4 ms·

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? ...

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).
- robterrell 9y ago
  His miss on networking wasn't just about not understanding ethernet. Remember, this interview predates the assumption that the Internet would win. For a long time that wasn't really clear, and there were many players in walled-garden networks. This was a moment in time when people connected to computer networks over phone lines via modems, and whoever controlled the network most people dialed in to was the biggest player in networked computers. At that time, the biggest was CompuServe. In 1985, Apple started a service called AppleLink that connected apple dealers, developers, and employees. You'd connect through a Mac client app and a dial-up modem. I believe it was built on top of some GE service. They later had Steve Case build "AppleLink Personal Edition" -- more user friendly and with more user content -- which they decided not to ship. Case retained the rights and eventually released it as "America Online" which became the most famous walled garden network. (And much later, Apple released a re-branded AOL as "eWorld". Which means Apple failed multiple times at this connected-netowrk business. No wonder Jobs was all-in on the Internet by the time he announced NeXT.)
julian_1 9y ago
> reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. It's difficult to avoid the comparison with Bill Gate's book "the road ahead" published a decade later, that first neglected and then had to be revised in hardback edition to include the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_boo...
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Gates was wrong about the internet, but he assumed that proprietary networks like MSN, AOL, etc would be the network. Given the dominance of Facebook, etc, he may have been right the first time!
- adventured 9y ago
  Microsoft was utilizing the Internet for business by the mid 1980s, they weren't oblivious to it. Gates viewed there as being two approaches that might win, one he preferred to call the Information Superhighway (basically closed platforms over high-speed cable), and the other being the Internet. He thought the Internet would lose because of how slow it was in the early days, and it was very mediocre at video and interaction initially. Gates and Microsoft were fully aware of the coming value in networking up systems, the only debate was what form that would take, not whether it would be a big deal.
  - julian_1 9y ago
    I remember when the tcp stack for Windows 3x was a third party application. https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/ https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

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).
robterrell 9y ago
His miss on networking wasn't just about not understanding ethernet. Remember, this interview predates the assumption that the Internet would win. For a long time that wasn't really clear, and there were many players in walled-garden networks. This was a moment in time when people connected to computer networks over phone lines via modems, and whoever controlled the network most people dialed in to was the biggest player in networked computers. At that time, the biggest was CompuServe. In 1985, Apple started a service called AppleLink that connected apple dealers, developers, and employees. You'd connect through a Mac client app and a dial-up modem. I believe it was built on top of some GE service. They later had Steve Case build "AppleLink Personal Edition" -- more user friendly and with more user content -- which they decided not to ship. Case retained the rights and eventually released it as "America Online" which became the most famous walled garden network. (And much later, Apple released a re-branded AOL as "eWorld". Which means Apple failed multiple times at this connected-netowrk business. No wonder Jobs was all-in on the Internet by the time he announced NeXT.)

julian_1 9y ago

> reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. It's difficult to avoid the comparison with Bill Gate's book "the road ahead" published a decade later, that first neglected and then had to be revised in hardback edition to include the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_boo...

Spooky23 9y ago
Gates was wrong about the internet, but he assumed that proprietary networks like MSN, AOL, etc would be the network. Given the dominance of Facebook, etc, he may have been right the first time!
adventured 9y ago
Microsoft was utilizing the Internet for business by the mid 1980s, they weren't oblivious to it. Gates viewed there as being two approaches that might win, one he preferred to call the Information Superhighway (basically closed platforms over high-speed cable), and the other being the Internet. He thought the Internet would lose because of how slow it was in the early days, and it was very mediocre at video and interaction initially. Gates and Microsoft were fully aware of the coming value in networking up systems, the only debate was what form that would take, not whether it would be a big deal.
- julian_1 9y ago
  I remember when the tcp stack for Windows 3x was a third party application. https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/ https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]