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Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

155 points by valuearb 9y ago

valuearb 9y ago
I'm amazed at how mature he sounds in this interview at age 29, like far more direct, honest, confident and smart than say, Zuckerberg. He was very prescient and when wrong (he didn't anticipate the clone makers, saying there wouldn't be another $200M+ PC company) it was an area he really didn't care to be involved in.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tw1010 9y ago
  Compared to Zuckerberg, sure. But 29 is hardly that young to be this articulate and wise. I feel like sentiments like this is much more about hero worship than a statement about how unusually well spoken he his compared to most people his age.
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    Excellent point. Thank you for making me think about this. Zuckerberg did some things to achieve success. Jobs did some things to achieve success, one of which was speaking well.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Well, it's not meaningful to compare Jobs to Zuck in any way than that they were founders of large, powerful companies. I think the more interesting things is that Jobs embodies what Apple did best: being able to explain/present technology in a very understandable way. I felt that he didn't make you come to him, he brought it to you. He was very intelligent, confident and opinionated. But what made him great was his salesmanship combined with the above. I have yet to see/hear another tech CEO/founder that made as much sense as Jobs for the things he cared about.
  - hellofunk 9y ago
    He was just as articulate at 22. When you see his interviews during the launch of the Apple I, you see the same Jobs as in this interview several years later.
- marcell 9y ago
  Not to take away from your point but people have different strengths. Zuckerberg is bad at social skills but (evidently) a great hacker and amazing at business strategy. It took Jobs a long time to master business management that allowed Apple to become a hugely successful company. Zuckerberg (and others, e.g. Bill Gates) got it right away.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    I think the interview makes it clear he had mastered a great deal about business management already.
- 5_minutes 9y ago
  Compared to Zuckerberg anyone not-evil looks great.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    Jobs had many flaws which are often elided in his hagiographies.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      As did Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Lincoln, Washington, Churchill, et al.
      - bjshepard 9y ago
        Gandhi was a straight up racist. Lincoln participated in an ethnic cleansing campaign as a young man. Washington was one of the founders of a slave empire and a slaver himself. Churchill, a genocidaire, financially linked with arms dealers, and militarist.
- csomar 9y ago
  Very different circumstance. Jobs at that stage was a mini-celebrity and a multi-millionaire. Zuck right now is one of the most famous people in the world, hold incredible power (maybe even more than some of the worlds governments) and is a multi-billionaire. Most people think Zuck is evil or abnormal. He is a regular dude. He is just sitting on a couple million of hydrogen bombs ready to explode. Facebook is very influential today and the parties it affects are not just companies but governments. These are not easy entities to deal with.
thecompilr 9y ago
> 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. Wow, I don't know why but this explanation blows me away. So simple and yet so accurate.
- Kevin_S 9y ago
  I always get this feeling as an excel power user
- pazimzadeh 9y ago
  I wonder if Steve saw this lecture by Richard Feynman, where Feynman uses a similar metaphor to explain how computers work.
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    I absolutely love how Feynman speaks and writes about computers. Most of the time he's criticizing them for their ability to entice you to waste time by seeing what you can do with them. So, I second. Great anecdote!
  - justonepost 9y ago
    Probably, great artists steal.
leejoramo 9y ago
> [the information] revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. I remember people thinking this was a crazy idea, but his forecast was largely correct: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?source=frontpage-immediate-access&i=appl+vs+xom+market+cap http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?source=frontpage-immediat...
- tim333 9y ago
  And it still has a ways to go.
- barrkel 9y ago
  The petrochemical revolution is more than the market cap of an oil company. The petrochemical revolution guides the way we've built our cities for the past 100+ years, how we ship our goods and how we travel the world. The entire transport system - cars, trucks, ships, planes - almost all petrochemical. And the negative side too. Vast fields of tarmac (petrochemical) parking lots (petrochemical) for strip malls. Urban sprawl. Well over a million people killed on roads every year. Millions more affected by chemical byproducts. Acid rain. Global warming. Computers are only getting started. They'll get there eventually though; computers are to the brain what engines are to the body.
  - antod 9y ago
    Not only those aspects of the petrochemical revolution, it's also the total pervasiveness of plastic products in our lives.
  - louprado 9y ago
    > The petrochemical revolution guides the way we've conducted foreign policy should have received top billing. Unless you were intentionally excluding items not in both sets.
    - barrkel 9y ago
      Petrochemicals also enabled mechanized warfare. That's a bigger impact on killing power than any squabbles in the Middle East. I expect deaths in Levantine squabbles are also dwarfed by road accidents.
Synaesthesia 9y ago
1984, pre-internet! Or at least pre WWW and big internet >Playboy: Those are arguments for computers in business and in schools, but what about the home? ... This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes. 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 . Playboy: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about? Jobs: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.
- twoodfin 9y ago
  Interesting. This is only 5 years after Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC, where he would later say he “missed [their developments in] networking” because he was so fascinated by their GUI work.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    He probably missed it, but others at the company probably didn't. Then again there is very little detail in the statement, and much of it could already be true with the modems and BBSs of the time. Hell, a year after this interview LucasArts opened up Habitat for beta testing on Quantum Link. The client side running on C64 no less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) As Gibson likes to put it: the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed.
    - leoc 9y ago
      (I am not an expert on anything.) At this stage Sun was already selling networked workstations and trumpeting that "the network is the computer". DNS ramped up in 1985, while SMTP was already a few years active, and from a user's POV the good ole modern IPv4-on-Unix-machines Internet was already a reality if still not open to all comers. Speaking of Gibson, Neuromancer was already out, too. Basically Jobs was, for someone in his position—and for someone who iirc was in regular contact with Apple employee Alan Kay at this stage—more or less up to speed here, not really visionary. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317553 Speaking of Sun workstations though, remember that at the time of this 1985 interview Jobs was about four months from being fired from Apple. The Big Mac project he'd been pushing at the time looks very much like his attempt to do basically a NeXT—a networked Unix workstation with a new GUI layer and Mac/Apple fairy dust—inside Apple as the next Macintosh, and he founded NeXT by the end of the year in response to Gassée's termination of Big Mac after he (Jobs) left (basically in favour of the more incremental Macintosh II, it seems).
fredliu 9y ago
>Playboy: And in the meantime? >Jobs: The developments will be in making the products more and more portable... maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer. Hard to believe this was 1984, it almost sounded like the original iPhone was 20+ years in baking
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Depends on how much one read into the whole "merging" thing. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say...
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Especially since not “telephone” and “computer” implied non-portability at the time. A pretty prescient statement even so.
- rospaya 9y ago
  Well the first smartphone was prototyped around 1992 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
steve_adams_86 9y ago
>Playboy: One of the experts in the field says that for this industry to really flourish, and for it to benefit the consumer, one standard has to prevail. >Jobs: That’s simply untrue. This is a little funny given the walled garden he oversaw the creation of (It seemed like it was intended to improve chances of success by implementing a single standard for an ecosystem), but I'm excluding some context and just poking some fun. Overall it was a good read - he had some excellent foresight about computing and the culture around it. Very cool.
- jansho 9y ago
  It's interesting that the Japanese never really did their own personal computers, as Jobs supposed. He was probably right though, computers are a different beast to things like the stereo, because it's always changing a la Moore's Law.
jansho 9y ago
Beautiful interview. I forgot how young, bombastic and intellectual Jobs was when he started Apple. > 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. The last bit made me laugh out loud. It's technically true (!) and probably the iPhone was far more disruptive than personal computers.
remir 9y ago
Jobs definitely saw the bigger picture: computers must be tools for everybody, not just technical people. The work that was done by Xerox PARC, Apple, Microsoft, Google and countless others over the years to make complex tools usable by everybody is simply phenomenal. I don't think this would have been possible elsewhere on Earth. There was a unique combination of people, places, events and things that allowed all of these innovations to flourish.
ggm 9y ago
My first computer science lecture in 1979 was on digital convergence and my lecturer said there, it was actually to all intents and purposes already over, we were just living through a long tail transition. He put it back to 1962 and telstar, although doubtless you could push back further. So if you want to say Jobs was 'visionary' in '85, remember he had 6 years of lead time, if all he did was pay attention to what was being said in academia about ubiquitous networks. The mouse was demo'd in 1968 at the mother by Engelbart. So Again, Jobs was really just doing a good sell job on something we had pretty deep long insight into. Respect is due, but lets temper it. Standing on the shoulders of giants is for physics. In computer science we stand on each others toes..
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Bingo. There were a whole lot of informed people running around Apple. Jobs and his like have a knack of picking up ideas, and then spin round and present them as their own without ever giving a hit of attribution.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    if you read the entire interview you may note he didn’t take personal credit for anything.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Except that no one was building the future the way Jobs did. Having the idea for something is only part of the battle, actually implementing it in a usable fashion is the most important part of it. If you look at the Xerox Alto, and the Macintosh, it's amazing how much more advanced the Macintosh was at UI and how much easier to use it was, and how much less expensive it was (Jobs actually supposedly helped design the Mac mouse, which was really good and super cheap).
  - antoniuschan99 9y ago
    Jobs, along with Gates are the Entrepreneurs. Engelbart and Kay are the Academics.
leoc 9y ago
2014 comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559 (Also, previous postings from 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 and 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 with a single comment each.)
corford 9y ago
Beautiful interview. Love him or hate him, you have to respect him. I loved this passage: Playboy: Do you know what you want to do with the rest of this lifetime? Jobs: There’s an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: “For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.” As I’m going to be 30 in February, the thought has crossed my mind. Playboy: And? Jobs: And I’m not sure. I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. And that’s what I may try to do. The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind. Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. 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.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  > For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you. So if you live longer than 60, I wonder that means of those years in-between, after age 30.
  - cheez 9y ago
    Trying to undo the damage of the first 30 years.
Brendinooo 9y ago
As someone who grew up in the era of PC clones, it's interesting to me to see so much of the interview focus on the IBM vs. Apple angle. Apple was a non-factor in the 90s and IBM didn't have a very strong presence in the consumer market, at least not more than Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  Other than the Commodore 64 that was entry level and about to crash, the winners of the first half of the 80s were IBM then Apple: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ (Scroll to bottom for graph.) The Amiga should have been a factor by ‘85, if there was parental supervision over there. ;)
Tomminn 9y ago
I've seen this a bunch of times on hn. Each time I read a little more and notice/learn something new. I'll be the first to point out his flaws, but goddam Steve Jobs was a smart guy. It amazes how much he knew exactly what he was doing.
erikb 9y ago
Someone has to say it: So, there are really people reading the interviews!
orph4nus 9y ago
Anyone knows why the "The Playboy Interview: Moguls" (kindle) ebook seems to be no longer available at amazon?
kuharich 9y ago
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ykler 9y ago
Dude is 29 years old and already this timeless bullshit that in my day kids were idealistic and now they just care about money. (Although, maybe there are fluctuations about the mean and 1985 was an extreme.)
ykler 9y ago
"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." He is probably right. And yet, how tragic. Forty hours is not that long. Imagine that the telephone hadn't been invented. Would we still today be living in a society where people went to the telegraph office to send telegraphs but basically no one could telegraph themselves?
shams93 9y ago
Without the influence of LSD I don't think you would have gotten the Mac. You would have gotten Guis inspired by Xerox park but the whole vision of the computer as a work of art and a device to make art that was tied into Jobs inspirations from his psychedelic experiences.
dezzeus 9y ago
> Jobs: [...] there’s been virtually zero innovation since IBM got dominant control of that market place 15 years ago. They are going to do the same thing in every other sector of the computer market place if they can get away with it. The IBM PC fundamentally brought no new technology to the industry at all. It was just repackaging and slight extension of Apple II technology, and they want it all. They absolutely want it all. > This market place is coming down to the two of us, whether we like it or not. I don’t particularly like it, but it’s coming down to Apple and IBM. > [...] > Playboy: It’s not all competition [...]: You buy your disk drives from Sony, for instance. > Jobs: We buy many of our components from [...]. We save a ton of energy not having to make and design floppy-disk drives or microprocessors that we can spend on software. So, nowadays Apple is the new IBM and "needs" serious competition...
mehrdada 9y ago
> 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. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be—not an astronaut, not a football player—but this. Wow. Little did he know it would happen to himself not long after.
drallison 9y ago
I've always thought the Steve Jobs Playboy Interview was a PR coup for Apple (and, in retrospect, Playboy). I suspect Regis McKenna had a hand in both the questions and the answers. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regis_McKenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regis_McKenna)

155 points by valuearb 9y ago

I'm amazed at how mature he sounds in this interview at age 29, like far more direct, honest, confident and smart than say, Zuckerberg. He was very prescient and when wrong (he didn't anticipate the clone makers, saying there wouldn't be another $200M+ PC company) it was an area he really didn't care to be involved in.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tw1010 9y ago
Compared to Zuckerberg, sure. But 29 is hardly that young to be this articulate and wise. I feel like sentiments like this is much more about hero worship than a statement about how unusually well spoken he his compared to most people his age.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  Excellent point. Thank you for making me think about this. Zuckerberg did some things to achieve success. Jobs did some things to achieve success, one of which was speaking well.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Well, it's not meaningful to compare Jobs to Zuck in any way than that they were founders of large, powerful companies. I think the more interesting things is that Jobs embodies what Apple did best: being able to explain/present technology in a very understandable way. I felt that he didn't make you come to him, he brought it to you. He was very intelligent, confident and opinionated. But what made him great was his salesmanship combined with the above. I have yet to see/hear another tech CEO/founder that made as much sense as Jobs for the things he cared about.
- hellofunk 9y ago
  He was just as articulate at 22. When you see his interviews during the launch of the Apple I, you see the same Jobs as in this interview several years later.
marcell 9y ago
Not to take away from your point but people have different strengths. Zuckerberg is bad at social skills but (evidently) a great hacker and amazing at business strategy. It took Jobs a long time to master business management that allowed Apple to become a hugely successful company. Zuckerberg (and others, e.g. Bill Gates) got it right away.
- valuearb 9y ago
  I think the interview makes it clear he had mastered a great deal about business management already.
5_minutes 9y ago
Compared to Zuckerberg anyone not-evil looks great.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  Jobs had many flaws which are often elided in his hagiographies.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    As did Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Lincoln, Washington, Churchill, et al.
    - bjshepard 9y ago
      Gandhi was a straight up racist. Lincoln participated in an ethnic cleansing campaign as a young man. Washington was one of the founders of a slave empire and a slaver himself. Churchill, a genocidaire, financially linked with arms dealers, and militarist.
csomar 9y ago
Very different circumstance. Jobs at that stage was a mini-celebrity and a multi-millionaire. Zuck right now is one of the most famous people in the world, hold incredible power (maybe even more than some of the worlds governments) and is a multi-billionaire. Most people think Zuck is evil or abnormal. He is a regular dude. He is just sitting on a couple million of hydrogen bombs ready to explode. Facebook is very influential today and the parties it affects are not just companies but governments. These are not easy entities to deal with.

thecompilr 9y ago

> 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. Wow, I don't know why but this explanation blows me away. So simple and yet so accurate.

Kevin_S 9y ago
I always get this feeling as an excel power user
pazimzadeh 9y ago
I wonder if Steve saw this lecture by Richard Feynman, where Feynman uses a similar metaphor to explain how computers work.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  I absolutely love how Feynman speaks and writes about computers. Most of the time he's criticizing them for their ability to entice you to waste time by seeing what you can do with them. So, I second. Great anecdote!
- justonepost 9y ago
  Probably, great artists steal.

leejoramo 9y ago

> [the information] revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. I remember people thinking this was a crazy idea, but his forecast was largely correct: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?source=frontpage-immediate-access&i=appl+vs+xom+market+cap http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?source=frontpage-immediat...

tim333 9y ago
And it still has a ways to go.
barrkel 9y ago
The petrochemical revolution is more than the market cap of an oil company. The petrochemical revolution guides the way we've built our cities for the past 100+ years, how we ship our goods and how we travel the world. The entire transport system - cars, trucks, ships, planes - almost all petrochemical. And the negative side too. Vast fields of tarmac (petrochemical) parking lots (petrochemical) for strip malls. Urban sprawl. Well over a million people killed on roads every year. Millions more affected by chemical byproducts. Acid rain. Global warming. Computers are only getting started. They'll get there eventually though; computers are to the brain what engines are to the body.
- antod 9y ago
  Not only those aspects of the petrochemical revolution, it's also the total pervasiveness of plastic products in our lives.
- louprado 9y ago
  > The petrochemical revolution guides the way we've conducted foreign policy should have received top billing. Unless you were intentionally excluding items not in both sets.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    Petrochemicals also enabled mechanized warfare. That's a bigger impact on killing power than any squabbles in the Middle East. I expect deaths in Levantine squabbles are also dwarfed by road accidents.

Synaesthesia 9y ago

1984, pre-internet! Or at least pre WWW and big internet >Playboy: Those are arguments for computers in business and in schools, but what about the home? ... This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes. 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 . Playboy: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about? Jobs: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don’t know exactly what’s going to result, but you know it’s something very big and very good.

twoodfin 9y ago
Interesting. This is only 5 years after Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC, where he would later say he “missed [their developments in] networking” because he was so fascinated by their GUI work.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  He probably missed it, but others at the company probably didn't. Then again there is very little detail in the statement, and much of it could already be true with the modems and BBSs of the time. Hell, a year after this interview LucasArts opened up Habitat for beta testing on Quantum Link. The client side running on C64 no less. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) As Gibson likes to put it: the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed.
  - leoc 9y ago
    (I am not an expert on anything.) At this stage Sun was already selling networked workstations and trumpeting that "the network is the computer". DNS ramped up in 1985, while SMTP was already a few years active, and from a user's POV the good ole modern IPv4-on-Unix-machines Internet was already a reality if still not open to all comers. Speaking of Gibson, Neuromancer was already out, too. Basically Jobs was, for someone in his position—and for someone who iirc was in regular contact with Apple employee Alan Kay at this stage—more or less up to speed here, not really visionary. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317553 Speaking of Sun workstations though, remember that at the time of this 1985 interview Jobs was about four months from being fired from Apple. The Big Mac project he'd been pushing at the time looks very much like his attempt to do basically a NeXT—a networked Unix workstation with a new GUI layer and Mac/Apple fairy dust—inside Apple as the next Macintosh, and he founded NeXT by the end of the year in response to Gassée's termination of Big Mac after he (Jobs) left (basically in favour of the more incremental Macintosh II, it seems).

fredliu 9y ago

>Playboy: And in the meantime? >Jobs: The developments will be in making the products more and more portable... maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer. Hard to believe this was 1984, it almost sounded like the original iPhone was 20+ years in baking

digi_owl 9y ago
Depends on how much one read into the whole "merging" thing. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say...
- mikeash 9y ago
  Especially since not “telephone” and “computer” implied non-portability at the time. A pretty prescient statement even so.
rospaya 9y ago
Well the first smartphone was prototyped around 1992 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

steve_adams_86 9y ago

>Playboy: One of the experts in the field says that for this industry to really flourish, and for it to benefit the consumer, one standard has to prevail. >Jobs: That’s simply untrue. This is a little funny given the walled garden he oversaw the creation of (It seemed like it was intended to improve chances of success by implementing a single standard for an ecosystem), but I'm excluding some context and just poking some fun. Overall it was a good read - he had some excellent foresight about computing and the culture around it. Very cool.

jansho 9y ago
It's interesting that the Japanese never really did their own personal computers, as Jobs supposed. He was probably right though, computers are a different beast to things like the stereo, because it's always changing a la Moore's Law.

jansho 9y ago

Beautiful interview. I forgot how young, bombastic and intellectual Jobs was when he started Apple. > 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. The last bit made me laugh out loud. It's technically true (!) and probably the iPhone was far more disruptive than personal computers.

remir 9y ago

Jobs definitely saw the bigger picture: computers must be tools for everybody, not just technical people. The work that was done by Xerox PARC, Apple, Microsoft, Google and countless others over the years to make complex tools usable by everybody is simply phenomenal. I don't think this would have been possible elsewhere on Earth. There was a unique combination of people, places, events and things that allowed all of these innovations to flourish.

ggm 9y ago

My first computer science lecture in 1979 was on digital convergence and my lecturer said there, it was actually to all intents and purposes already over, we were just living through a long tail transition. He put it back to 1962 and telstar, although doubtless you could push back further. So if you want to say Jobs was 'visionary' in '85, remember he had 6 years of lead time, if all he did was pay attention to what was being said in academia about ubiquitous networks. The mouse was demo'd in 1968 at the mother by Engelbart. So Again, Jobs was really just doing a good sell job on something we had pretty deep long insight into. Respect is due, but lets temper it. Standing on the shoulders of giants is for physics. In computer science we stand on each others toes..

digi_owl 9y ago
Bingo. There were a whole lot of informed people running around Apple. Jobs and his like have a knack of picking up ideas, and then spin round and present them as their own without ever giving a hit of attribution.
- valuearb 9y ago
  if you read the entire interview you may note he didn’t take personal credit for anything.
valuearb 9y ago
Except that no one was building the future the way Jobs did. Having the idea for something is only part of the battle, actually implementing it in a usable fashion is the most important part of it. If you look at the Xerox Alto, and the Macintosh, it's amazing how much more advanced the Macintosh was at UI and how much easier to use it was, and how much less expensive it was (Jobs actually supposedly helped design the Mac mouse, which was really good and super cheap).
- antoniuschan99 9y ago
  Jobs, along with Gates are the Entrepreneurs. Engelbart and Kay are the Academics.

leoc 9y ago

2014 comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559 (Also, previous postings from 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 and 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 with a single comment each.)

corford 9y ago

Beautiful interview. Love him or hate him, you have to respect him. I loved this passage: Playboy: Do you know what you want to do with the rest of this lifetime? Jobs: There’s an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: “For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.” As I’m going to be 30 in February, the thought has crossed my mind. Playboy: And? Jobs: And I’m not sure. I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. And that’s what I may try to do. The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind. Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. 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.

hellofunk 9y ago
> For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you. So if you live longer than 60, I wonder that means of those years in-between, after age 30.
- cheez 9y ago
  Trying to undo the damage of the first 30 years.

Brendinooo 9y ago

As someone who grew up in the era of PC clones, it's interesting to me to see so much of the interview focus on the IBM vs. Apple angle. Apple was a non-factor in the 90s and IBM didn't have a very strong presence in the consumer market, at least not more than Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
Other than the Commodore 64 that was entry level and about to crash, the winners of the first half of the 80s were IBM then Apple: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ (Scroll to bottom for graph.) The Amiga should have been a factor by ‘85, if there was parental supervision over there. ;)

Tomminn 9y ago

I've seen this a bunch of times on hn. Each time I read a little more and notice/learn something new. I'll be the first to point out his flaws, but goddam Steve Jobs was a smart guy. It amazes how much he knew exactly what he was doing.

erikb 9y ago

Someone has to say it: So, there are really people reading the interviews!

orph4nus 9y ago

Anyone knows why the "The Playboy Interview: Moguls" (kindle) ebook seems to be no longer available at amazon?

kuharich 9y ago

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559

deleted 9y ago

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ykler 9y ago

Dude is 29 years old and already this timeless bullshit that in my day kids were idealistic and now they just care about money. (Although, maybe there are fluctuations about the mean and 1985 was an extreme.)

ykler 9y ago

"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." He is probably right. And yet, how tragic. Forty hours is not that long. Imagine that the telephone hadn't been invented. Would we still today be living in a society where people went to the telegraph office to send telegraphs but basically no one could telegraph themselves?

shams93 9y ago

Without the influence of LSD I don't think you would have gotten the Mac. You would have gotten Guis inspired by Xerox park but the whole vision of the computer as a work of art and a device to make art that was tied into Jobs inspirations from his psychedelic experiences.

dezzeus 9y ago

> Jobs: [...] there’s been virtually zero innovation since IBM got dominant control of that market place 15 years ago. They are going to do the same thing in every other sector of the computer market place if they can get away with it. The IBM PC fundamentally brought no new technology to the industry at all. It was just repackaging and slight extension of Apple II technology, and they want it all. They absolutely want it all. > This market place is coming down to the two of us, whether we like it or not. I don’t particularly like it, but it’s coming down to Apple and IBM. > [...] > Playboy: It’s not all competition [...]: You buy your disk drives from Sony, for instance. > Jobs: We buy many of our components from [...]. We save a ton of energy not having to make and design floppy-disk drives or microprocessors that we can spend on software. So, nowadays Apple is the new IBM and "needs" serious competition...

mehrdada 9y ago

> 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. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be—not an astronaut, not a football player—but this. Wow. Little did he know it would happen to himself not long after.

drallison 9y ago

I've always thought the Steve Jobs Playboy Interview was a PR coup for Apple (and, in retrospect, Playboy). I suspect Regis McKenna had a hand in both the questions and the answers. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regis_McKenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regis_McKenna)