Steve Jobs 1995 Interview
Transcript
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yeah I'm ready okay it's April 20th 1995 this is the Smithsonian interview for us Steve Jobs
okay I'd like to begin Steve with some background biographical information tell us about when you
were born where your parents your family sure childhood memories I was born in San Francisco
California, USA, planet Earth on February 24th, 1955. I could go into a lot of details of
my youth, but I don't know that anybody would really care about that too much.
Only mine in 300 years, because all this print is going to disintegrate. Tell me a little
bit about your parents, your family. What are the earliest things you remember? 55 Eisenhower
or was still president.
Yeah, I don't remember him.
But I do remember growing up in sort of the very late 50s, early 60s,
the very interesting time in the United States of America.
America was sort of at its pinnacle of post-World War II prosperity, I think,
and everything had been fairly straight and narrow,
from haircuts to culture in every way.
and it was just starting to kind of broaden into the 60s
where things were going to start expanding out in new directions.
But it hadn't quite gone that way,
and everything was still very successful, very young.
America seemed very young and naive in many ways to me
from my memories of that time.
So you would have been about five or six years old when John Kennedy was president.
Right. I remember John Kennedy being assassinated.
I remember the exact moment I heard that he had been shot.
Where were you when he was shot?
I was walking across the grass of my schoolyard going home at about 3 in the afternoon,
and somebody yelled out that the president had been shot and killed.
And I must have been about 7 or 8 years old then, I guess.
And I knew exactly what it meant.
I also remember very much the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I probably didn't sleep for three or four nights
because I was afraid if I went to sleep, I wouldn't wake up.
And I absolutely, even at, I guess I was about six, seven years old.
Seven years old, yeah.
Again, I understood exactly what was going on.
I think everybody did.
And it was really a terror that I will never forget in my life
and probably has never really left.
And I think that everyone felt it at that time.
Oh, yeah. Those of us who are older, I remember being in high school and making plans of where we'd meet if the country was devastated.
It was a strange, strange time.
One of the things we're trying to get a handle on is sort of passion and power.
And early things that you were passionate about, that you were really interested in, that you think...
I was very lucky. I had a father named Paul who was a pretty remarkable man.
He'd never graduated from high school.
He joined the Coast Guard in World War II and ferried troops around the world for general patent, I guess.
And I think he was always getting into trouble and getting busted down to what's private, I think, is the lowest, right?
Yeah.
but he was a machinist by trade and worked very hard and was a kind of a genius with his hands
and he had a workbench out in the garage where when I was about five or six he sectioned off a
little piece of it and said Steve this is your workbench now and he gave me some of his smaller
tools, you know, showed me how to use a hammer and a saw and how to build things. And it
really was very good for me. You know, he spent a lot of time with me teaching me how
to build things, take things apart, put things back together. And one of the things that
he touched upon was electronics. He did not have a deep understanding of electronics himself,
But he'd encountered electronics a lot in automobiles and other things that he would fix.
So he showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that.
And then I grew up in Silicon Valley.
My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five.
My dad had gotten transferred.
And that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley.
So there were engineers kind of all around.
and Silicon Valley at that time was still...
orchards for the most part it was apricot orchards and prune orchards and it was really paradise
i remember there not being um i i remember almost every day the air being crystal clear
where you could see from one end of the valley to the other this was when you were six seven
yeah eight years old right exactly and it was it was really the most wonderful place in the world
to grow up and there was a man that moved in down the street maybe about six or seven houses down
the block who was new in the neighborhood with his wife and it turned out he was an engineer at
hewlett-packard and he was a ham radio operator and really into electronics and what he did to
get to know the kids on the block was a rather strange thing he put out a a carbon microphone
and a battery and a speaker on his driveway where you could talk into the microphone and your voice
would get amplified on the speaker it's kind of a strange thing to do when you
move into a neighborhood but that's what he did and I of course started messing
around with this and I'd always been taught that you needed an amplifier to
amplify the voice of a microphone for it to come out of a speaker my father had
taught me that so I went home and proudly announced to my father that he
was all wrong and that this man up the block was amplifying voice with just a
battery my father told me I didn't know what I was talking about we got into a
very large argument about this so I dragged him down and showed him this and he himself was a
little befuddled and I got to know this man whose name was Larry Lang and he taught me a lot of
electronics too he was great and he used to build you know Heath kits which they don't really have
anymore but Heath kits were really great these Heath kits were these these products that you
would buy in kit form.
You'd actually pay more money for them
than you would if you just went and bought the finished product,
if it was available.
But these heath kits would come with detailed manuals
on how to put this thing together.
And all the parts would be laid out in a certain way
and color-coded.
And you'd actually build this thing yourself.
And I would say that gave one several things.
It gave one an understanding of what
was inside a finished product and how it worked,
because it would all include a theory of operation.
But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense
that one could build the things that one saw around oneself
in the universe.
I mean, you see these things were not mysteries anymore.
When you looked at a television set,
you would think, well, I haven't built one of those,
but I could.
There's one of those in the Heathkit catalog,
and I built two other Heathkits.
So I could build a television set.
I could build.
Things became much more clear that they
were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one's
environment and one had no knowledge of their interiors.
So it gave one a tremendous degree of self-confidence that through exploration and learning one
could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment.
and so you know that was my childhood was very fortunate in that way I had a rough time in
school it sounds like you're really lucky to have your dad as both a sort of a mentor and
and a hero and I was going to ask you about school what was what was the formal side of
your education like well it was pretty hard for me at the beginning my my mother had taught me how
to read before I got to school and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two
things I wanted to read books because I love reading books and I wanted to go outside and
chase butterflies and do all the things that you know five-year-olds like to do and I encountered
authority of a different kind than I'd ever encountered before and I did not like it and
they they really they almost got me they really almost they came this close to really beating