In June 1978, Steve Jobs, having seen one of Tog's early programs, The Great American Probability Machine, had Jef Raskin hire him as Apple's first applications software engineer.

(Steve Smith and Chris Espinosa also played a key role, incorporating the initial material on the Lisa and Macintosh computers in the fourth and fifth editions in the early 1980s.)

During this period, Tog was responsible for the design of the Macintosh's hierarchical menus and invented time-out dialog boxes, which, after a visible countdown, carry out the default activity without the user explicitly clicking.

While working at Sun Microsystems, in 1992 and 1993, he produced the Starfire video prototype, in order to give an idea of a usability centered vision of the Office of the future.

"[3] While at Sun Microsystems, Tog also filed for 58 US patents, with 57 issued in the areas of aviation safety, GPS, and human-computer interaction.