
Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985) - o0-0o
http://longform.org/stories/playboy-interview-steve-jobs
======
ekianjo
> Jobs: my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer
> Dark Ages for about 20 years. Once IBM gains control of a market sector,
> they almost always stop innovation. They prevent innovation from happening.

I'm very glad that IBM and its compatible equivalents won the market, we would
certainly be in much Darker Ages should Apple have won the desktop war, with
their close-minded view on the world and its strict control on contents,
peripherals and whatever gravitates around the Brand.

~~~
simonh
IBM never gained control of that market sector though. What happened is that
they lost control of the technical standards they created, accidentaly
launching an open platform they never intended to be open. If IBM had retained
control of the PC and had as a result dominated the desktop computer industry,
history would be very different.

I don't think Jobs ever really intended to win the dsktop wars in that way
though. He never even tried to compete in every market segment and control
every standard. I think his conception of Apple was always (since the lanuch
of the Mac anyway) as a premium brand capturing the top end of the market,
where the profits are. There would always be a mass market and enthusiast
community in a world in which Apple was the dominant desktop brand, because
Apple had no interest in competing with it. Conversely Microsoft has always
ben about market share first, with an MS computer on every desk running MS
software. That's not a Jobsian vision. Even when the iPhone was the only
'modern' smartphone and Android devices were years away from competing
effectively with it, Apple never went for the market share play. At the time
this was roundly criticised in the media as a grave strategic error, in some
circles it still is, but that was to completely misunderstand Apple's
strategy.

~~~
ekianjo
> That's not a Jobsian vision. Even when the iPhone was the only 'modern'
> smartphone and Android devices were years away from competing effectively
> with it, Apple never went for the market share play

Yet Apple achieved a large market share and was perfectly happy with it even
when Jobs was on the board. I'd find it hard to believe that you don't want
Market Share anyway, even if you target premium users. You don't want to be a
Ferrari maker in the end with a minuscule market share. I'd rather say Apple
was always trying to keep a substantial market share while having "better"
products (just like P&G for example, they win on the market with more
expensive products) but failed until they entered the Portable Music Players
and Smartphone market.

~~~
simonh
They did, but profit has always been a higher priority for them than market
share and the 'platform dominance' that goes with it. If they happen to get a
large market share, or if their platform becomes dominant anyway that's a nice
benefit, but it's not a strategic goal.

A good example of when Apple became a market share elader is the iPod. If you
look at Apple's product strategy though, they never did anything to gain
market share at the cost of profits and premium branding. The combination of
devices and services via iTunes created a dominant platform. They didn't do
anything to avoid that, it's not that beign dominant is itself a bad thing,
it's just that it wasn't a strategic goal. They never under-cut competitors to
achieve it. Yet at the height of their market dominance, when they were best
placed to use their position to exert market control, instead of using that
power against customers to increase lock-in, they used it to force reluctant
labels to embrace DRM free content. They then used it again to coerce the
labels to sign up to iTunes Match. They did this becaue these moves ease
customer pain points and improve the customer experience, making their
products more attractive and therefore more valuable.

Can you imagine Microsoft or IBM making moves like that? I can't. As another
example, Apple has always maintained that they don't allow third party
keyboards, or third party browsers to use the accelerated Webkit engine for
security reasons. These explanations were widely derided as fig leaves to
cover a lock-in strategy, yet as soon as Apple has implemented controls to
open these restrictions securely, it did so. It turns out their stated reasons
for doing that really were their actual reasons for doing it. So if you want
to make your 'Apple lockin would be worse than IBM' thesis stand up, you need
to explain why their actual behaviour when they're in that situation doesn't
match the thesis.

~~~
Intermernet
Apple dropped DRM in iTunes because of bad PR. Everything Apple have done with
regards to content distribution has been a balancing act between industry
demands and PR.

Except for Sony, every other media player disregarded DRM. You may not have
noticed this if you only had an iPod. The fact that they joined the ranks of
their competitors in this regard should not be seen as a positive, it should
only be seen as PR.

~~~
DanBC
> Except for Sony, every other media player disregarded DRM.

The Sandisk Sansa Fuze[1] had the bizarre "slot radio".
[http://gizmodo.com/5126743/how-sandisks-slotradio-turned-
a-g...](http://gizmodo.com/5126743/how-sandisks-slotradio-turned-a-good-idea-
into-a-horrible-product)

~~~
Intermernet
Wow, thanks for the link. I didn't know about that at all...

Surprising that it's from 2009. I thought that the big players had worked out
the public's opinion by then, but it may be that that product was in
development during the DRM battles and Sandisk had to either release it, or
scrap the product.

------
pptr1
I can't think of someone else right now who could come up with such an easy
way to understand computers.

"Playboy: Maybe we should pause and get your definition of what a computer is.
How do they work?

Jobs: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in
this café [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood
only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest
room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise
instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand
erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot
and shift weight 300 centimeters forward…” and on and on. If you could
interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in
this café, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a
milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers,
and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative
to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very,
very simple-minded instructions—“Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put
the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but
executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per
second, the results appear to be magic.

That’s a simple explanation, and the point is that people really don’t have to
understand how computers work. Most people have no concept of how an automatic
transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to study
physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don’t have to
understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh—but you asked. [laughs]"

~~~
robg
It's a great answer but, a minor quibble, we have thousands of hours studying
physics and the laws of motion before we ever drive a car.

See:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_physics)

~~~
Diamons
You completely missed his point

~~~
robg
Not in physics, I didn't. Infants start testing gravity. They watch how
objects move and collide. Physics is built-in. We do understand it. A decade
and half later that "understanding" is exactly what's necessary for driving a
car.

The problem isn't that I missed his point. It's that he makes the wrong one.
We understand physics just fine. But I bet most folks have little
understanding of how a combustion engine works, but they drive the car just
fine. That's the analogy he's going for.

~~~
graeme
Your error is that people don't _study_ physics to get their understanding of
physical laws. We learn, from trial and error.

Jobs was clearly talking about studying theoretical physics from a textbook.

~~~
robg
There's a theory of epistemology that's tied to naive physics. We're built to
study physics.

The same is not true of computer science except in the vaguest possible uses
of "language".

~~~
graeme
In context, Jobs was clearly using this definition of study:

Study: 1. the devotion of time and attention to acquiring knowledge on an
academic subject, esp. by means of books

You're willfully ignoring that. You're making a point that would be valid if
Jobs had said something dumber. That's called a strawman argument.

~~~
robg
No, I'm not ignoring anything. It was a poor analogy based on the science.
Naive physics means we understand pretty deep points about how objects move
even if we can't express the formalisms. Exactly because we know deeply how
objects move we can drive a car pretty darn well. And by the way, infants in
the crib do study and experiment to understand physics.

He wasn't making that point about computer science. We need know nothing about
how computers work to use them. A decent, correct analogy to driving is
combustion engines.

~~~
graeme
Ah, that's much clearer than before. I guess the issue was the word "study"
which has no English definition which refers to the kind of naive physics
learning you referenced above.

To be clear, you mean: it's a poor analogy to say we don't need to know
physics to drive, because we have thousands of hours learning physics from our
normal experience. A better analogy would have been we can use a combustion
engine without knowing the science.

I think you're right, then.

------
treblig
Jobs, conceptually articulating what would become the Internet in 1985:

"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home
will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the
beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most
people—as remarkable as the telephone."

~~~
zurn
These predictions were very commonplace by then. In 1983, TCP/IP came along
and MILNET was split off. This is commonly considered to mark the start of the
Internet. First .com domain was registered in 1985.

~~~
drblast
Remember "The Network Is The Computer?"

1984.

[http://www.tcse-k12.org/pages/network.pdf](http://www.tcse-k12.org/pages/network.pdf)

~~~
leoc
The further twist is that just a few months after this interview, Jobs left
Apple and founded a company to build graphical, Ethernet-connected, UNIX-based
personal workstations: in other words to compete on Sun's turf. I think the
Sun/Apple and Sun/NeXT relationship is an interesting, underexplored part of
an overtold story, especially since by 2000 Apple had more or less stolen
Sun's original clothes as a profitable vendor of Unix workstations.

------
ulyssesgrant
Great read. Haven't finished it yet, but this answer was really perfect:

"Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the
people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we
didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the
group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We
weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the
best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of
drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though
it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so
you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep
well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way
through."

~~~
AndrewKemendo
_We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build
the best thing we could build._

So is this only a good response because apple succeeded so well or should they
have done market research and done even better? I ask because the logic for
every startup is do market research (now called validation) in some fashion -
even if it is the landing page approach.

I guess I am asking, prior to the success of the Mac would any business person
have gone along with the "no market research" approach?

~~~
takatin
Coming up with products is a bit like coming up with songs or paintings.
Market research won't get you Van Gogh's Starry Night or any of the Beatles'
songs. Instead it gives you autotune as music and photo filters as art. If you
need to come with a genuinely once-in-a-lifetime product, music, painting or
anything creative, it has to come from satisficing a basic need in a unique
way (often with a personal touch i.e., "soul"). Current startup landscape
dominated by validation is basically the autotune model built for quick
iterations and easy profits as opposed to the old-school "soul" model which is
more of a personal endeavour that transforms into a mass-movement of sorts.
Bitcoin would be a modern example of something coming out of the "soul" model.

edit: One place where Market Research does have value in the "soul" model is
for refining the product to fit the market better. The germ of the idea is
still intensely personal to the founder.

~~~
duncanawoods
"satisficing a basic need"

Do you mean this? I can see you might or might not. To satisfice would mean
stopping at the first minimally acceptable solution to save time and effort.
To invoke art and once-in-a-life-time product seems to suggest you want the
opposite concept - optimising i.e. to strive relentlessly towards the maximal
solution despite the extra time and effort it takes.

------
jordhy
In this interview, Jobs' obssesion with fighting IBM is quite present. A
decade later, the obsession was to defeat Microsoft, or at least to gain
substantial market share from them.

It's quite funny that Apple became the most valuable company in the planet
when they let go of this obsession and instead focused on beating the old
Apple.

~~~
utopkara
It is a great observation. I wonder if it is true though. We have seen Apple
obsess over Google's competition in mobile as they were rising this time.

~~~
mehrdada
> We have seen Apple obsess over Google's competition in mobile as they were
> rising this time

How so? I'm actually surprised how little they seem to have reacted to the
competitive pressure of Android than pursuing their agenda at their own pace.

~~~
jordhy
Remember the phrase "I'll go thermonuclear on Google" by S. Jobs.

------
urs2102
> Jobs: I think that the scale of the business has gotten large enough so that
> it’s going to be very difficult for anyone to successfully launch anything
> new.

Playboy: No more billion-dollar companies hatched in garages?

Jobs: No, I’m afraid not in computers. And this puts a responsibility on
Apple, because if there’s going to be innovation in this industry, it’ll come
from us. It’s the only way we can compete with them. If we go fast enough,
they can’t keep up.

I'm not sure I agree, but what kind of hardware company do you guys think
could ever reach a near Apple level? I feel that perhaps something in
robotics, but was curious what you all thought...

~~~
ivanca
Tesla. But yeah, your definition of "Hardware" may vary.

~~~
npinguy
Tesla was launched with the investment and vision of a man who's already made
billions in the industry, not some teenagers with an idea and a garage.

------
ddebernardy
Quite prescient:

> Jobs: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the
> home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just
> in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for
> most people—as remarkable as the telephone.

~~~
tdicola
Is it really that prescient? By 1985 there were lots of BBSes you could dial
into and connect with people from across the nation. In fact what would become
America Online was just starting out as a BBS. The internet was available at
most colleges, and tools like email and usenet were in full use. I think his
statement is like someone right now saying electric cars will be a huge thing
in the future.

~~~
coldtea
> _Is it really that prescient? By 1985 there were lots of BBSes you could
> dial into and connect with people from across the nation._

Yeah, it's really that prescient.

The fact that BBS existed and there was some networking in colleges is
irrelevant. Most people didn't even think a PC would be important for
everybody, much less internet. It was seen as a totally geek / big business
thing.

Read how the media pundits and even large corporations talked and wrote about
the web in 1992-3 for example (as a fad, novelty, for nerds only, etc). Heck,
even Microsoft took years to get it, and got behind Netscape.

~~~
leoc
Not really. By '85, the idea that an all-encompassing global computer network
was coming was pretty well established. SMTP and DNS were up and (as tdicola
noted) there were already a fair number of people on a recognisable modern
Internet. The ITU was already well into a very serious and high-profile push
for its own alternative to TCP/IP. Sun Microsystems had already launched, and
afaik had already made "the network is the computer" its slogan. CompuServe
CIS was running two-page ads [http://www.amazon.com/CompuServe-Computer-
Information-Servic...](http://www.amazon.com/CompuServe-Computer-Information-
Service-2-Page/dp/B007RWGX5U) ; Minitel was several years old. Doug Engelbart
and Ted Nelson had been celebrated or mocked figures in computing circles for
many years. Flipping _Neuromancer_ had come out the previous year.

(Speaking of Ted Nelson and ubiquitous microcomputers, the desirability of
microcomputers in homes and schools was already received wisdom; the BBC had
been evangelising it since 1981. I have colour-printed computer-programming
books released by a major children's publisher (Usborne) around 1983-5 sitting
behind my monitor here.)

So Jobs' statement wasn't remarkably prescient. Certainly, a lot of other
people weren't as clearly aware of what was coming in 1985; but for someone
whose job was to be the leader and chief visionary of a forward-looking
computer company, "respectably well-informed" would be closer to it.

(I didn't downvote you.)

------
ekianjo
> Jobs: No, I’m afraid not in computers. And this puts a responsibility on
> Apple, because if there’s going to be innovation in this industry, it’ll
> come from us.

Always like to see how pretentious Jobs has always been, thinking he was the
only source of innovation in the whole world. He has been proven wrong many
times.

~~~
CmonDev
But the strategy was right, the image of Apple as innovator still stands
strong in consumers' minds, despite obvious incorrectness.

~~~
ekianjo
Perception bias. The strategy has failed for 20 years before it took hold on
the mobile computer market (Smartphones / Tablets). So when do you decide that
a strategy was right? Only when the tides turn around, ignoring the rest of
time when the water was low?

~~~
bennyg
Brand == Perception.

You can't argue that their brand is based off the perception of grand
innovation. Take a look at every Apple keynote ever.

------
asimov42
Loved the simple, straightforward language used at the time. Currently even
mainstream news sites are are just dripping with way too many marketing terms
that don't really mean anything anymore.

~~~
Rambunctious
Liked how the interviewer was posing tough questions around the failures of
previous product launches and around any resentment towards folks who had
deemed him incapable of running the Lisa division. Didn't seem like the
interviewer was sitting inside the distortion field. Having said that, I must
also say that Jobs fielded the questions rather well.

------
mironathetin
Playboy interviews used to be great! There was no limit in length or content.
The interviewer was allowed to ask whatever he wanted. If you get a Playboy
from the 60s or the 70s, the interviews fill 20 pages and more. No pics, only
text. Unimaginable nowadays in a printed product. I bought some old Playboys
because of this (Castro, Connery, Dylan etc.)

There are also books with the interviews only [the directors (Clint Eastwood,
Billy Wilder, Orson Wells etc.), larger than life etc.]. Great reads.

~~~
wonderyak
'I only read it for the interviews/articles' used to be a legitimate reason
and not a joke for covering up buying a magazine with boobs in it.

~~~
mironathetin
I was waiting for this comment :o).

Indeed, the interviews were designed to give more credibility to the Playboy
and give a wider range of men an excuse to buy them. This worked out
perfectly, if you ask me.

But, the interviews developed into much more than just an excuse. They are a
genuine piece of great journalism. Even though they are surrounded with boobs
- which isn't totally uncomfortable for the reader, too - is it?

------
CmonDev
"If you die, you certainly don’t want to leave a large amount to your
children. It will just ruin their lives." \- was certainly reconsidered :).
But funnily Gates fulfilled it.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Gates became the liberal do-gooder that Jobs initially sold himself as with
his Eastern philosophy and anti-materialist pretensions. Jobs died cursing
Google while building a super-yacht he never got to use. Incredible how things
ended up. No one saw this coming, I think.

------
mentos
"...That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are
growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image
of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist,
which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going
crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe
later they re-emerge a little differently."

Apropo today given Notch's announcement.

------
enraged_camel
>> _[The telegraph] was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could
actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People
talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve
productivity. But it wouldn’t have worked. It required that people learn this
whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use
the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would
never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the
patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the
telegraph, but people already knew how to use it._

It occurs to me that programming languages are like the telegraph: you can do
amazing things with them, but at the end of the day they require someone to
learn a "whole sequence of strange incantations," and the majority of people
will never learn how to use them.

I wonder who will invent the "telephone" for computers -- which would, in this
case, allow ordinary people to create software with languages they already
know how to use (speak). I know it sounds far-fetched given how computers
work, but I'm sure the telephone also sounded far-fetched to telegraph
operators at the time.

~~~
judk
Cordata / Google Now / Siri

People just gesture at the terminal, and the software interprets it.

~~~
EarthLaunch
> "For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning
> dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were
> made touch-sensitive -- you merely had to brush the panels with your
> fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction
> of the components and hope. [...] Zaphod waved a hand and the channel
> switched again."

-Hitchhiker's Guide (1979?)

------
graeme
Interesting comment about the petrochemical revolution here:

We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The
petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this
case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the
information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another
kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh
computer takes less power than a 100-watt light bulb to run and it can save
you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50
years from now? This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We’re
on the forefront.

\---------

What I think is interesting is that the computer revolution is, and will
continue to be, dependent on the petrochemical revolution.

We are in the process of finding out whether we can replace petrochemicals
with renewables. If we can't, or only partially can, computing gets more
expensive. This goes contrary to our expectations of more and cheaper
computer, indefinitely.

------
TaoloModisi
Jobs: I actually lost $250,000,000 in one year when the stock went down.
[laughs]

Playboy: You can laugh about it?

Jobs: I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Isn’t it kind of funny? You know,
my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention
to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s
happened to me in the past ten years.

I believe that Jobs laughed because- the value of starting or investing in a
business is in making meaning first; by making meaning you are looking to
change the world. Starting or investing in a business on the sole purpose of
making money, means that if you don't make money, you’ll quickly lose interest
and on top of that you’ll be left with a meaningless company that doesn’t
change the world.

------
pp19dd
Oddly prophetic note on Radio Shack, which is recently sending signals about
its impending bankruptcy.

Jobs: "Radio Shack is totally out of the picture. They have missed the boat."
\- "...their model of retailing, which in my opinion often meant selling
second-rate products or low-end products in a surplus-store environment."

And the nail in the coffin: "I don’t anticipate that they’re going to recover
and again become a major player."

~~~
tim333
It's quite impressive that Radio Shack have kept going as long as they have.
Here's the Onion's take

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-
ho...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how-
radioshack-still-in-b,2190/)

~~~
joezydeco
In the context of 1985, Radio Shack was a different story. In most towns, it
was the closest thing people had to a computer store. There was no Best Buy,
there was no way to order $3 cables from Monoprice via China.

When you needed an RS-232 cable or a box of floppy discs, sometimes Radio
Shack was all you had.

~~~
georgegeorges
not only was RadioShack the only computer store in town, but they also helped
open up the IBM platform by selling the Tandy computer (produced by their
parent company, Tandy). Prior to that they created and sold the TRS-80.

It's easy to toss rocks at them today. But it's hard to understate their
importance to the early PC industry.

Ultimately Jobs was right. This sort of hobbyist market wasn't going to last
(and RadioShack has completely missed the boat on the 3d printing and "maker"
movements). We don't have smartphones with BASIC installed. Computer makers
don't even _care_ about that aspect of their devices (that is, that they are
_programmable_ ). Things have changed quite dramatically.

------
joshmlewis
> Playboy: Then for now, aren’t you asking home-computer buyers to invest
> $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?

I'm sure a lot of people were and still are asking that about Tesla. His
response is basically he doesn't know how the future will respond to the
computer but he knows it will definitely change the world and before long it
won't be an act of faith.

~~~
coldtea
Only the Tesla won't change the world. It's just an electric car.

~~~
boomlinde
The Macintosh was just a computer.

~~~
coldtea
A computer is a general purpose machine, with capabilities for business,
clerical work, arts (graphics, multimedia etc), entertainment (games, web tv,
media distrubution) and of course communications.

A car, by now, is just a car. It's 2014, they are a known quantity, and the
big change they were to bring, they have brought already.

Plus the key in the era of Mac and IBM PC was that the personal computer was
just beginning and exploding from only nerds and large enterprises to billions
of people. The personal computer was something genuinely new and disruptive
for all kinds of markets, business processes and personal life. An electric
car is just an incremental innovation on the car everybody already has.

Now, if it was a flying car, or a self driving car, that would have been more
impressive in its possibility for change, but still nothing like a computer in
the pre-mass computer era.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Their cars definitely won't change the world. The one area they're working on
that might change the world is battery technology.

~~~
wonderyak
The current battery tech is holding the entire world back. The next market
revolution will come with new power generation (battery) tech that allows us
to not worry about charging things every 5 hours.

I have the same thought as you, what Tesla may accomplish as a company may not
be affordable electric vehicles but leaps in battery and power storage.

------
edlebert
All these things show that it really is coming down to just Apple and IBM. If
for some reason, we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling
is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years.
Once IBM gains control of a market sector, they almost always stop innovation.
They prevent innovation from happening.

------
himanshuy
I envy Steve Jobs the way he articulates technical terms in simple words.

------
flyrain
He is right. The IT revolution has dwarf the petrochemical revolution.

------
cnp
Wow: quite easily one of the Great Interviews of our time, hands down.

------
jobebob
> "The developments will be in making the products more and more portable,
> networking them, getting out laser printers, getting out shared data bases,
> getting out more communications ability, maybe the merging of the telephone
> and the personal computer."

Looks like the iPhone was in his mind for a long time.

~~~
mpweiher
That's mostly just Alan Kay's Dynabook from 1968 IIRC. And the networking and
laser printers etc. were the "Interim Dynabooks" aka Altos + networked laser
printers (Ethernet) he saw at PARC.

