'A Bicycle of the Mind' - Steve Jobs on the Computer
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
I remember reading an article when I was about 12 years old, I think it might have been Scientific
American, where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet
earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B. And the condor
one came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a
third of the way down the list, which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation.
somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle.
A human riding a bicycle blew away the condor, all the way off the top of the list.
And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders,
and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes.
And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind,
something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.
and I think we're just at the early stages of this
tool, very early stages, and we've come only a very short distance
and it's still in its formation but already we've seen enormous changes I
think that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next hundred years.
In program six we're going to look at some of the past predictions of why
people have been so wrong about the future and one of the notions is that
today's vision of a standalone computer
is just as limited as those past visions of it being only a number cruncher.
What's the difference philosophically between a network machine and a standalone machine?
Let me answer that question in a slightly different way.
There have been, if you look at why the majority of people have bought these things so far,
there have been two real explosions that have propelled the industry forward.
The first one really happened in 1977.
and it was the spreadsheet. I remember when Dan Feilstra, who ran the company that marketed the
first spreadsheet, walked into my office at Apple one day and pulled out this disk from his
vest pocket and said, I have this incredible new program. I call it a visual calculator,
and it became VisiCalc. And that's what really drove, propelled the Apple to the success it
achieved more than any other single event. And with the invention of Lotus 1, 2, 3, and I think
I think it was 1982, that's what really propelled the IBM PC to the level of success that it
achieved.
So that was the first explosion, was the spreadsheet.
The second really big explosion in our industry has been desktop publishing.
It happened in 1985 with the Macintosh and the LaserWriter printer.
And at that point, people could start to do on their desktops things that only typesetters
and printers could do prior to that.
And that's been a very big revolution in publishing.
And those are really, those two explosions have been the only two real major revolutions
which have caused a lot of people to buy these things and use them.
The third one is starting to happen now.
And the third one is, let's do for human to human communication what spreadsheets did
for financial planning and what desktop publishing did for publishing.
Let's revolutionize it using these desktop devices.
And we're already starting to see the signs of that.
As an example, in an organization, we're starting to see that as business conditions change
faster and faster with each year, we cannot change our management hierarchical organization
very fast relative to the changing business conditions.
We can't have somebody working for a new boss every week.
We also can't change our geographic organization very fast, matter of fact, even slower than
the management one.
can't be moving people around the country every week.
But we can change an electronic organization like that.
And what's starting to happen is, as we start to link these
computers together with sophisticated networks and
great user interfaces, we're starting to be able to create
clusters of people working on a common task, literally in 15
minutes worth of setup.
And these 15 people can work together extremely efficiently,
no matter where they are geographically, and no matter
who they work for hierarchically.
And these organizations can live for as long as they're
needed and then vanish.
And we're finding we can reorganize our companies
electronically very rapidly.
And that's the only type of organization that can begin
to keep pace with the changing business conditions.
And I believe that this collaborative model has
existed in higher education for a long time.
But we're starting to see it applied into the commercial
world as well.
And this is going to be the third major revolution
that these desktop computers provide,
is revolutionizing human-to-human communication
and group work.
We call it interpersonal computing.
In the 1980s, we did personal computing.
And now we're going to .
extend that as we network these things to interpersonal computing.
I saw my first computer when I was 12.
And it was at NASA. We had a local NASA center nearby.
And it was a terminal which was connected to a big computer somewhere.
And I got a time-sharing account on it.
And I was fascinated by this thing.
I saw my second computer a few years later, which was really the first desktop computer ever made.
It was made by Hewlett-Packard. It was called the 9100A.
A and it ran a language called BASIC and it was very large, had a very small cathode ray
tube on it for display. And I got a chance to play with one of those maybe in 1968 or
nine and spent every spare moment I had trying to write programs for it. I was so fascinated
by this. And so I was probably fairly lucky in that my introduction to computers very rapidly
moved from a terminal to within maybe 12 months or so actually seeing one of the first, probably
the first desktop computer ever really produced. And so my point of view never really changed
from being able to get my arms around it even though my arms probably didn't quite fit around
that first one. I read somewhere that you had no intention of building a company. You
were just out to do stuff for yourselves. If you can give me... I don't know the question
they asked to get that, but... Well, at the time we started Apple, Waz was working for
Hewlett Packard, I was working for Atari, actually for Nolan Bush, designing video games.
And we went to Atari and showed them our early prototypes, and we went to HP. And we encouraged
each company to hire the other one and let us do this for them. And we got turned down
in both places. Probably for good reasons. But we started a company because it was the
only alternative left. Not because we wanted to.
When did you ever think that this was really going to happen? That this was going to go
from just an interesting idea to...
Oh, it didn't take very long. It happened for me when I saw people that could never
possibly design a computer, could never possibly build a hardware kit, could never possibly
assemble their own keyboards and monitors, could never even write their own software
using these things. Then you knew something
very big was going to happen. When we got into that stage where we were high enough on the food
chain, if you will, that a lot of people could use these things.
And they were really liking it.
What do computer networks offer to education?
Well, education's
been on computer networks for longer than almost anyone else.
The Department of Defense has an office called DARPA,
and they funded a thing called ARPANET many, many years ago
to try to build a command and control network for military purposes.
And they did a very brilliant thing.
After they got a prototype working, they gave it to the university community in America
and said, bang on this for a while and see if it works and help us make it better.
And after a few years of the university community doing that,
they created a separate version for military purposes, but they left the educational version