8 ms·

The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech from 1983: Foreshadowing Wireless Networking & iPad

98 points by peterkchen 14y ago

eckyptang 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    Bit harsh, but I sympathise with your frustration. The "only marketing" trope is so shallow that it is annoying how it survives.
    - eckyptang 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        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 14y ago
        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.
        rustynails77 14y ago
        Don't dismiss Jobsy's (or his team's) contributions out of hand. They knew that an app store was key to the success of Apple's new device, so they made minimal profit off the App store. What Jobsy did was more than marketing - but a lot of it was marketing. He drove things in a particular direction, which makes him somewhat of a visionary - not just a marketer. On the other hand, I agree with the great grand-parent poster. What Apple had was not significantly better, just packaged better. I view that as a visionary rather than marketing.
  - Of_Prometheus 14y ago
    You're being sarcastic, but you're also correct. While the strength of a product may dictate its long-term success, a well-implemented marketing campaign is often the difference between a mediocre product with excellent sales and an excellent product with mediocre sales.
  - voyou 14y ago
    People say "Apple just does just marketing" like marketing is easy or unimportant. But, you know what, Apple's success really is about marketing, and that's a good thing. Apple haven't made that many purely technical innovations, but what they have done is look at new technology, figure out what people might want to do with it, tweak the technology to focus on doing that thing, and then explain to people how Apple's product can help them do something they want to do. This is "marketing," it's what makes technological innovations accessible to people, and it's something Apple should be praised for.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- mmariani 14y ago
  Yeah sure! Let's just call John Sculley to replace Tim Cook. He'll fix Apple good. PS: the "tape" is awesome, thanks.
- w0utert 14y ago
  > 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. Yes, in hindsight it's all so logical. Anybody could have done it, Apple was simply the first to redefine the MP3 market, the digital music distribution market, the phone market, the mobile app market, the laptop market, the tablet market, all by chance. And marketing of course. Marketing and chance, there ain't nothing more to it. Just like founding NeXT, only to buy it 10 years later to create a whole new operating system and foundation of frameworks to program it, agile enough to run on hardware ranging from smartphones to workstations, it was all Jobs' marketing genius. The same marketing genius that founded Pixar, and had Intel scrambling to pay the traditional PC manufacturers to produce the PC equivalents of MacBook Airs. Really, Steve Jobs and Apple are all.marketing, no doubt about it... :-/
zorbo 14y ago
This article is bunk. I'd advise the author to stay far away from fortune tellers and palm readers.
moonsoonmenu 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    my source: http://liliputing.com/2010/10/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-bashes-7-inch-tablets.html http://liliputing.com/2010/10/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-bashes-7-...
    - rustynails77 14y ago
      And jobsy bashed tablets not long before he released the iPad. What jobsy said publicly was not a good basis for what he believed.
    - gman99 14y ago
      About your assertion that the 4inch iPhone is a Tim Cook idea, I doubt it. It was probably in the pipeline for 18months so I'm sure it was signed off by Jobs. Next years products are going to be the first under Tim Cook's reign. And Steve also said that video on iPods was a stupid idea.... a year before he introduced a video iPod (so Apple must've been working on it even as he made that statement)
  - rustynails77 14y ago
    It's brave to say Jobsy held Apple back - he brought Apple back from the ashes. Jobsy supposedly passed on much advice to Tim Cook - on where to go with the next few models. Jobsy may not have been against 4G LTE and a 4 inch screen - he may have recommended Tim to go down that path.
molmalo 14y ago
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-9AD5-4D04-8BB6-015AEBB1C052 http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB... , Min 28 and forward.
- cefstat 14y ago
  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.
001sky 14y ago
Repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4605117 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4605117
goggles99 14y ago
And Sci-Fi has done far more for tech innovation than Steve Jobs. Too bad the authors never get any credit.
jgrahamc 14y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1
DodgyEggplant 14y ago
Startup = Vision
netcan 14y ago
On a side note, is digitizing and distributing this recording violating some copyright?
netcan 14y ago
Wow. He was just 28 when this was recorded, I think.
AimHere 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
elviejo 14y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
    - rmrfrmrf 14y ago
      Jef Raskin was an Apple employee who was responsible for the Macintosh project. Please stop trolling.
    - simonh 14y ago
      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.
otaku888 14y ago
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?
sspiff 14y ago
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.
icebraining 14y ago
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 http://microship.com/resources/technomadic-tools.html
- huxley 14y ago
  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 http://youtu.be/tDaz8vaKzdQ
ryeguy_24 14y ago
I highly recommend listening to this.
agumonkey 14y ago
Almost as if he was born with a single vision that he implemented all the way through his life.

98 points by peterkchen 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  Bit harsh, but I sympathise with your frustration. The "only marketing" trope is so shallow that it is annoying how it survives.
  - eckyptang 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        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.
        rustynails77 14y ago
        Don't dismiss Jobsy's (or his team's) contributions out of hand. They knew that an app store was key to the success of Apple's new device, so they made minimal profit off the App store. What Jobsy did was more than marketing - but a lot of it was marketing. He drove things in a particular direction, which makes him somewhat of a visionary - not just a marketer. On the other hand, I agree with the great grand-parent poster. What Apple had was not significantly better, just packaged better. I view that as a visionary rather than marketing.
- Of_Prometheus 14y ago
  You're being sarcastic, but you're also correct. While the strength of a product may dictate its long-term success, a well-implemented marketing campaign is often the difference between a mediocre product with excellent sales and an excellent product with mediocre sales.
- voyou 14y ago
  People say "Apple just does just marketing" like marketing is easy or unimportant. But, you know what, Apple's success really is about marketing, and that's a good thing. Apple haven't made that many purely technical innovations, but what they have done is look at new technology, figure out what people might want to do with it, tweak the technology to focus on doing that thing, and then explain to people how Apple's product can help them do something they want to do. This is "marketing," it's what makes technological innovations accessible to people, and it's something Apple should be praised for.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
mmariani 14y ago
Yeah sure! Let's just call John Sculley to replace Tim Cook. He'll fix Apple good. PS: the "tape" is awesome, thanks.
w0utert 14y ago
> 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. Yes, in hindsight it's all so logical. Anybody could have done it, Apple was simply the first to redefine the MP3 market, the digital music distribution market, the phone market, the mobile app market, the laptop market, the tablet market, all by chance. And marketing of course. Marketing and chance, there ain't nothing more to it. Just like founding NeXT, only to buy it 10 years later to create a whole new operating system and foundation of frameworks to program it, agile enough to run on hardware ranging from smartphones to workstations, it was all Jobs' marketing genius. The same marketing genius that founded Pixar, and had Intel scrambling to pay the traditional PC manufacturers to produce the PC equivalents of MacBook Airs. Really, Steve Jobs and Apple are all.marketing, no doubt about it... :-/

zorbo 14y ago

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

moonsoonmenu 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  my source: http://liliputing.com/2010/10/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-bashes-7-inch-tablets.html http://liliputing.com/2010/10/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-bashes-7-...
  - rustynails77 14y ago
    And jobsy bashed tablets not long before he released the iPad. What jobsy said publicly was not a good basis for what he believed.
  - gman99 14y ago
    About your assertion that the 4inch iPhone is a Tim Cook idea, I doubt it. It was probably in the pipeline for 18months so I'm sure it was signed off by Jobs. Next years products are going to be the first under Tim Cook's reign. And Steve also said that video on iPods was a stupid idea.... a year before he introduced a video iPod (so Apple must've been working on it even as he made that statement)
- rustynails77 14y ago
  It's brave to say Jobsy held Apple back - he brought Apple back from the ashes. Jobsy supposedly passed on much advice to Tim Cook - on where to go with the next few models. Jobsy may not have been against 4G LTE and a 4 inch screen - he may have recommended Tim to go down that path.

molmalo 14y ago

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

cefstat 14y ago
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.

001sky 14y ago

Repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4605117 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4605117

goggles99 14y ago

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

jgrahamc 14y ago

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

DodgyEggplant 14y ago

Startup = Vision

netcan 14y ago

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

netcan 14y ago

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

AimHere 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.

elviejo 14y ago

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

DeepDuh 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
  - rmrfrmrf 14y ago
    Jef Raskin was an Apple employee who was responsible for the Macintosh project. Please stop trolling.
  - simonh 14y ago
    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.

otaku888 14y ago

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?

sspiff 14y ago

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.

icebraining 14y ago

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 http://microship.com/resources/technomadic-tools.html

huxley 14y ago
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 http://youtu.be/tDaz8vaKzdQ

ryeguy_24 14y ago

I highly recommend listening to this.

agumonkey 14y ago

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