Steve Jobs is 28 years aged and seems a little nervous as he begins his speech to a group of designers gathered under a vast tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and soon takes off his jacket, dropping it on the floor when he can’t find anywhere else to put it. It’s 1983, and he’s going to ask designers to lend a hand him improve the look of the coming wave of personal computers. But not before he tells them that these computers will destroy their lives.
“How many of you are 36… older than 36?” he asks. That’s how aged the computer is, he says. But even the younger people in the room, himself included, are in a sense “pre-computer,” members of the TV generation. A novel, distinct generation is emerging, he says: “In their lifetime, the computer will be the dominant means of communication.”
That was a pretty bold claim at the time, considering that Jobs’s improvised poll showed that very few viewers owned or had even seen a personal computer. Jobs tells designers that not only will be They will utilize it soon, but it will be irreplaceable and deeply woven into the fabric of their lives.
The recording of this speech is the centerpiece of an online exhibition entitled Our life goalsPresented by Steve Jobs Archivean ambitious historical project dedicated to telling the story of Apple’s legendary co-founder. When the exhibit opened earlier this month — following the discovery of a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection — I found it not only a compelling reminder of the overdue CEO but also relevant to our own times, when another novel technology looms with equal promise and peril.
The occasion for the speech was the annual Aspen International Design Conference. This year’s theme was “The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be,” making Jobs the perfect speaker. While much of the talk focused on his views on making products look better, the underlying message came straight from a Bob Dylan song: Something is happening and you don’t know what. He was telling his audiences things that seemed absurd: that in a few years more computers would be shipped than cars, and that people would spend more time with those computers than they would spend driving their cars. He was telling them that computers would be interconnected and everyone would be using something called e-mail, which he had to describe because it was such a strange concept at the time. Computers, he said, would become the dominant medium of communication. His goal was to make all this happen, to get to the point “where people would use these things and say, ‘Haven’t we always done that?'”
Jobs’ vision seemed to have an effect on the audience, which earned him a standing ovation. Before he left Aspen this week, Jobs was asked to donate an item to be placed in a time capsule commemorating the event, to be unearthed in 2000. Jobs detached a mouse from a Lisa computer he had brought to the demo and placed it in the capsule, along with an 8-track Moody Blues tape and a six-pack of beer.
The speech itself is a time capsule of sorts. Jobs was right when he said that one day we wouldn’t be able to imagine what life was like before the novel tools he was bringing into the mainstream. Those of us who are still alive, who are, as Jobs said, “born precomputer,” often amaze teenage people by describing how we did our jobs (typewriters! copiers!), communicated (phone booths!), and entertained ourselves (three TV channels!). Luck!) before computers became our virtual appendages.