Here is the full transcript [Edited version] of the YouTube video entitled Steve Jobs: Lost Interview (1990). We produce here the transcript of the tape for the benefit of our readers.
[Audio starts abruptly]
Interviewer: What is it about this machine? Why is this machine so interesting? Why has it been so influential?
Steve Jobs: Hmm, I’ll give you my point of view on it. I remember reading a magazine article a long time ago when I was twelve years ago maybe, in I think it was Scientific American. I’m not sure. And the article proposed to measure the efficiency of locomotion for lots of species on planet earth to see which species was the most efficient at getting from point A to point B. And they measured the kilocalories that each one expended. So they ranked them all and I remember that the Condor won – the Condor was the most efficient at getting from point A to point B. And humankind, the crown of creation came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. So that didn’t look so great.
But let me do this over again, because I am just not sure.
Interviewer: Sure.
Steve Jobs: I remember reading an article when I was about twelve years old. I think it might have been Scientific American where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B? And the Condor 1 came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation. And — but somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. A human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor, all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders. And that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind. Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.
And I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool. Very early stages. And we’ve come only a very short distance. And it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes. I think that’s nothing compared to what’s coming in the next hundred years.
Interviewer: In program six, we’re going to look at some of the past predictions of why people have been so wrong about the future. And one of the notions is that today’s vision of a standalone computer is just as limited as those past visions of it being only a number cruncher. What’s the difference philosophically between a network machine and a standalone machine?
Steve Jobs: Let me answer that question a slightly different way. There have been, if you look at why the majority of people have bought these things so far, there have been two real explosions that have propelled the industry forward. The first one really happened in 1977. And it was the spreadsheets. I remember when Dan Fylstra who ran the company that marketed the first spreadsheet, walked into my office at Apple one day and pulled out this disk from his vest pocket and said, “I have this incredible new program. I call it a visual calculator.” And it became VisiCalc. And that’s what really drove, propelled the Apple to…to the success it achieved more than any other single event. And with the invention of Lotus 123, and I think it was 1982, that’s what really propelled the IBM PC to the level of success that it achieved. So that was the first explosion was the spreadsheet.
The second really big explosion in our industry has been desktop publishing. Happened in 1985 with the Macintosh and the LaserWriter printer. And at that point people could start to do on their desktops things that only typesetters and printers could do prior to that. And that’s been a very big revolution in publishing. And those are really, those two explosions have been the only two real major revolutions which have caused a lot of people to buy these things and use them.
The third one is starting to happen now. And the third one is let’s do for human to human communication what spreadsheets did for financial planning and what desktop publishing did for publishing. Let’s revolutionize it using these desktop devices. And we’re already starting to see the signs of that. As an example in an organization, we’re starting to see that as business conditions change faster and faster with each year, we cannot change our management hierarchical organization very fast relative to the changing business conditions. We can’t have somebody working for a new boss every week. We also can’t change our geographic organization very fast. As a matter of fact even slower than the management one. We can’t be moving people around the country every week. But we can change an electronic organization like that. And what’s starting to happen is as we start to link these computers together with sophisticated networks and great user interfaces, we’re starting to be able to create clusters of people working on a common task in a.. literally in fifteen minutes worth of setup. And these fifteen people can work together extremely efficiently no matter where they are geographically. And no matter who they work for hierarchically. And these organizations can live for as long as they’re needed and then vanish. And we’re finding we can reorganize our companies electronically very rapidly. And that’s the only type of organization that can begin to keep pace with the changing business conditions.
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