It is not enough to be in the right place at the right time, but to be aware of it and know what to do to transform the opportunity into a new reality. Steve Jobs was not only fortunate to coincide when he was barely 15 years old through the mediation of a friend with Steve Wozniak, who at 21 was developing his own computer, but he was the architect not only of understanding, but of interpreting everything that was happening with that incipient technology at that time anchored in enormous and monolithic corporations.
Following the line pointed out by Xerox and IBM, the casual Apple of Jobs and Wozniak drew its own line in the development of the personal computer and its software, reaching the lead in a segment that matured quickly with its Lisa. It was the machine with which Jobs, at 28 years old and after changing his bohemian air for a perfect shave and hairstyle and a bow tie, presented himself in June 1983 at the International Design Conference, which was held in Aspen, Colorado.
There he talked about Lisa, a computer that opened a new era by having a mouse that allowed you to move the cursor around the screen by activating icons generated by a bitmap, making its use easy and intuitive. But he also outlined Apple’s objectives, announcing that the firm was already working on what decades later would be the iPad, on wireless connectivity, on revolutionary software tools like Apple Draw, on the first Maps experiences, on what would end up being Apple Store… and in design – it was the scope of the conference – as an experience necessarily linked to technology.
The conference, titled “The future isn’t what it used to be,” was lost for decades. The audio was recorded and a cassette was even distributed to attendees at the end of the event. A time capsule was even buried, now recovered, although the tape was not there. He found it three decades after having heard the talk live by John Celuch, of Inland Design, apparently the only one of the attendees who kept the analog recording. Jobs’s intervention, which we offer excerpted, is a clear example of his determination and clairvoyance.
“If you are over 36 years old, you were born before computers, because computers are 36 years old. I am practically a product of the television generation, but to a certain extent I am beginning to be a product of the computer generation and the children who grow up now are definitely products of this new computer generation. Throughout its life, the computer will become the predominant means of communication, as when television took over from the radio and the radio surpassed the book.
”How many of you own an Apple? Or any personal computer? Many of you have used or seen one. I do not care. What is the computer? The answer is really simple: a machine. Gears and pistons have been replaced by electrons. Have you ever seen an electron? That’s the problem with computers. They are intimidating because you can’t see how they work or have their mechanisms in your hands. Because in a very small space there are billions of electrons running around and we can’t really see what they do.
”There aren’t many experts either. The oldest person with a computer science degree is 39 years old. At Apple we are all under 30 years old. So it’s a field that’s dominated by fairly young people.
”The first thing we should know about computers is that they are really stupid. But they are very fast. The instructions we have to give them are really trivial: get a number from here, look up a number, add two numbers, test to see if it is greater than zero, put it there… The key is its speed.
“It’s like I can move a hundred times faster than anyone else and right now, in the blink of an eye, I could run out, pick up a bouquet of fresh flowers or something, and come back here with them in the snap of my fingers. You’d all think I was a magician or something, and yet I was basically giving a series of really simple instructions for someone to pick the flowers and bring them back so fast you’d think there was something magical going on.
”The computer can do exactly that, take these numbers, add them up and give us the result at a rate of approximately one million instructions per second. We tend to think that there is something magical when something like this happens, but in reality there is just a series of very simple instructions that we, by working with them, build a higher level instruction.
”Over the last 20 years of working with computers we have reached higher and higher levels of abstraction, but ultimately these levels of abstraction boil down to these crude instructions that execute very quickly.
”A good way to understand the brief history of computers is to take the example of the electric motor. It was first invented at the end of the 19th century and it was only possible to build a huge one. Its cost could only be justified for very complex uses. So they didn’t proliferate fast at all.
”But someone took one of these big electric motors, put a shaft on it, and through a series of belts and pulleys developed enough horsepower to replace 15 or 20 jobs. The cost of it became profitable. Although his real breakthrough was the invention of the fractional system. Take your power to where it was needed. And the cost of it was justified in a completely individual application. Today there are around 55 fractional horsepower motors in each home.
”If we look at the development of computers we see a true parallel with this. One of the first, called ENIAC, was developed in 1947 especially for military ballistic calculations. It was gigantic and almost no one had the opportunity to use it. The real breakthrough came in the 1960s with the invention of what was called time-sharing. It consisted of taking one of those very large computers and sharing it between terminals.
”Because he could execute so many instructions so quickly, Fred executed some in his work. Then Sally did the same in hers. And John in his. Meanwhile, Susi was also working on the computer. It was so fast that everyone thought they had the entire computer to themselves. Now, most of you have already used computer terminals connected with some umbilical cable to some large computer somewhere else. That’s sharing time and it’s what caused computers to be in large quantities on university campuses.
”The reason Apple exists is because we stumbled upon fractional horsepower computing five years before anyone else, that’s the reason we exist. We take these microprocessor chips, which are kind of a computer on a chip, and we surround them with all the other things. And we built a computer that weighed approximately six kilos.
“People looked at it and said, ‘Well, where is the computer?’ This is just a terminal. ‘That’s the computer,’ we responded. After about five minutes a light bulb finally went on in his mind. If they didn’t like it they could throw it out the window or run over it with the car, but that was the whole computer. That’s why we exist.
”This fractional horsepower computing has created a revolution that began in 1976 with the first personal computer. This year, in 1983, the industry will produce more than three million of them. And we are going to reach 10 million computers in ’86. This new object will be in everyone’s work environment, in all educational centers and in all homes.
”I take for example the year 86 or 87: people will spend more time interacting with these machines than with their car, in which they spend two or three hours a day. And industrial design, software design, will define how people interact with these things.
”Today, most cars are not being designed in America. Neither do television, electronic devices, watches, cameras, bicycles, calculators… whatever. Most of the objects in our lives are not designed here. Now, with this new computer technology, we have the opportunity to make these things beautiful and we have the opportunity to communicate something through design.
”Let’s go back to this revolution. What is happening? The computer is a new means of communication, like a book, a telephone, a radio, a television… Each medium has its deficiencies, limits that it cannot cross, but generally it also has unique characteristics. Each one has opened new opportunities. We’re seeing it now with email, where we connect a bunch of computers and can send messages to an email box that people can open as they wish.
”We see that, in fact, in a sense we are sending voice over the cables, although in reality we are sending ones and zeros. I also want to make a drawing and compress it and put it in the mailbox of someone who has a computer. You don’t need to be there, you can pick it up at noon. You can be in New York and get it back.
”One of these days, when we have laptops with radio links, they can be walking around Aspen and retrieve it, and the communication process will change. What I mean is that personal computers open up a new possibility of communicating.
”Right here in Aspen, MIT conducted an experiment about four years ago. They had a truck with a camera and they drove down every street, photographed every intersection on every street in Aspen, photographed every building.
”And they have this computer and this video disk connected, and on this screen you see yourself looking down a street. And you touch the screen, and there are some arrows on the screen, and you click ‘walk forward’, and suddenly, it’s like you’re walking forward on the street. And you come to an intersection and you can stop, you can look to the right, you can look ahead and you can look to the left. And you can decide which path you want to take. You can even go to some of the stores.
”It is an electronic map. It makes you feel like you’re walking through Aspen. Then there are four little buttons in the corner because they came back and did the exact same thing all four seasons. So you can be looking down the street, winter comes and suddenly you find the same street with a meter of snow. It’s really amazing. It’s not incredibly useful, but it points the way to this interactive communication.
”The first television programs were nothing more than a radio program with cameras. It took 20 years for television to have its own language, as in the funeral of John Fitzgerald Kennedy or the Apollo landing on the moon. We will need another five or ten years to evolve. We are in an initial phase.
”In our development, when microcomputers or personal computers appeared for the first time we fell back into old media habits and used those strange languages ??like Cobol with them, we did commercial accounting with them… It took us about four years before we started to get out of there and we are just beginning to break with it.
”Now Lisa allows a person like me, who is not an artist, to draw artistically. Because we have a program called Lisa Draw, and if I don’t like what I just drew I can erase it, I can move it, I can reduce it, I can change its texture, I can put soft edges on it… And then I can see in the email inbox if someone else who lives here in Aspen and received my email and sees the drawing I made.
”So where we are is that the personal computer is a new medium since society and computers first really met in the 80s. In the next 15 years we will have the opportunity to make it great. At Apple we are working for this.
”And one last thing I want to explain and then we can talk about whatever you want. What is a computer program? Do you know what a program is? Does anyone know? It’s something strange, really strange. The programs do not have physical content.
”Let’s compare computer programming with television programming. When you watch the tape of Kennedy’s funeral you will start to cry, you will feel the same thing you felt when you were watching it 20 years ago. Because? We are very good at capturing a set of experiences and recreating them.
”Programming captures the underlying principles of an experience. Not the experience itself, but the underlying principles of the experience, and those principles can allow for thousands of different experiences that follow the same laws. The perfect example is a video game. What do video games do? They follow some laws. In that stupid game of ping pong, the ball always follows certain laws. No two games are ever the same, and yet every game follows these underlying principles.
(unintelligible question)
”How are all these computers going to work together? Probably in a very similar way to people. Sometimes they are going to work together very well and other times they are not going to work together as well. What we have now is that we are releasing many computers that are made to be used autonomously.
”The beginning is one person, one computer, although it doesn’t take long before you get a community of users who want to connect, because ultimately a computer will be a communication tool, and over the next five years the standards for do this they will evolve. Now everyone speaks a different language.
”I explain an experience: they connected one hundred computers in a local area network, which is simply a cable that transports all this information from one place to another. And something interesting happened. There were 20 people and they were interested in volleyball, so a volleyball mailing list was developed. And when a volleyball game was changed, you wrote a quick note and sent it to the volleyball mailing list. And then there was a cooking list of Chinese food. And soon, there were more lists than people.
”It was a very, very interesting phenomenon, because I think that is exactly what is going to happen. That as we start to put these things together, they will make it easier to communicate and make it easier for people to come together and the special interests that they have. We are about five years away from really solving the problem of connecting these computers in the office. And we are about 10-15 years away from solving the problem of connecting them at home. Many people are working on it.
(unintelligible question)
”Now, Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly good computer in a book that you can carry with you and that you can learn to use in 20 minutes. That’s what we want to do and we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link so that you don’t have to connect to anything, you’re in communication with all these databases and other computers.
”We don’t know how to do it now. Technically it is impossible. So we have three options. One is to do nothing, and as I mentioned, we’re all pretty young and impatient, so that’s not a good option. The second is to put a piece of junk computer in a book, and we can do that, but our competitors are already doing it, so we don’t need to do it. The third option is to design the computer that we eventually want to include in the book, even though we can’t include it in the book now. Right now it fits in a bread box, costs $10,000 and is called Lisa.
”It turns out that, fortunately, there is a huge office market that is buying these products much faster than we can make them and they will sell out over the next year, so we will sell over a hundred million dollars of them already in the first year. Luckily, there is that office market where improving personal productivity is worth $10,000 per person and will pay for the development of this new technology. So the next thing we’re going to do is find a way to put it in a shoebox and sell it for 100.
(unintelligible question)
”Now you are going to buy a program and you don’t know what to buy, so you ask the computer salesman: ‘Which one should I buy?’ And that person doesn’t know it. They are selling computers, not looking at software. And then they give you a shitty answer, and you buy it, and maybe you’re satisfied, or maybe you’re not.
”Let’s make an easy comparison. Most people walk into a record store and know exactly what record they want to buy. They don’t come 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, which offers a free sample so that we can make our decisions before going to the point of sale. We need the equivalent in the software business. We need a software radio station.
“How can we do it? Transmitting electronically over the telephone line… so we go directly from computer to computer. And 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, or we’ll let you play with it for a day.’ If you want to buy it, just enter your visa number and you have it. “I don’t know how we are going to do it, but we need that radio station.”