
Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985) - gscott
http://reprints.longform.org/playboy-interview-steve-jobs
======
tompccs
People talk about CEOs with "vision", and usually it's a substitute for a more
concrete explanation of what the value-add of non-technical upper management
is.

Reading this exchange is fascinating. Jobs doesn't spell out the future - he
doesn't know it either - but he has an unwavering faith that computers will be
central to it, and can even quite effectively explain how and why. The
interviewer seems in retrospect hopelessly naive, but he no doubt represented
the mainstream opinion of the time. For Jobs to understand this and bet his
career on it (remember, most people betting their careers on computers would
have been able to find work even if they had never left the science lab or big
corporations - Jobs was speculating on a completely different future) shows, I
think, that he deserves the place and high-regard in technological history he
has been given.

~~~
lisper
"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."

Steve saw the internet coming in 1985. Wow.

~~~
gambler
_> Steve saw the internet coming in 1985. Wow. _

This will probably blow your mind:

[https://youtu.be/Ao9X1GsUPys?t=125](https://youtu.be/Ao9X1GsUPys?t=125)

1988 presentation where Alan Kay confidently predicts media-driven websites
that became the norm only around 2010. He also talks about virtual reality and
real-time 3d graphics.

We _still_ haven't caught up with his vision for exploratory interactive
computing and user-driven simulations.

The fact that computers can/will/should be networked and also used for
interactive collaboration rather than just raw number crunching was evident to
some people as far as 1962. Maybe even earlier.

[http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/](http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/)

Augmenting Human Intellect is not an easy read, but it is well worth it, and
not just as a matter of historic curiosity.

~~~
maltelau
> [https://youtu.be/Ao9X1GsUPys?t=125](https://youtu.be/Ao9X1GsUPys?t=125) >
> 1988 presentation where Alan Kay [...]

I'm getting no sound throughout the whole video, and youtube lists it as
having music from a particular Debussy recording, which is then also
unavailable
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhogGOTnT9I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhogGOTnT9I))

Muting the sound is the usual response to streams and videos that plays audio
that someone claims to own the rights to. Is this another casualty to how easy
youtube makes it for copyright trolls (or people indistinguishable to
copyright trolls)?

~~~
gambler
It plays fine for me, but it does have a 3D demo with some classical music at
the end, so maybe YouTube disabled sound based on your location.

------
simonh
I love the analogy between early command-line computer interfaces and the
telegraph, versus graphical computer interfaces and the telephone.

It's also funny to that when he elaborates on this by saying we prefer not to
describe where something is but just point to it, he did so with his finger.
Of course in context he meant on a computer it's better to point with a mouse
than enter commands, but it so nicely foreshadows his intuitive embrace of
touch interfaces decades later.

~~~
globular-toast
I don't agree with the analogy. Telephones derive their power from the use of
language just like command-line interfaces. Point and click interfaces will
never surpass the power of language because it is language that makes us
human.

~~~
simonh
You're completely missing the point. Language is about an awful lot more than
words, it's about expressiveness and emotional content as well as just textual
information. He talked about telephones letting people sing - express
themselves though voice beyond mere words.

A command line interface isn't a great medium for singing, but graphical
interfaces enabled sophisticated music production software, desktop publishing
using beautiful fonts and images (examples he used). It enables expressiveness
beyond what can be captured in mere text. But it can do plain text just fine
too.

But the main point he made was not that these things can't be done using a
command line, it's that a graphical interface democratises access by removing
the need to learn special incantations to interact creatively with content.

~~~
ekianjo
Your examples are not very convincing. Desktop publishing powers tabloids
while a great book remains a great book even in pure text format.
Expressiveness is not limited to a medium, and if you ever used a command line
interface you would understand the concept it pipes and arguments is way more
expressive than a round of 100 clicks to do the same thing thru a GUI.

GUI do democratise access to capabilities, but unless you work only with
pixels GUIs are inferior in every single way.

~~~
simonh
"If you ever used a command lien interface".

That's a good one, I've been using Unix/Linux systems daily since the early
90s and test people on their Bash skills in job interviews.

~~~
IggleSniggle
"Command lien interface" \- a modality of interaction in which the empowered
party (lienor) exerts control over someone with valuable property (lienee) via
commands backed by a ephemeral interface that does not need to exist at
compile time (lien), but is practical for eliminating bugs that arise from
causality in economic systems.

------
acqq
So it's right there in 1985 (emphasis mine):

"Jobs: That’s inevitably what happens. That’s why I think _death is the most
wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are
obsolete._ " (He was speaking about the computer hardware).

20 years later "2005 Stanford Commencement Address":

[https://singjupost.com/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-
commencement...](https://singjupost.com/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-commencement-
address-full-transcript/?singlepage=1)

"About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. (...) Having lived through it,
I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a
useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who
want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the
destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should
be, because _Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is
Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new._

Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will
gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it
is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be
trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s
thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner
voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything
else is secondary."

There is also a coda: in 2010, at D8 conference (Jobs died 2011), Jobs got a
question:

"Q: A few years ago you gave a preparation speech at Stanford (...) Now few
years later and a couple of years wiser would you add anything to that
speech?"

"Jobs: Oh, I have no idea. Probably I would have just turned out the volume on
it because the last few years have reminded me that life is fragile."

(Or was it "turn up"? Do we hear what we want to hear there?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=4400](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=4400)
)

~~~
torstenvl
Definitely sounds like "turn up" to me. Plus "turn out the volume" isn't
idiomatic in Standard American English.

~~~
acqq
> "turn out the volume" isn't idiomatic

Indeed, thanks.

------
dantondwa
> The famous story about the boxes is when Woz called the Vatican and told
> them he was Henry Kissinger. They had someone going to wake the Pope up in
> the middle of the night before they figured out it wasn’t really Kissinger.

These were really different times.

~~~
dwoozle
[https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/10/lindsey-graham-
trum...](https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/10/lindsey-graham-trump-hoax-
call-043991)

------
victor106
This interview offers so many insights, it’s unbelievable.

Who are some visionaries/ industry leaders that have this kind Realistic
future insight that are worth paying attention to?

~~~
petilon
Elon Musk. How many companies has he created or is running? Zip2, PayPal,
SpaceX (a rocket company? that takes guts), Tesla (a new car company to
compete against GM, Ford, Mercedes, BMW etc? that's nuts!), SolarCity, The
Boring Company. And now he is promising self-driving cars by next year.
(That's nuts!)

------
ericmcer
"Jobs: When I went to school, it was right after the Sixties and before this
general wave of practical purposefulness had set in. Now students aren’t even
thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much. They certainly
are not letting any of the philosophical issues of the day take up too much of
their time as they study their business majors. The idealistic wind of the
Sixties was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are
my age have that engrained in them forever."

This was pretty striking for me, the goal of becoming rich, or being 'a
millionaire' has been pounded into me from a young age to the point where I
have difficulty picturing myself obtaining any kind of happiness without some
level of financial success. Hopefully the current generations can find
fulfillment in different areas. Tying happiness to money is kind of a cruel
road to send entire generations down.

------
pentae
Playboy: That’s what critics charge you with: hooking the enthusiasts with
premium prices, then turning around and lowering your prices to catch the rest
of the market.

Seems like old tricks are the best tricks, eh?

~~~
ekianjo
Apple was pretty much always premium though. Way more expensive than
equivalent hardware.

~~~
ubermonkey
Price wasn't the main driver, either. Dealer network mattered a LOT.

Lots of kids who grew up away from larger cities ended up with computers from
Radio Shack, because they were EVERYWHERE, while Apple or Commodore dealers
were harder to find.

But I'm still curious, because I don't remember: How did (e.g.) Apple II
pricing compare to equivalent-ish, contemporaneous models from Commodore or
Tandy?

~~~
dfxm12
_How did (e.g.) Apple II pricing compare to equivalent-ish, contemporaneous
models from Commodore or Tandy?_

Apple ][: $1,298

Commodore PET: $795

Tandy TRS-80: $600

At these prices, in 1977, only the Apple had color graphics.

~~~
hsitz
I was one of the young kids (age 15) who saved up and bought a TRS-80 in 1979.
Apple IIe was definitely better, but more expensive. PET was a bit of an odd
bird, with chiclet square calculator keys and built in small monitor, no real
keyboard. Apple II was the only one that was color, and if I recall it had
bitmapped graphics with 256 x 192 resolution. TRS-80 had crude 48 x 128
graphics. My school had an Apple II for use by some science students, and I
did some fooling around on it. It was definitely much nicer. But TRS-80 was
mostly a tool to learn about computers; somehow I scrounged up resources
(probably guided by magazines), got a CPU manual, and did some simple Z80
machine language programming, later got an assembler.

------
archeantus
RIP, Steve. I have ached since he died not only for the loss of what he was,
but also for the loss of what could have been. Whatever your view of Apple
now, I feel strongly that it is a fraction of what it would have been if Steve
had been able to continue on for another 10 years.

------
peter303
Tech revolutions are often ushered in by people in their early 20s one pop
economist noted. That is when they have some education, lots of energy and few
family responsibilities. The PC revolution was by people born in the mid
1950s, dot.com by mid 1970s, mobile by early 1990s ...

~~~
casefields
Wars have also fought by that same age group since the beginning of time.

------
k__
1985 haha, that's when I was born!

When I grew up, I had the feeling computers weren't much of a thing in
private.

Sure, I had a C64 when I got 8 years old and my first PC with 11, but until I
got my PC I knew basically nobody in any age group that had a computer.

To me, the dream Jobs had, that anyone had a computer, became reality end of
the 90 and beginning of the 00.

Which is kinda funny. The time everyone really had a computer at home probably
didn't even last more than 10 years when it was superseeded by smartphones.

Life is very crazy in retrospect...

I remember talking to some friends at school when I was 16. They told me I
should become an administrator and not a developer, because everything we need
is already developed. They had games, videos, mp3s what more was there?

~~~
ubermonkey
"Sure, I had a C64 when I got 8 years old and my first PC with 11, but until I
got my PC I knew basically nobody in any age group that had a computer."

Wild. Where did you grow up?

I ask because I was born in 1970, and by the time I got a computer (a TRS-80
Color Computer 2; 16K of RAM, baby!) in about 1982, I was far from the first
kid I knew to have one (though I definitely was on the leading edge). I wrote
all my high school papers on it, and by the time I graduated in 1988 I'd say
at least half the papers being turned in had those tell-tale rough edges from
tractor-feed paper run through dot-matrix printers. By then, several friends
had moved up from CoCo/C64/Apple II style machines to PCs (or, in one case, an
early Mac).

My family was firmly middle/upper-middle class, but we were in a very poor
state (Mississippi).

Now, most of these were household computers, shared by everyone in the house,
but still: the upshot was "lots of PC penetration in homes in south
Mississippi by 1988."

~~~
irremediable
AFAIK the US got computers earlier than most places, even other First World
countries. Large disposable incomes and a large, relatively homogeneous
market. My family were middle class (teachers) in the UK, and moderately early
adopters; we still only got our first PC in the mid-90s.

~~~
ubermonkey
I guess I knew that. UK also had some pre-PC home computers that were
homegrown, right? Acorn, et. al.?

~~~
dep_b
The UK seemed to have all of the good stuff in spades. I wouldn't be surprised
if a larger percentage of people had computers at home in the UK than the US
in the 80's, so much software and hardware was made there, lots of
publications like Amiga Format and Commodore User. When you look at the total
market the US probably was bigger back then and probably nothing would compare
to larger hubs like SV, NY or even Seattle.

------
ponyous
> Then there was the time Wozniak made something that looked and sounded like
> a bomb and took it to the school cafeteria.

Oh my. That's funny.

~~~
ekianjo
In 2019 that would have ended with a SWAT team guns blazing.

~~~
delinka
And, if not death, prison time for the 'prankster.'

------
chrisieb
>> 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.

Ironically, the first US IKEA store opened in June that same year.

------
lnsru
I really enjoyed description of an environment where Jobs grew up. Now kids
see electronics only as a screen of smartphone or tablet. No space for
technical creativity unless your parents are doing something in this domain.
Selling printed circuit board in European Union is a great adventure taking
care of CE and WEEE even for experienced adult.

~~~
pjc50
It is kind of annoying that there's a two tier market: as a consumer, you can
buy all sorts of extremely cheap nifty boards to connect to the Arduino, by
having them posted from China to circumvent all the rules. But you can't
circumvent the rules yourself.

(Well, you can, the enforcement is pretty adhoc, but there is still a nonzero
chance of getting spotted and fined and they can actually collect against you
in the EU)

------
ozmaverick72
I used to buy the magazine for the articles - honest

~~~
harrygeez
Not gonna lie. Bought for the pics, stayed for the articles.

------
blazespin
A jerk, but a visionary jerk.

~~~
pentae
You say jerk, I love the fact he's honest, unfiltered, and usually dead right.

------
dubeux
What's really cute is how Jobs expresses contempt for money, for being a
millionaire, praising the Sixties idealism (needless to say, the very spirit
of the beginning of internet) at the same time he builds up the most closed,
proprietary-obsessed company possible.

------
francescopnpn
In the interview at the end Jobs says he loves Sushi. What's the deal here? I
thought he only ate fruit or at least certainly not meat/fish. Can someone
explain?

~~~
guyzero
Eating sushi wasn't something normal people in the US did in 1985. It was a
bit of a class marker that he was sophisticated and did crazy things.

I realize that sushi is pretty commonplace now but in 1985, for white
Americans it was probably the craziest thing you could think of doing. It
really freaked people out. Raw fish?

~~~
cardiffspaceman
Not so much "crazy" because it was in multiple places in my suburban location
at that time. The 'Claire' character of "The Breakfast Club" movie of 1985,
brought sushi in (what I remember to be) a bento box with her and I only read
her as spoiled, not crazy.

------
faissaloo
It really saddens me that the Apple I read here is an Apple that would be
saddened by the Apple of today

