

Playboy Magazine interview with 29-year-old Steve Jobs - unalone
http://www.playboy.com/magazine/interview_archive/steven-jobs/steven-jobs.html

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davi
From Steve Jobs talking in 1985 I learn something about color vision:

"You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and
founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but,
more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and
built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but
eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave
his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. So
Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science,
trying to crack the code of color vision."

Googling on Land's color vision work:

<http://www.greatreality.com/Color2Color.htm>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinex>

Neat.

~~~
drinian
Ironic, considering that Jobs was himself asked to leave Apple a few years
later. (And, of course, came back to re-conquer Apple from NeXT).

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jbrun
Great interview. A couple things struck me. Particularly, two of the major
threads in the 37signals new-speak lexicon are almost verbatim from the
interview:

I like to think of the Fortune 5,000,000 or 14,000,000. There are 14,000,000
small businesses in this country. I think that the vast group of people who
need to be computerized includes that large number of medium and small
businesses. We’re going to try to be able to bring some meaningful solutions
to them in 1985.

And

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.

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dualogy
"PLAYBOY: What will change? 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."

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spif
Trying to read that on my iPhone redirects to special iPhone portal. Pretty
annoying for any site to not support direct linking for mobile versions of
their site. For the playboy site it is weird, you find yourself on the playboy
homepage... ;-)

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allenbrunson
why did this comment deserve downvotes? it's not abrasive, and it's true! the
same thing happened to me.

seems like every site that has a mobile version does this. you follow a link
from somewhere else, and instead of getting to the page you wanted to read,
you wind up at the top page of their mobile site. annoying.

~~~
wehriam
It was down voted because it was only tangentially related to the original
post.

~~~
allenbrunson
"only tangentially related" might be a reason not to vote it up. but my
interpretation of pg's rules are that downvotes are only for comments that are
inflammatory, spam, or some other violation of protocol.

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ciscoriordan
"He is an engaging pitchman and never loses an opportunity to sell his
products, eloquently describing a time when computers will be as common as
kitchen appliances and as revolutionary in their impact as the telephone or
the internal-combustion engine."

Well, he got that one right.

~~~
omouse
Not yet, there's more to be done. This is a good start perhaps, but we're
nowhere near where we could be.

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tsally
"Is that really significant or is it simply a novelty? The Macintosh has been
called "the world’s most expensive Etch A Sketch" by at least one critic."

"Aside from some of the recurrent criticisms—that the mouse is inefficient..."

I'd say an important take away from this interview is to ignore (most)
criticism, no matter what. Just imagine how silly some of the criticism for
advancing technology today will look in 2040 :-).

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Andi
"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." (page 2)

This is the vision - freeing the intellectual energy.

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Raphael
Yeah, who needs AI, when there are millions of people sitting around with
nothing to do?

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jacquesm
that is an excellent observation.

One reason there are still lots of truckdrivers and not AI's driving those
trucks is that even if you could build one it would be very hard to make it
cost effective.

Long term it will probably be more like the drones piloted by guys sitting a
couple of hundred (or thousand) miles away, jobs will be broken up into groups
based on the 'hardness' of the problems that need solving and then get
parcelled out a-la the mechanical turk.

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jackchristopher
_A.T. &T. is changing from a subsidized and regulated service-oriented company
to a free-market, competitive-marketing technology company. A.T.&T.’s products
per se have never been of the highest quality. All you have to do is go look
at their telephones. They’re somewhat of an embarrassment._ \- Steve Jobs

Some _early_ foreshadowing.

This is one of the best Jobs interview I've seen. It's long but it's well
worth it; Greatly inspiring.

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DavidSJ
He was much more open then.

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wizlb
And then?

