Steve Jobs talk at the IDCA in Aspen 1983 AUDIO
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
Good morning.
Introductions are really funny.
They pay me $60, so I wore a tie.
How many of you are 36 years older than 36 years old?
Yeah, you were born pre-computer.
The computer is 36 years old.
And there's something sort of, I think that there's going to be a little slice
in the timeline of history as we look back.
Pretty meaningful slice right there.
A lot of you are products of the television generation.
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 in their lifetimes, the computer will become the predominant medium of communication
just as the television took over from the radio, took over from even the book.
I'll talk about anything you want to talk about today.
I have about 15 or 20 minutes of stuff that I just wanted to cover really quickly.
And then whatever you want to talk about, we can talk about.
How's that?
How many of you own an Apple?
Or just any personal computer?
Uh-oh.
How many of you have used one or seen one?
Anything like that?
Good.
Okay.
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.
The gears, the pistons have been replaced with electrons.
How many of you have 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 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 moved 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 the University
of California at Berkeley, and it was a master's degree, was offered in 1968, which means the
oldest person that has a degree in computer science is 39 years old, and the average age
of professionals at Apple is 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, even the raw
instructions that we have to feed these giant Cray-1 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 that, let's say I could move a hundred times faster than anyone in here.
In the blink of your eye, I could run out there and I could grab 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 the exact same way with the computer.
It can go grab these numbers and add them together
and throw them 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 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.
Look at the brief history of computers. The best way to understand is probably an analogy.
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 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 the factory and through a series of belts and pulleys,
brought, shared 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 medium-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-justify it 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. The first computer was called the ENIAC in 1947. It was developed particularly for ballistic 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.
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 onto 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,
finally a light bulb would go on in their minds
and they'd 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
has created a revolution.
It was invented in 1976,
the first personal computer.
This year, in 1983,
the industry is going to ship
over three million of the little buggers.
Three million.
By 1986,