No way; I worked for him from 1978-1986, and never heard him say a naughty word. Also, I tagged along when he went to Apple to meet Jobs, who wanted to show him a late prototype of the Mac, and don’t recall hearing any such thing at the time (and it would have shocked me).

I've also heard that story with several different people in the place of Jobs (mid 90's it was almost always Bill Gates, for example), making me believe it to be apocryphal.

Also, it seems unlike Jobs to be reading algorithm books or to claim so - he was not interested in writing software. Jobs would involve himself in the user-facing functions of software.

Whereas I recall Gates claimed to have read them, or at least some of the volumes, and found them mind-expanding. Gates wrote a fair amount of software himself early on and later would still challenge people on very technical points.

Perhaps everyone misheard when he said "you're full of t-shirts."

Posting the reference to this for those who may have missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18699166

My guess is that this is a paraphrase by Tom Zito using his own speech patterns (and the general style of the Apple group). Since you were there you might remember Don's actual words, or we could always ask him.

Well the website is called "folklore", so I think your skepticism is well placed. ;)

Is there a way to dispute the story on folklore? drfuch's comment should be appended there.

The story is 100% veritably folklore. I know this since I've been hearing the story for at least 20 years starring a good half dozen different characters. The fact that is almost certainly not true (and Knuth has denied it) seems quite irrelevant.

FWIW Knuth himself doesn't think this happened nor does he sound like the kind of person (to me) who would try to cut someone down like that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24&t=26m

More likely Knuth made an earnest comment about being impressed about reading all his books.

That comment was then misinterpreted as sarcasm, which is what the folklore author remembered. Later having forgotten the words, and only remembering the mistaken interpretation's overall feel, it was paraphrased, poorly.

I like this response because it doesn't put the blame into anyone.

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

Or entropy. (In this case, social entropy?)

Knuth was asked if this was true by R Munroe (xkcd) on a talk on campus at Google, and Knuth denied it.

As they say, "never let the truth spoil a good story."

..that the Don was the one who really revived Apple by inventing the iMac and the iPhone ? Yes, yes, we know all that.

It is very unlikely that Steve read all of the TAoCP that were published at the time.