer. The secretary connected me directly to Steve Jobs. (Of course I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t even recognize the name as being one of the people who had actually invented the thing.)

“He listened to me for a couple of minutes on the phone. I said I’d love to come up and talk with him about my idea. He said sure, any time, just pick a date. and so I did, and I got on a flight to Cupertino.

Follow the headline link to read the rest. Pretty interesting anecdote.