
The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech from 1983: Foreshadowing Wireless Networking & iPad - peterkchen
http://lifelibertytech.com/2012/10/02/the-lost-steve-jobs-speech-from-1983-foreshadowing-wireless-networking-the-ipad-and-the-app-store
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molmalo
I think that an important distinction has to be made about this kind of
people. Unlike many journalists, and 'futurists' out there, trying to predict
what the future will be like, people like Jobs and Gates[1] do not make bold
predictions, just for the sake of making them. Instead they have a vision and
they work to make that vision real.

That's the reason of why, when they speak, sometimes the things they tell may
seem to be a little bit odd at the time, but eventually that things became
real.

There are a few examples of this in the interview made by AllThingsD to Gates
and Jobs together in 2007. [1] At 35:30 Gates said that he was sure the tablet
market was about to explode (while jobs was looking at him with a funny poker
face), and later, he basically described Kinnect, a few years before Project
Natal was made public.

If Google haven't revealed Glass or their autonomous cars, and Larry or Sergey
came out speaking about driver-less cars, and wearable devices, some would
think that they are dreaming, but the truth is that they are describing their
vision, and they are working to make it real.

It's like what jobs said at min 43, when asked about 5 years from 2007 (yeah,
right now!). And he said: "I don't know, " [...] "but something comes along,
gets really popular, people love it, get used to it, you want it on there".

They are not wizards, they happen to know what currently exists, and what's
being developed. So, instead of making weird assumptions (like: "ok, assuming
that we will develop a material 1000 times stronger, 100 times lighter and 10
times cheaper, we'll have X in ten years"), they rationalize about what's the
logical evolution of the technology, based on what they know.

[1]
[http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB...](http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB6-015AEBB1C052)
, Min 28 and forward.

~~~
cefstat
Exactly! As Alan Kay said "The best way to predict the future is to invent
it".

I don't find it is so important that people like Jobs, Gates, Brin, etc. have
sometimes correctly predicted the future. What is important is that they
executed, and turned these predictions to reality. Even more. They turned
these predictions to everyday reality for most people, instead of a select
few.

It annoys me when these people are compared to people who just throw a million
ideas around and then, when one of these ideas becomes reality, they claim
that they are so good at predicting the future.

~~~
molmalo
That quote came to my mind, while I was writing my comment, and I think it's
magnificent. I love it, because it basically tells you: Don't lay there just
dreaming about the future, go out and build the future!

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jgrahamc
This tape really is worth listening to for anyone who was not involved with
computers in 1983. Jobs clearly sees what is happening in the home computer
revolution. He's not alone in that, many of us at that time realized that the
computer was going to take over everywhere.

Around that time I worked on a project for a company that made machines to
stick labels on product packets. Those machines were electromechanical and
worked but were quite inflexible. I was asked to prototype a computer control
of one of the machines and wrote the code by hand and demonstrated that not
only was computer control cheaper and smaller it was way more flexible. For
example, the electromechanical machines were unable to detect when there was a
missing sticker on the roll of stickers to be applied to the products. It was
trivial with computer control (and an IR detector) to add that functionality.

The machine was a 6502-based box whose interface was a hex keypad and a 6
digit seven segment display. You typed your program in in hex and ran out, but
it and enough I/O channels to run the machine.

Here is is... The KIM-1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1>

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icebraining
_He confidently talks about the personal computer being a new medium of
communication. Again, this is before networking was commonplace or there was
any inkling of the Internet going mainstream. Yet he specifically talks about
early e-mail systems and how it is re-shaping communication. He matter-of-
factly states that when we have portable computers with radio links, people
could be walking around anywhere and pick up their e-mail. Again, this is
1983, at least 20 years before the era of mobile computing._

Meanwhile, and also in 1983, Steve Roberts was traveling across the US with
his computer-on-a-bike and checking his email across CompuServ using satellite
links, so actually _doing_ it: <http://microship.com/resources/technomadic-
tools.html>

~~~
huxley
I seem to remember that the satellite links came later, in 1983 the Winnebiko
only had CB radio for communication (no email) and an audio-casette deck to
store what he was writing on his stops.

Winnebiko 2 added packet radio for email in 1986-88, but I don't think the
satellite links came until Behemoth which was in the 1990s.

Neat presentation he did describing it at Xerox PARC in 1989.
<http://youtu.be/tDaz8vaKzdQ>

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AimHere
I thank Mozilla almighty for Firefox' 'Inspect Element' feature allowing me to
block that intrusive element full of social networking cruft that was
obscuring much of the content. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't attempt to
read this article at all.

Presumably some browser/window size configurations wouldn't have a chunk of
article text blocked by an obnoxious window demanding I shill this article on
a bunch of websites I never visit, so I figure it's bad website design rather
than an intentional retro throwback to 1998-style popup-heavy browsing, but
still - if you made that site, and you're reading this, make it not happen
anymore.

~~~
larrys
Great tip.

For others, in Firefox, under OSX:

Tools -> Web Developer -> Inspect

Then hold down option, select the box, then click on the downarrow "delete
node" and the box will disappear.

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eckyptang
We had everything he said back then - it was just rather bulky. It's not a
visionary statement - it's logic.

I wish everyone would stop harping on about Jobs - he was a marketing expert
not a visionary.

~~~
pinaceae
oh boy aren't you smart. the old "just marketing" troll.

    
    
      all you need to make an mp3 player successful is marketing.
      all you need to make a smartphone successful is marketing.
      all you need to make notebooks successful is marketing.
    

my god, it is so simple!

fire all the designers, engineers, coders, all the fucking nerds and replace
them with marketing people! brilliant. this is exactly how you become one of
the most valuable companies on this planet.

quick, call HP, Dell and Nokia to tell them about this grandiose insight!

~~~
czr80
Bit harsh, but I sympathise with your frustration. The "only marketing" trope
is so shallow that it is annoying how it survives.

~~~
eckyptang
In the interest of backing up my statement and sticking to my guns:

Take the marketing and hype away from Apple, and what is it? A Foxconn
rebranding outfit, a 1990s style UNIX outfit which ships proprietary hardware
and a media pushing company with a less than 7% market share of the IT
industry with many rising competitors. That is it.

That is no different than Sony 10 years ago. And look where they are now.

Hype cannot be maintained forever. When you can no longer outdo yourself, it's
gone. This is happening rapidly. People used to wait on Apple news
announcements. I mean hell even I did as they usually stepped up the game. But
what have they delivered of note recently: absolutely sod all. Lumias are
starting to tread on their innovation territory, Surface is less than a month
away, Google has taken over the appliance model and the mobile market is
dominated by South Korean giant Samsung.

They're losing the marketing battle as that's all they had and they're suing
everyone on the way down.

My main problem is that people worship Jobs as some kind of idol. I think he
was an extremely bad role model and a warning rather than a sign. Sure he
knocked up Apple's market cap, which is his only real acheivement, but it in
the process he shafted just about everyone on the way, destroyed the
perception of an open computing model, lied persistently about bad products
and ripped off other people's work persistently.

The guy was technically speaking in every way an utter psychopathic arrogant
asshole with no remnant of humanity. But a good marketer.

I'm fed up with reading all the tripe about him.

~~~
arn
Your position is absurd and contradictory.

The hype and popularity exists because Apple has produced very compelling
products. The iPod and the iPhone were both leaps and bounds ahead of the
competition at their launch. It's also clear that Jobs was the driving force
behind their vision.

You say that "even [you]" waited on Apple announcements because "they usually
stepped up the game" which translates into the fact that Apple made
better/interesting/more innovative products. Note you didn't say "even I
waited on Apple news announcements because their marketing was so amazing."

You say that Lumias are treading on their "innovation" territory. Not their
marketing territory, their innovation territory.

If it was all marketing, they would still be winning by your argument. Has
their marketing dramatically changed in the past few years?

The only rational way to reconcile this is by you saying "oh, by marketing, I
mean the whole product package, user interface, software, and hardware
design". In which case, you just are simply defining marketing wrong.

~~~
eckyptang
The iPod and iPhone were not leaps and bounds ahead. That is a common
misconception which is powered by the marketing hype. There were other
products out there which were far superior. Archos produced better music
players and Nokia produced far better phones under the Symbian banner.

The differentiator was the marketing hype.

They stepped up the game by delivering on day zero which made people hang on
them. That is still marketing.

Lumia marketing is horrible, but they are producing hype via innovation. Apple
don't do that any more. They have nothing to deliver any more.

Their marketing has changed from "new product" to "new incremental
improvement" i.e. the hype is dying.

Marketing here is purely spin.

~~~
shenberg
I'll bite on the Symbian claim.

Saying that the iPhone is not leaps and bounds better than anything else in
the market at the time is disingenuous - if you used both the N95's browser
(with the crummy joystick-controlled mouse) and the iPhone's multitouch
browser, you'd know there is no comparison.

I'll go further and say the Nokia phones at the time were much more marketing-
driven. They had huge checklists of features _so that marketing could say they
have "more features"_ (e.g. irDA), but the core experience was poor
(unresponsive and confusing UI, bad input methods) it didn't matter.

Did Nokia make better phones? In one sense, yes - they had longer battery
lives, better cameras, they worked much better as phones, for chrissake. But,
in the most important way, the iPhone blew everything out of the water - which
phone people would prefer to use. I preferred a usable browsing and mapping
experience to the jack-of-all-trades and master of none approach of Nokia
phones, and apparently, so did the market.

~~~
eckyptang
Well you kind of justified my point:

The iPhone is a crappy phone with crappy battery life and has a crappy camera.
None of this is desirable nor unique (O2 XDA kind of nailed all of these in
2002).

Apple however made it successful through marketing.

And don't mention usable mapping after the last week or so :)

~~~
Synaesthesia
It's got a good web browser, good media playback, good apps and games, and
good display. The camera isn't crappy either IMO.

~~~
whatusername
on launch the iPhone didn't have a great camera. (Or apps)

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elviejo
Wow that was visionary! </sarcasm> if it wasnt for the fact that Alan Kay had
invented the dynabook concept in 1968 and had cardboard prototype of an ipad
in 1972. And he went and helped create that vision in xerox parc.

and later went to work for apple were jobs was able to copy more of his ideas.

So yeah what a prediction say in 1983 what Alan Kay invented in 1968.

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

~~~
DeepDuh
You sound bitter. So other people have thought of and built parts of what
jobs' team brought together, ergo Jobs was not a visionary? You can hate Apple
and SJ's personality as much as you want, but don't let it blind you. Lisa and
Mac invented more over the Xerox UI than you think, plus they got the license
from Xerox in a fair deal against shares.

~~~
elviejo
You mean the macintosh project that Steve Jobs took away from its original
inventor Jeff Raskin?

Im not bitter it just bothersme the fanboyism that is so prevalent in Sillicon
Valley...if we want to improve our craft we need to know it's history.

~~~
simonh
Except that Raskin's vision for the Mac was completely different from the
direction Steve took it in. That's not speculation, we know what Raskin wanted
the Mac to be because he founded a separate company and implemented it as
SwyftWare and later the Canon Cat. Raskin's plans for the 'Mac' interface
didn't even use a GUI, it was entirely text based.

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netcan
Wow. He was just 28 when this was recorded, I think.

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001sky
Repost of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4605117>

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netcan
On a side note, is digitizing and distributing this recording violating some
copyright?

------
sspiff
I came here, thinking it would be another typical Jobs speech, and was
expecting mindless Apple fanboys to praise everything about it.

But 5 minutes in, I realize this speech is actually filled with content, and
good content at that.

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moonsoonmenu
To everyone saying Steve Jobs is just a "marketer" obviously doesn't know what
it takes to run a company, let alone his full genius. Now watch as Apple
starts falling down.

~~~
hayksaakian
Steve Jobs was obviously holding Apple back, only just recently did we finally
get a 4 inch screen, 4G LTE, and (keep in mind he publicly decried this form
factor) an iPad mini 7ish inch tablet

long live tim cook

~~~
hayksaakian
my source: [http://liliputing.com/2010/10/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-
bashes-7-...](http://liliputing.com/2010/10/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-
bashes-7-inch-tablets.html)

~~~
rustynails77
And jobsy bashed tablets not long before he released the iPad. What jobsy said
publicly was not a good basis for what he believed.

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agumonkey
Almost as if he was born with a single vision that he implemented all the way
through his life.

------
otaku888
Is it me or is there a recent trend of more and more apple/steve jobs/ios
threads? There seems to be so many of them, when ios6 came out there were
quite literally a wall of related threads on the front page.

Is it because most people these days use macbooks for development?

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ryeguy_24
I highly recommend listening to this.

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DodgyEggplant
Startup = Vision

------
goggles99
And Sci-Fi has done far more for tech innovation than Steve Jobs. Too bad the
authors never get any credit.

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zorbo
This article is bunk. I'd advise the author to stay far away from fortune
tellers and palm readers.

