A look back at Steve Jobs’ 1983 Aspen talk, where he foresaw computers becoming the main medium of communication, portable devices with wireless links, and software delivered electronically. The piece reviews what he predicted correctly, where he was too optimistic, and includes a personal story highlighting Apple’s flat management approach that preceeded Sun Microsystems’ sprawling virtual teams.

Contents

Steve Jobs’ talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen

In 1983, Steve Jobs delivered a talk that, in hindsight, reads as part prophecy, part product pitch, and part earnest manifesto. This was the era of the Apple Lisa, the IBM PC was still a relative novelty, and most people hadn’t laid their hands on any sort of personal computer at all.

I recently revisited the transcript of that speech. It’s a remarkable window into Jobs’ thinking before the Macintosh launched, before the iPhone, before Apple became the most valuable company in the world. Below, I’ll draw out the most striking ideas, summarise what he predicted, and offer a bit of commentary on where he was spot on – and where time proved him wrong or merely optimistic.

Video

Key Points and Predictions

1. Computers as a New Medium of Communication
Jobs argued that computers weren’t just tools but an entirely new medium, comparable to the book, radio, or television. He predicted that in their lifetimes, children of the 1980s would grow up in a society where computers became the primary means of communication.

2. The Rise of Fractional Horsepower Computing
He made an analogy to electric motors. Just as smaller, cheaper motors transformed industry and households, microcomputers (what he called fractional horsepower computers) would become ubiquitous. Apple, he claimed, had gotten there five years ahead of everyone else.

3. Exponential Growth of Personal Computing
Jobs forecast that by 1986, Americans would buy more computers than cars. He stressed that industrial design would become critical as people spent hours each day interacting with them.

4. Software as the Heart of Computing
He spoke about software not merely as a product but as an archetypal set of ideas – programmes that captured the principles behind experiences, not just the experiences themselves. This was a precursor to the idea that software would “eat the world”.

5. The Vision for a Computer in a Book
Perhaps most presciently, Jobs laid out Apple’s aspiration: to build a powerful computer the size of a book, with a radio link to communicate without wires. He openly admitted this was technically impossible in 1983 but promised it would arrive within a decade.

6. The Cultural Dimension
He lamented how most industrial design – cars, watches, cameras – was no longer led by American firms. He saw computers as an opportunity to reverse this decline and bring craftsmanship, design and humanistic sensibility back to the forefront.

7. The Need for Accessible Education
Jobs detailed Apple’s early educational initiatives, like giving away computers to every school in California, and the importance of helping people learn to use computers rather than forcing them to program.

8. Future of Software Distribution
He predicted software would be distributed electronically over phone lines, with consumers sampling programmes before purchase – in effect, describing the App Store nearly twenty years before it existed.

What He Got Right

Jobs was remarkably on target in several areas:

• Computers as a Communication Medium: The Internet, email, messaging, and eventually social media all validated his belief that computers would become the default way we share ideas.
• Ubiquity of Personal Computing: The prediction that computers would outnumber cars was, if anything, an underestimate. There are billions of personal devices in the world today.
• Importance of Design: Apple’s later success proved that industrial design matters immensely. People do care what their devices look and feel like.
• Software Distribution Over Networks: While he was talking about phone lines, he accurately foresaw the end of physical software and the rise of instant delivery.
• Computers in Education: Apple’s focus on education was an early sign of how critical digital literacy would become.
• Portable Computing: The idea of a computer “in a book” with wireless connectivity was essentially the iPad and the MacBook Air decades later.

Where He Was Off (a Bit or a Lot)

Jobs was visionary but also, at times, wildly optimistic:

• Timeline for Voice Recognition: He guessed it would be mainstream in about a decade. In reality, it took nearly thirty years before Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant became usable.
• Decentralisation of Knowledge: He imagined that distributed tools would empower citizens to track government testimony and write letters to their MPs daily. In truth, while the information explosion did occur, we’re still grappling with how to make sense of it.
• Computers as Sole Medium: While computers became essential, other devices – especially smartphones – overtook the standalone PC as the dominant platform.
• The End of Programming: He thought that software would eventually be “connecting the dots” visually, making programming obsolete for most users. While low-code and no-code tools are common today, the reality is that programming remains alive and well.
• Educational Equality: Jobs believed putting one computer in every school would significantly level the playing field. It helped, but the digital divide persisted and has become more complex, not less.

Reflections

Reading the transcript, the sheer conviction Jobs struck me had that this new medium would reshape civilisation. It is easy, from the vantage point of 2025, to forget how strange and intimidating computers felt to most people in the early 1980s. Jobs didn’t just want to make them accessible. He wanted them to be beautiful, approachable, and capable of unlocking human potential in ways books or television never could.

His ideas about design as a language, about technology as culture, and about the computer as a bridge between disciplines are all threads that Apple would weave into its DNA for decades. Even when he got it wrong, it was often only a matter of timing.

I always smile when I hear Jobs talk about the Catholic Church having four layers of management and how Apple would never need more. At Sun Microsystems, where I spent years, we prided ourselves on having only three levels of management between any employee and Scott McNealy. In theory, it was beautifully flat. In practice, it meant every manager ended up with absurdly large “teams.”

You couldn’t realistically lead 400+ people directly, so we had to create virtual teams to give the illusion of structure. In the UK, for example, our Systems Engineering team was split into four pseudo-divisions, aligned to our Sales engagement model: Government, Finance, Telco, and Everything Else (it had a bullshit name, like midmarket, lol). It was an artificial hierarchy layered over a flat hierarchy, and it worked only because everyone was quietly pretending it was real. When I tell people about this nowadays (2025), they look at me with incredulity, like I must be talking out of my hat… but I was there, dude.  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Above all, this speech is a reminder that technological revolutions don’t just happen because the tools get cheaper or faster. They happen because people with conviction insist they can and must be made better, and because they dare to imagine a world nobody else can quite see yet.

Appendix – Full Transcript

[Appluase]

Morning

Introductions are really funny… they paid me $60 so I wore a tie um how many people how many of you are 36 years older than 36 years old yeah all you were born pre-computer the computer’s uh 36 years
old and there’s something sort of I think that that there’s going to be a little slice in the timeline of history
as we look back pretty meaningful slice right there um a lot of you are products of
the television generation uh I’m pretty much a product of the television generation but to some extent starting
to be a product of the computer generation and the kids growing up now are definitely products of the computer generation and uh in their lifetimes the
computer will become the predominant medium of communication just as the television took over from the r radio uh
took over from even the book um boy I’ll talk about anything you
want to talk about today I have about 15 or 20 minutes of stuff that I I just wanted to cover really quickly and then
whatever you want to talk about we can talk about how’s that yeah how many of you own an apple any or just any personal computer
uhoh how many of you have used one or seen one anything like that good okay
okay uh let’s start off with what is a computer what is a computer it’s really
simple it’s just a simple machine but it’s a new type of machine uh the gears
the Pistons have been replaced with electrons how many of you ever seen an electron that’s the problem with
computers is that you can’t get your hands on the actual things that are moving around you can’t see them and so
they tend to be very intimidating because in a very small space there’s billions of electrons running around and
we can’t really get a hold on on exactly what they look like computers are very
adaptive it’s a very adaptive machine we can move the electrons around differently to different places
depending upon the current state of affairs the results of the last time we move the electrons around so if you were
here last night and you heard about the brain and how it’s very adaptive a computer is in the same way very very
adaptive second thing about a computer it’s very new it was invented 36 years ago in 1947 the world’s first degree
in computer science offered by a university which was University of California at Berkeley and it was a master’s degree was offered in 1968
which means uh the oldest person that has a degree in computer science is 39 years old and the average age of
professionals at Apple’s under 30 so it’s a field that’s dominated by fairly young
people third thing about computers they’re really dumb they’re exceptionally simple but they’re really
fast the raw instructions that we have to feed these little
microprocessors the even the raw instructions that we have to feed these giant cray1 supercomputers are the most
trivial of instructions they’re get some data from here get a number from here
fetch a number add two numbers together test to see if it’s bigger than zero go put it over there it’s the most mundane
thing you could ever imagine but the key thing about it is is
that let’s say I could move 100 times faster than than anyone in here in the blink of your eye I could run out there
and I could grab a a bouquet of fresh spring flowers or something and I could run back in here and I could snap my fingers and you’d all think I was a
magician or something and yet I was basically doing a series of really simple instructions moving running out
there grabbing some flowers running back snapping my fingers but I could just do them so fast that you would think that
there was something magical going on it’s exact same way with the computer it can go grab these numbers and add them together and throw over here at the rate
of about a million instructions per second and so we tend to think there’s something magical going on when in
reality there’s just a series of these simple instructions now what we do is we take these very very simple instructions
and we by building a collection of these things build a higher level instruction
so instead of saying Turn Right Left Foot Right Foot Left Foot Right Foot extend hand grab flowers run back I can
say could you go get some flowers could you pour a cup of coffee and we start we have started in the last 20 years to
deal with computers in higher and higher levels of abstraction but ultimately
these levels of abstraction get translated down into these stupid instructions that run really fast let’s
look at the brief history of computers best way to understand it’s probably an analogy uh take the electric motor the
electric motor was first invented in the late 1800s and when it was first invented it was only possible to build a very very large one which meant that it
could only be cost Justified for very large large applications and therefore electric motors did not proliferate very
fast at all but the next breakthrough was when somebody took one
of these large electric motors and they ran a shaft through the middle of a factory and through a series of belts and pulleys brought shared this the
horsepower of this one large electric motor on 15 or 20 medium-sized workstations thereby allowing one
electric motor to be cost Justified on some mediums scale tasks and electric
motors proliferated even further then but the real breakthrough was the invention of the fractional horsepower electric motor we could then bring the
horsepower directly to where it was needed and cost Justified on a totally individual application and I think there’s about 55 or so fractional
horsepower motors now in every household if we look at the development
of computers we see a real parallel we look the first computer was called the eniac in 1947 it was developed
particularly for ballistic uh military calculations it was giant hardly anyone
got a chance to use it the real breakthrough the next real
breakthrough was in the’ 60s with the invention of what was called time sharing and what we did was we took one of these very large computers and we
shared it since it could execute so many instructions so quickly we’d run some on Fred’s job over here and then we’d run
some on Sally’s job and we’d run some on Don’s job and we’d run some on Susie’s job and we’d share this thing and it was
so fast that everyone would think they had the whole computer to themselves time sharing was what really started to proliferate computers in the 60s and
most of you if you’ve used computer terminals connected with some umbilical cord to some large computer somewhere else that’s time sharing that’s what got
computers on college campuses in large numbers the reason Apple exists is
because we stumbled on to fractional horsepower Computing five years before anybody else that’s the reason we exist
we took these microprocessor chips which is sort of a computer on a chip and we surrounded it with all the other stuff
you need to interact with a computer we made a computer that was about 13 pounds and people would look at it and they’d
say well where’s the computer this is just the terminal we’d say no that is the computer and after about five minutes of repeating this they’ finally
a light bulb would go on in their minds and they decide if they didn’t like it they could throw it out the window or run over it with their car but that this
was the entire computer that’s why we exist fractional horsepower Computing
this fractional horsepower Computing created a revolution it was invented in 1976 the first personal
computer this year in 1983 the industry is going to ship over 3 million of the little
buggers 3 million by 1986 we’re going to ship more computers than automobiles in
this country and let me digress for a minute one of the reasons I’m here is because I need your help if you’ve looked at
computers they look like garbage all the great product designers are off designing automobiles or they’re
off designing buildings but hardly any of them were designing computers and if
we take a look um we’re going to sell those 3 million computers this year
we’re going to sell those 10 million computers in ‘ 86 whether they look like a piece of or they look great it
doesn’t really matter because people are going to just suck this stuff up so fast that they’re going to do it no matter
what it looks like and it doesn’t cost any more money to make it look great there are going to be these objects this
new object that’s going to be in everyone’s working environment and it’s going to be in everyone’s educational environment and it’s going to be in
everyone’s home environment and we have a shot at putting a great object there or if we don’t we’re going to put one
more piece of junk object there buy n you know by an 86 87 pick a
year people are going to be spending more time interacting with these machines than they do interacting with their big automobile machines today
people are going to be spending two three hours a day sometimes interacting with these machines longer than they
spend in a car and so the industrial design the software design and how
people interact with these things certainly must be given the consideration that we give automobiles
today if not a lot more and if you take a look what we’ve got is we’ve got a
situation where most of the automobiles are not being designed in the United States Europe Japan televisions audio
Electronics watches cameras bicycles calculators you name it most of the objects of our life are not designed in
America we’ve blown it we’ve blown it from an industrial point of view because we’ve lost the markets to the foreign
competitors we’ve also blown it in a design point point of view and I think we have a chance focusing on this new
Computing technology meeting people in the 80s the fact that computers in society out on a first date in the 80s
we have a chance to make these things beautiful and we have a chance to communicate something through the design
of the the objects themselves in addition to that we’re going to spend over $ hundred million in the next 12
months on media advertising Apple alone IBM will spend at least an equivalent amount and we generate tens of millions
of dollars worth of brochures posters more than the Auto industry again as a
comparison and this stuff can either be great or it can be lousy and we need
help we really really need your help okay let’s go back to this
revolution what is happening what’s happening is the personal computer is a new medium of communication one of the
media and so what’s a medium it’s a technology
communication a book is a medium telephone radio television these are mediums of communication and each medium
has pitfalls to it has shortcomings has boundaries which you can’t cross but it also generally has some new unique
opportunities the neat thing is that each medium shapes not only the communication that goes through it but
it shapes the process of communication perfect example if you compare the telephone to
what we’re seeing now in electronic mail where we link a bunch of computers together and we can send messages to an electronic mailbox which people can then
receive at their Leisure we see that indeed in one sense we’re sending Voice through these wires and in another sense
we’re sending ones and zeros through these wires so the content that’s traveling through the medium is certainly different but the most
interesting thing that’s different is the process of communication when I talk on a telephone with anyone we both have
to be on the phone at the same time when I’m working or when I want to send something to somebody with a computer
terminal I want to do a drawing and zip it over and put it in their mailbox they don’t need to be there they can retrieve
it at 12 a.m. in the morning they can retrieve it 3 days later they can be in New York and retrieve it one of these
days when we have portable computers with radio links they can be walking around Aspen and retrieve it and so the
process of communication itself changes as the mediums
evolve so when I’m claiming is that computers are a medium and that personal computers are a new and different medium
from large computers what happens when a new medium enters the scene is that we tend to fall back into Old media habits
and let’s look at let’s look at a few transitions from one medium to another radio to television television to this
incredible new interactive medium of the video dis if you go back and you look at the first television shows they’re
basically radio shows with a television camera pointed at them and it took us the better part of the 50s to really
understand how television was going to come into its own as its own medium and I really think the first time that that
a lot of people were shook into realizing the television had come of age was the JFK
funeral the nation a lot of the world experienced the JFK funeral in their living room at a level of intensity that
wouldn’t have been possible with radio I think another more upbeat example was the Apollo
Landing that experience was not possible with the previous medium and it took us the better part of 20 years for that one
to really evolve let’s look at the next transition we have this Optical video disc which
can store 55,000 images on a side or an hour of video randomly accessible what
are we using it for movies we’re dropping back into the old
media habits and there’s a few experiments though that are starting to happen and you start to believe that 5
years 10 years from now that’s going to come into its own a neat experiment happened right here here in Aspen uh MIT
came out to Aspen about four or five years I think about four years ago and they had this truck with this camera on it and they went down every single
Street photographed every single intersection in every single Street in Aspen they photographed all the
buildings and they’ve got this computer and this video disc hooked up together and on the screen you see yourself
looking down a street and you can touch the screen and there’s some arrows on the screen and you can touch walk forward and all of a sudden this it’s
just like you’re walking forward in the street and you get to an section and you can stop and you can look right and you
can look straight and you can look left and you can decide which way you want to go you can even go in some of the shops
it’s an electronic map that gives you the feeling you’re walking through Aspen then there’s four little buttons in the corner because they came back and they
did exactly the same thing all four seasons so you can be looking down a street hit winter all of a sudden you
get the same street with three feet of snow on it it’s really amazing that’s not incredibly useful but it
points it points to some of the interactive nature of this new medium
which is just starting to break out from movies and is going to take another 5 to 10 years to evolve okay let’s go back to computers
we’re in the I Love Lucy stage right now in our medium development what we did
was micro computers personal computers first come on the scene what do we do we fall back into Old media habits we run
these weird languages like cobal we do business accounting on them that’s
that’s the kind of stuff we have been doing on them historically it took us about four years before we started
breaking out of that and we’re just starting to break out of it now when you look at
Lisa Lisa enables a person like me I’m not an artist in the sense that many of you are I can sit down and I can draw
artistic pictures with that thing because there’s a program called Lisa draw and if I don’t like what I’ve just
drawn I can erase it I can move it I can shrink it I can grow it I can change its texture there’s a little airbrush the
more I scrub the darker it gets I can put soft edges on things hard edges on
things and so I I have no Talent at drawing at all can make neat drawings
and then I can cut them out and I can paste them into my documents so that I can combine pictures and words and then
I can send it onto the electronic mailbox so somebody else that’s living here in Aspen can dial up a phone number
and get their mail and see this drawing that I made so we’re starting to break out and you can just see it now and it’s
really exciting so where we are is that the personal computer computer is a new medium and
that society and computers are really meeting for the first time in the 80s in
15 years it’s going to be all over in terms of this first phase getting these tools out into society in large numbers
but during the next 15 years if we really we have an opportunity to do it great or to do it so
so and uh what a lot of us at Apple are working on is trying to do it
great I want to look at one last thing then we can talk about whatever you want to talk about um what is a computer
program do you know what a computer program is anybody no sort of sort of
it’s an odd thing it’s really an odd thing it’s it’s you can’t if I mean you’ve never seen an electron but
computer programs have no physical manifestation at all they’re simply ideas expressed on paper
computer programs are archetypal what do I mean by that let’s compare computer programming to television programming
again if you go back and you look at the tapes of the JFK funeral in 1963 I
guess you’ll start to cry you will feel a lot of the same feelings you felt when
you were watching that 20 years ago why because through the art of Television
programming we are very good at capturing a set of experiences and
experience two experiences 20 experiences and being able to recreate them we’re very good at that it takes a
lot of money and it’s somewhat limited but we can do a pretty good job of that you can really feel the excitement of
Neil Armstrong landing on the moon computer programming does something
a little different what computer programming does is it captures the underlying principles of an
experience the not the experience itself but the underlying principles of the experience and those principles can
enable thousands of different experiences that all follow those laws if you will and the perfect example is
the video game what is the video game do it follows the laws of gravity of
angular momentum and it sets up this stupid little Pawn game but the ball always follows these laws no two Pawn
games are ever the same and yet every single Pawn game follows these underlying principles give you another
example there’s a neat program called Hammer Robi and Hammer Robi there’s seven-year-old kids playing this and
it’s a game and you comes up on the screen he goes and you’re King hamurabi goes oh king hamurabi and you get to be king hamurabi of the ancient Kingdom of
Sumeria for 10 years comes oh King hamurabi this is year one you have a thousand bushels of weed and storage you
have 100 people and you have 100 acres of land land is trading at 24 bushels an acre would you like to sell any land no
would you like to buy any land no how much would you like to plant or feed how much would you like to plant and it
turns out that if you don’t plant enough some of your people will starve the next year and if you plant a lot then people
will come from the surrounding Villages because you got a hot Village to live in and you feed them well so you plant you
plant a certain amount but you need a then it says um how much oh I’m sorry so
you feed your people a certain amount then it asks you how much would you like to plant and you have to plant so much
as well in order to get the grain the next year but you can’t plant more Acres
then you have people to plant the acres and so if you go on a land buying spree at the beginning and you don’t feed your
your people well because you spend all your grain buying land then you don’t have the people to plant the land so it doesn’t do any good if you don’t plant
the land and you feed your people a ton all these other people come from the surrounding Villages but they starve the next year and there are these
seven-year-old and it goes on year two year three and every once in a while it throws in the rats ate some of the Grain and you’re in deep trouble what are you going to do kill some people or sell
some land or whatever and it’s crude but basically there are
these seven-year-old kids playing with this macroeconomic model and you can argue about the the content
of the model but one thing you can’t argue about they will sit there for hours and play that and learn and we’ve
got to get our models better and better and more sophisticated but that is an interactive way of learning that none of
us ever had when we were growing up and again thousands of individual experiences but all based on that one
set of underlying principles when I was um going to school
I um had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers and the thing that
that probably kept me out of jail was books because I could go read what Aristotle wrote or what Plato wrote uh
and uh I didn’t have to have an intermediary in the way and a book was a phenomenal thing it
got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle the problem was you can’t ask
Aristotle a question and I think as we look towards the next
50 to 100 years if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying
Spirit or an underlying set of principles or an underlying way of looking at the world then when the next
Aristotle comes around maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life his or her whole
life and types in all this stuff then maybe someday after the person’s dead and gone we can ask this machine hey
what what would aerostyle have said what about this and maybe we won’t get the right answer but maybe we will and
that’s really exciting to me and that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing so what do you want to talk
[Applause]
about yeah
yeah it’s a mess
okay okay how are these computers all going to work together
um they’re going to probably work together a lot like people sometimes they’re going to work together really well and other times they’re not going
to work together so well what we’ve got now is we are putting a lot of computers
out that are made to be used pretty much in a what we call a standalone mode one person one computer but it isn’t very
long before you get a community of users using these things that really want to hook them all together because
ultimately a computer is going to be a tool for communication so they want to hook them together and communicate and
over the next five years the standards for doing this are going to evolve they all speak different languages right now
and uh there’s oh man I heard a funny story We we’ve talked a lot with
AT&T um American Bell Etc and there’s a a funny story
um about the this is a true story when the old I talked to this old guy who was about 80 years old and he was one of the
original telephone installers and he would go out and he’d install telephones in people in farmh houses and they had
never seen anything like this and uh it takes two wires he’d run the two wires down and and he’d hook up the phone and
he was out installing this phone uh for this Italian family in this farm
and he finished installing the phone and the guy asked him well can I speak Italian on this phone and he said why
didn’t you tell me I got to run a third wire it’ll be $50 extra so that’s where
we are today
and what happened there’s been a few installations where people have hooked these things together together the one
installation that stands out is is a Xerox did at a place called palala Research Center or park for short and
they hooked about 100 100 computers together on a what’s called a local area network which is just a cable that
carries all this information back and forth and an interesting thing happened when they did that what happened was was
that you’d have a distribution list so you’d want to send a memo to all the people in this group and so you’d say
Okay you’d write a memo and you’d send it to the distribution list for all the people interested in the November 4
or a new product Delta or whatever you’re working on but then an interesting thing happened uh there were
20 people and they were interested in volleyball so a volleyball distribution list evolved and when there was a the
volleyball game next week was changed you’d write a quick memo and send it to the volleyball distribution list then there was a Chinese food cooking list
and before long there were more lists than people and it was a very very
interesting phenomenon because I think that that’s exactly what’s going to happen is that as we start to tie these
things together they’re going to facilitate communication and facilitate bringing people together in the special
interests that they have we’re we’re about five years away from really
solving the problems of hooking these computers together in the office and we’re about 10 to 15 years away of
solving the problems of hooking them together in the home uh and a lot of people working on
it but it’s a pretty Fierce problem now Apple strategy is really simple
what we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you that you
can learn how to use in 20 minutes that’s what we want to do we want to do it this decade and we really want to do
it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers we don’t
know how to do that now it’s impossible technically so we had three options one was to do nothing and as I mentioned
we’re all pretty young and impatient so that was not a good option the second one was to put a piece of garbage
computer in a book and we can do that but our competitors are doing that and so we don’t need to do that the the third option was to design
the computer that we want to put into the book eventually even though we can’t put it into the book now and right now
it fits in a bread box and it’s $10,000 and it’s called Lisa and it just so turns out that
fortunately there is a giant office Market out there that is buying these things a lot faster than we can make
them we’re sold out for the next year and we’ll sell over $ hundred million of those things the first
year so fortunately there is an office marketplace where enhancing personal
productivity is absolutely worth $10,000 a person and they’re gobbling these things up and they will pay for the
development of this new technology the next thing we will do is we will find a way to put it in a in a shoe box and
sell it for like $2,500 and that’ll be the next step and finally
we’ll find a way to get it in a book and sell it for under $1,000 and we will be there within five to seven years and
that’s what we’re working pretty singularly on yeah
yeah it is a little crude right okay uh let me tell you that what
we’re planning to do to sort of be able to provide tools for graphic design that’ll never be our Fort
um our Fort is going to be PE just people and relative to nothing what we
can give them in the next 5 years is a lot and eventually we’ll get to the point where people can create um images
that are as good as they could create any other way but it’s going to take the better part of this decade to be able to
get it down to a price level that people can afford but we’re doing some things now every computer to date has used a
weird type on the screen as you known the eyes are just as wide as the W’s
they’re nonproportionally spaced fonts we call them you call them and um it’s
really been impossible POs to use multiple fonts on the screen at any given time matter of fact the fonts have been just garbage and it’s really been
impossible to embed any kind of graphics with text if you take a look at Lisa it
is totally proportionally spaced text we have 30 40 fonts on the screen that come
out at approximately 80 dots per in inch resolution on the screen approximately up to 300 dots per in inch resolution on
a laser printer and that’s where we are today and what you’re saying is we really want to go to Six s 800 dots per
inch on a laser film printer we’re not there yet but we’re solving the problems of injecting some liberal arts into
these computers that’s what we’re trying to do right now let’s get proportionally spaced fonts in there let’s get multiple
fonts in there let’s get Graphics in there so that we can deal in pictures and let’s get to the point where three
years from now when somebody there is going to be no college student three or four years from now that’s ever going to think of writing a paper without one of
these things just like they will not think of going to a science class without a calculator today and where we’ve got to
get to is where people 3 four years from now are using these things they go wasn’t this the way it always was that’s where we’re trying to get to
now once we get to there then we can look at some of the other stuff
yeah yeah I only heard part of which part you’re talking about the people having these big databases about your
life orac the Privacy
issue okay um I guess what I see now is
um an incredible amount of information but not a very great ability to distill
any sort of knowledge or wisdom out of that information we are all bombarded with information every day and there is
so much information in data banks um in Congressional budgets in testimony uh in
books Journal articles being published every day and our ability to turn all
that information to filter it to what we’re interested in and to turn it into something useful to us into some
knowledge is very low so I think if we’re really interested in a
distributed um Society where the ability to understand
things and the ability to distill information Knowledge from information
is possess by everyone that the first thing we’ve got to do is give tools to people to help them do that because
right now those tools are centralized do you see what I’m saying
so I think the first step towards ensuring that uh we don’t get a
concentration of something something that you don’t want is to distribute that intelligence if you will that can
turn all this this information into some sort of knowledge for us so that we can get on and we can look at Congressional
any Congressional testimony that has to do with gun control any Journal articles published any newspaper articles published so that I can come home and on
a weekend peruse the weekly outpouring of information but put a filter on it because I’m only interested in gun
control and I can find out that my congressman gave some testimony last week about gun control that I didn’t agree with so I can get on and write a
pretty nasty letter and Zing it on the email system and make sure that at least one of his AIDS will read it tomorrow and I think that that probably
is a lot more important than worrying about these Global databases
um I don’t I don’t think that you’re going to find
um we’re moving rapidly into an era of electronic funds transfer and I think
that’s probably the thing that people are most concerned about right now because you could keep a history of
our whereabouts and things like that just based on financial transactions and I think that’s the thing people are most
concerned about right now but I haven’t heard a ton of issues concerning um
these giant databases knowing everything about us that had much substance to them the thing I’m most concerned with is the ability to turn all this stuff into
something we can do something about does that make any sense I didn’t get my sleep last night so I’m a little fzy
yeah mention
en what is computer doing in this area as a public service ah Public Service
um we we don’t do things because we think they’re Public Services we do them because we think they ought to be done I
guess we do them because we we want to do them um we’re doing a few things the first thing we’re doing uh
is there’s a situation that’s occurring in schools right now in
that this all started a governor the former Governor of California Governor Brown started this thing called the
California Commission on Industrial innovation in 1980 it turns out you know
we’re a um we’ll do about a billion dollars this year and we have a business plan that looks out five years it’s not
always accurate but it shows us the trends shows us the general directions shows us some of the pitfalls California
is um oh 22 I think $300 billion economy G&P
basically is associated with California and uh California doesn’t have anything
there isn’t one scrap of paper there didn’t used to be one scrap of paper written down so Governor Brian got all these people together and said we we got
to figure out where we’re going because we don’t want to have a planned economy but we need the infrastructure to support it and infrastructure takes time
to build so we have to at least understand the trends if you want to be turning out more Engineers next year you can’t start this year you have to have
started five years ago you have to train the teachers etc etc so what infrastructure we going to need to support the growth well the first thing
we looked at was employment jobs and what we found was that about 44% of the new jobs in
California in the 1980s come directly and indirectly from high technology and we looked at that and we said and
what are we going to do to further that and what’s going to hinder that and we there were three things that came up but the biggest one was education by a long
shot we looked at the education systems and we are turning out almost as many welders in California as we are computer
scientists and these welders are coming out of school and there ain’t any jobs for them and this is just a a minute
example of the problem and so one of the things that Apple decided to do this is this is not going to make a giant
difference but it could be a catalyst to get something started is we decided we wanted to give a computer to every school in
America and there’s 100,000 schools in America and we figured if there was just one there at least the kids that were
interested would somehow find a way to get to it and possibly they would start to understand a little bit about what
computers were maybe integrate them into one or two classes
um and so we figured that that would cost uh approximately $50 million and
we’d go broke so we went to Congress and we said look we’ll pay 10 of this if you
pay 40 of it that’s 10 right out of our bank account and just to give you a perspective on it uh in 1981 Apple made
$40 million total after working our butts off for a year and so we were willing to spend 25% of our 81 profits
to do that and uh we got very close to getting this passed but but Bob Dole in the Senate killed it because he didn’t
really understand it but California being the Bell weather state it was pass the same law because we pay California
tax and so we call the program the kids can’t wait the kids can’t wait
for educational bureaucracy to get around to it the kids can’t wait for their parents to understand about it buy
them one so we’re just going to get one in there right now and we are uh the law got passed in California we’ve got there
are 10,000 schools in California the program was announced UH 60 days ago and starting next month we roll out 10,000
computers one free to every school in
California and and I guess the important thing though to restate this isn’t going to fundamentally change the problem but
at least it’s going to get one computer in there so that if there is a student especially in one of the schools that can’t afford these things which is
another thing that concerns us this computer have computer have not split at least they’ll get exposure to one so
yeah constantly told by 2 85% of will be the information bu how do you feel oh um
well over half of the gross national product is contributed by companies and people that are already in the
information business today and that’s true um most of the
people that got laid off from General Motors are never going to go back to work at General Motors ever ever ever
and unless we retrain them and give them skills they’re going to burn the cities down and that’s one of the biggest
problems facing us right now it’s real easy to talk high-tech it’s real hard to take all these guys that have been
putting fenders on for 15 years you know servicing computers it’s going to be
really really hard and we’re not paying enough attention to it right now but we’re already in the information age
we’re ready there now most of us manipulate information for a living yeah
right that’s right here’s a challenge for you want to just make a great
contribution have fun make zillions of dollars all at the same time
um there is there are about 20,000 programs for the Apple 2 there’s for the
IBM PC which is the second most popular one now there’s about maybe 2,000 programs that’s a lot and you go to buy
one of these things and you don’t know what to buy so you go ask the computer dealer which one should I buy and that
person doesn’t know they’re out selling computers they’re not looking at software and so they give you a answer and you buy it and maybe you’re
happy and maybe you’re not now compare that to records most people walking into a record store know exactly what record
they want to buy they don’t go up and say what record should I
buy they know exactly what record they want to buy because there is the phenomenon of the radio station a free
samp l so that we make our decisions before we go in to the distribution
center for the records we need the equivalent in the software business we need a software radio station P quote
unquote and what’s going to happen is is that I think right now we software is
information and the information is expressed with a bunch of ones and zeros and what we do now is we take those ones
and zeros and we encode them magnetically on this piece of myar with a bunch of G on the surface of it that REM MERS the ones and zeros we take it
we put it in a package with a manual we take that we put it on a truck we ship it to a dealer they take it out of the
truck they put it on the Shelf it sits there for a while costing the money a customer comes in peruses them and picks
one out takes it home shoves it in their computer and it translates it back to electrical impulses of ones and zeros
now I mean that’s a pretty long path where we’ll be going is transmitting this stuff electronically over the phone
lines to where when you want to buy a piece of software we take our ones and zeros and you never you ever push a touch tone phone in
your right we’ll send tones over the phone that the computers will understand and go directly from computer to
computer that’s what we’ll be doing once we do that maybe it’s possible to say well we’ll give you 30 seconds of this
program for free or we’ll give you five screenshots we’ll let you play with it for a day and if you want to buy it just
type in your Visa number and you got it I don’t know how we’re going to do it but we need a radio
station yeah
right okay
um there are two things to do to get people and computers together one thing
is to make computers easier to use and the other thing is for people to get more and more familiar with the concepts
um how many people here own a hulet packer calculator yeah not a lot how many
people know about them right do you know the difference between reverse polish notation and the way the ti ones work
how the hp1 sort of work backwards right do you know about that no some of you do
though right probably maybe a quarter of you maybe um if you had like tried to
explain that to somebody 10 years ago it would have been just like computers are now and yet in 10 years um you know the
hp35 was first introduced in 1972 uh in 10 years people gradually
understand some of these Concepts if you’d given one of these Casio watches which he got 18 alarms and plays music
for you and everything else to somebody 10 years ago and tried to explain to him how to set the alarm and stuff like that
uh it wouldn’t have been possible automatic banking machines etc etc so gradually the the the level of technical
literacy is rising the problem is we’re educating people on these garbage
devices you know setting a CIO watch is really a a pain still so even though we
have products like Lisa we are still going to need to educate people about what computers are and what they do but
where we’re trying to get is we’re trying to get away from programming we’ve got to get away from
programming because people don’t want to program computers people want to use computers and so our strategy right now
is let’s write some programs that are generic that sort of will write 90% of
the program and you fill in the last 10% of the blanks a perfect example of that’s a word processor word processor
can be used to write a business letter a report for a college exam it can be used to write a correspondence letter to your
friend same word processor uh we write it once millions of people use it uh another program you know there’s a lot
of database programs there’s some spreadsheet modeling programs where we do 90% of the work you do the other 10
where we’re moving in the future though is programming with Graphics connecting
the dots if you will and uh that’s what you’ll be seeing more of over the next five years what’s really exciting though
let me give you a little um some of the finest people are going
into software right now and matter of fact about a year ago I met this little
kid in in um Chicago who had started this company called Aristotle software
and he was 13 and he started it with his more mature 14-year-old friend and a
year ago they were making about $44,000 a week off selling three game programs
now let me give you an example how this can work we have a million Apple twos
out there a million and people have paid about $22,000 for them so if they can
buy a new program one of these new diset for $100 that lets their computer do something totally new that it never
could do before that’s a good deal so let’s say uh let’s say your uh your
girlfriend is in the real estate business right you know a little about computers and uh she comes home and
she’s filling out all these crazy forms and going through all these calculations trying to do some creative financing well I could write a program for that
and you write a program that’s not that hard to use and over the next few months you goes well can it do this oh sure
that’s easy can it do this no that’s hard you refine this program to where it’s really great and all of a sudden she shows it to all the other people she
works with she brings it into the office or she brings them over one day and they go they just go wow I got to have this
this is worth $2,000 to me right there just for that one application okay let’s say that you put
that program on the market and sell it for $100 well the dealer is going to take $50 of it so you’ll see $50 per
copy and let’s say it cost $25 to make it you’re going to make $25 profit per
copy if you sell that to just 10% of the Apple 2 owners the first year
not including any new Apple 2 owners because we’re shipping almost a million computers a year so it’ll double the next year but forget about that even the
previous owners of a million you’ll sell 100,000 copies times $25 profit per copy or $25 million do profit the first year
selling to just 10% of the people and you can write that program with under $10,000 worth of computer
equipment that’s what’s happening that’s why they’re Aristotle softwares and um
and so you’re seeing a flurry of activity there right now yeah how did you manage
to particularly the ones were there origin okay um the actual turnover at
Apple has been very very low since Inception it’s been under 5% since Inception actually um okay we do it in a
few ways first thing we do is what’s happening is the definition of an American corporation’s evolving and it’s
evolving in a almost semi socialistic Dimension which is very interesting 100%
of the professionals at Apple own stock in the company 100% everybody owns stock in the
company and uh what that means is these traditional barriers I’ve never heard
the word labor or management mentioned at Apple ever ever in my life we have no unions or anything people say God the
electronics Industry doesn’t unions and and that’s true in one way but in the other way we’ve got like one of the best
unions of everybody going towards the same exact goals and objectives that I’ve ever seen in my life it’s on sort
of an economic scale for sure because it’s in everybody’s best interest to see the stock go up but more importantly we
feel that for some crazy reason we’re in the right place at the right time to put something back and what I mean by that
is um is is most of us didn’t make the clothes we’re wearing and we didn’t um
cook or grow the food that we eat and we speaking a language that was developed by other people we use a mathematics
that was developed by other people we you’re constantly taking and the ability to put something back into that pool of
Human Experience is is extremely neat and I think that that everyone knows that in the next 10 years that’s we have
the chance to really do that and we can look back or while we’re doing it it’s pretty fun too but I mean we can look
back and say God we were a part of that and so everyone is working 18 hours a day right now now on the people side we
believe in the phenomenon of great people and what I mean by that is we think there are people that are so good
that they can run circles around five pretty good people okay and those are
the kind of people that we want at Apple they’re hard to to I mean they’re all idiosyncratic but they’re the fun people
of the world they’re the artists of the world and so what we have is sort of a a
very small company in terms of people for our Revenue we are going to cross a billion in sales very shortly with under
5,000 people worldwide and that that’s phenomenal and
um I think our our feeling has been that what we want to do is keep the number of people down so that we can spend time
with think you started two or three people right years 5,000 assume a lot of manufacturing people no not very many
are under 2,000 are how did you grow that fast and man that
people they were all buddy Budd
yeah we do a few things um
we right it’s exactly right the first thing we do is we’ve always tried to hire people that were much better than
we needed for the current job because within six months they’d be fighting to keep up with it second thing though is
we’ve always tried to hire people the reason we hire people is to tell us what to do and so at Apple when you get hired
some people survive and some don’t but in general it’s hey this is the general thing we think we need done go figure
out what we need come back and tell us and tell us how much it’s going to cost and go do it and so we’ve got an incredible group of entrepreneurs and
we’re always arguing with each other and things like that but that’s just fine and so the 5,000 people we’ve got most
of those people are very independent thinkers and what they really want is they know what to do what they want is
the environment where they don’t have to convince 30 other people that it’s the right thing to do does that make any
sense and and it’s harder as we get older um it’s harder to spend time with everyone and to pull everyone together
but but we really make an attempt to do that and I guess our feeling is is that the day that somebody working in apple
decides that they can’t make a difference anymore is the day we’ve lost you know and we have the standard stuff
I mean anyone can come see myself or John scolly or anyone else anytime they want I mean it might take a day or two
to schedule it but uh we’ve got people at all levels floating around the you know coming to see us the other thing we
we’ve observed of course is that the oldest and largest organization in the world has only four layers of management that’s a Catholic
church and uh five if you count the highest order I suppose
but and so we see no reason why we need over four layers of management and
indeed we have usually about three that’s you know the president we maybe have a division manager and then maybe
under that a marketing or engineering manager and that’s really about it so that’s what we’re trying to do
yeah well what’s really interesting is that people a lot of times um I mean
what’s been we have good people and and what they’ve been able to do over the last 5 years is is pretty awesome but
what’s even neater is that what we can do in the next five years I mean we we are going to we’re in a position now
where we’re selling a billion dollars of stuff a year and where we’ve got one of the most recognized consumer brand names
in the country and so if we get it together we can turn out these incredibly great products with
incredibly great advertising with incredibly great software and
um and so what we want to do is just get great people to come help us do that
because that’s a pretty giant thing to try to do but that’s what we’re going for we started with nothing so whenever
you start with nothing you always can shoot for the moon you have nothing to lose and the thing that happens is when you when you when you sort of get
something it’s very easy to go into cover your ass mode and then you become conservative and vote for Ronnie so
what we’re trying to do is is to realize the um the very amazing time that we’re
in and not go into into that mode and I think Lisa is a reflection of that I mean we gambled the company on Lisa if
Lisa had bombed Apple would be just one more computer company and we gambled everything on that we had no backup to
it everything went into that for three and a half years the best and the brightest at Apple worked on on this
product now how come they came to Apple work on this we hired these people from other companies and the reason they came
to Apple was because they knew what to do but the companies they were working for wouldn’t take the risk and do it and
we said come to Apple and build this and they said well who do I have to convince to do that nobody just go do it and we
got a collection of the I think some of the finest computer scientists in the world that just went and did it and
that’s why I go to work in the morning is to hang around these type of people they’re fun they playing punk rock bands on the weekends and all sorts of stuff
computer people aren’t you read all this computer nerd stuff it’s not really true anymore they’re they’re really a lot closer to artists than they are to to
anything else they come in to work at about I don’t know anytime they want but usually about 11:00 in the
morning 12: in the morning play few rounds of ping pong work really hard
they work really hard but they’ll work and generally about 4 we go out and maybe play you know a game of volleyball
somewhere or something like that and then in the evening we work and then they’ll have dinner we’ll go out to Japanese restaurant for dinner something
come back and they’ll work till about 2:00 or 3: in the morning and they go home and wake up at 11: the next morning
com to work yeah yeah you sure why not how we
be tied those SK us actual
that for those us who invested thousands
already uh oh can you teach skiing um
voice recognition is about it’s going to be the better part of the decade away we can do toy voice recognition now the
problem is it just isn’t it isn’t just recognizing the voice when you talk to somebody it’s in understanding language
is much harder than understanding voice we can sort of sort out the words but what do they all mean and and most
language is exceptionally contextually driven other words one word means something in this context it means
something entirely different in another context and when you’re talking to somebody people interact it’s not a one-way communication it’s going yep yep
yep yep or and and they they gracefully interact they go in and out of levels of detail and boy this stuff’s hard so I
think you’re really looking at uh the better part of a decade before we we get close even close to that I I don’t know
how much time we have I think I’m about to get thank you very much I’ve enjoyed it

great

[Applause]