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Steve Jobs is 28 years old and seems a little nervous as he begins his speech to the designers gathered under a big tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and quickly takes off his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he can’t find a place to put it. In 1983, he wants to enlist the designers’ help in improving the look of upcoming personal computers. But first, he tells them that these computers will shatter the way they live their lives.
“How many of you are 36 years old… over 36?” he asks. That’s since the birth of computers, he says. But even the younger people in the room, including himself, are of a sort of “pre-computer” TV generation. He says a distinct new generation is emerging: “In their lifetimes, computers will become the dominant medium of communication.”
That was quite a statement at the time, considering that Jobs’ impromptu poll showed that very few of his audience owned or had ever seen a personal computer. Intention They may not use it right away, but it will become indispensable and deeply woven into their lives.
A video of the speech is the highlight of an online exhibition. Our purpose in lifeprovided by Steve Jobs Archivean ambitious history project telling the story of Apple’s legendary co-founder. The exhibit, which opened earlier this month following the discovery of a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection, is not only a powerful reminder of the late CEO, but one that also feels relevant to our current times, with new technologies that carry equal parts promise and peril.
The occasion was the annual Aspen International Design Conference. That year’s event’s theme was “The Future Isn’t the Same,” and Jobs was the perfect speaker. Most of the talk was about his views on making products beautiful, but the underlying message was taken directly from that Bob Dylan song: Something is happening, but I don’t know what it is. He told his audience some things that seemed extraordinary: that in a few years computers would be shipped more than cars, and people would spend more time with computers than they would in cars. He said that computers would be connected to each other, and that everyone would use something called email, which was such a strange concept at the time that he had to explain it. Computers, he claimed, would become the dominant medium of communication. His goal was to make all this happen and get to the point where “people would be using these things and think, ‘Haven’t this always been the way it was?'”
Jobs’ vision seemed to move the audience, who gave him a standing ovation. Before leaving Aspen that week, Jobs was asked to donate items to be placed in a time capsule commemorating the event, to be exhumed in the year 2000. Jobs removed the mouse from the Lisa computer he had brought to the demo and sealed it in the capsule along with an 8-track tape of the Moody Blues and a six-pack of beer.
The speech itself is something of a time capsule. Jobs was right when he said that one day it would be impossible to imagine what life was like before the new tools he was bringing to the mainstream. Those of us still alive who, in Jobs’ words, “were born before the computer” often amaze younger people with stories of how we work (manual typewriters! carbon copies!), communicate with each other (telephone booths!), and entertain ourselves (three TV channels!). Bonanza! ) This was before computers became our virtual appendages.