Steve Jobs - The lost interview
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
I'm Bob Cringley.
16 years ago when I was making my television series,
Triumph of the Nerds, I interviewed Steve Jobs.
That was in 1995.
10 years earlier, Steve had left Apple
following a bruising struggle with John Scully,
the CEO he'd brought into the company.
At the time of our interview, Steve was running Next,
the niche computer company he founded after leaving Apple.
Little did we know that within 18 months,
he would sell Next to Apple, and six months later,
he'd be running the place.
The way things work in television, we used only a part of that interview in the series,
and for years we thought the interview was lost forever because the master tape went missing while being shipped from London to the US in the 1990s.
Then just a few days ago, series director Paul Sen found a VHS copy of that interview in his garage.
There are very few TV interviews with Steve Jobs,
and almost no good ones.
They rarely show the charisma, candor, and vision
that this interview does.
And so, to honor an amazing man,
here is that interview in its entirety.
Most of this has never been seen before.
So, how did you get involved with personal computers?
Hmm.
Well, I ran into my first computer when I was about 10 or 11.
And it's hard to remember back then, but I'm an old fossil now.
I'm an old fossil.
So when I was 10 or 11, it was about 30 years ago.
And no one had ever seen a computer.
To the extent that they'd seen them, they'd seen them in movies,
and there were these big boxes with worrying.
For some reason, they fixated on the tape drives
as being the icon of what the computer was, or flashing lights somehow.
And so nobody had ever seen one. They were very mysterious, very powerful things that did something in the background.
And so to see one and actually get to use one was a real privilege back then.
And I got into NASA, Ames Research Center down here, and I got to use a time-sharing terminal.
So I didn't actually see the computer, but I saw a time-sharing terminal.
And in those days, again, it's hard to remember how primitive it was.
There was no such thing as a computer with a graphics video display.
display, it was literally a printer. It was a teletype printer with a keyboard on it.
So you would keyboard these commands in and then you would wait for a while and then the
thing would go da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da and it would
tell you something out. But even with that it was still remarkable, especially for a
ten year old, that you could write a program in BASIC, let's say, or FORTRAN, and actually
This machine would sort of take your idea and it would sort of execute your idea and give you back some results.
And if they were the results that you predicted, your program really worked.
It was an incredibly thrilling experience.
So I became very captivated by a computer.
and a computer to me was still a little mysterious
because it was at the other end of this wire
and I'd never really seen the actual computer itself.
And then I got tours of computers after that
and saw the insides.
And then I was part of this group at Hewlett-Packard.
When I was 12, I called up Bill Hewlett
who lived in Hewlett-Packard at the time.
And again, this dates me,
but there was no such thing as an unlisted telephone number then.
So I could just look in the book and look his name up.
And he answered the phone and I said,
Hi, my name's Steve Jobs. You don't know me, but I'm 12 years old, and I'm building a frequency counter, and I'd like some spare parts.
And so he talked to me for about 20 minutes. I'll never forget it as long as I live.
And he gave me the parts, but he also gave me a job working at Hewlett-Packard that summer, and I was 12 years old.
And that really made a remarkable influence on me.
Hewlett-Packard was really the only company I'd ever seen in my life at that age.
and it formed my view of what a company was
and how well they treated their employees.
At that time, I mean, they didn't know about cholesterol back then,
but at that time they used to bring a big cart full of donuts and coffee out
at 10 o'clock every morning.
Everybody would take a coffee and donut break.
And just little things like that.
It was clear that the company recognized that its true value was its employees.
Anyway, things led to things with Hewlett Packard, and I started going up to their Palo Alto research labs every Tuesday night with a small group of people to meet some of their researchers and stuff.
And I saw the first desktop computer ever made, which was the Hewlett Packard 9100.
It was about as big as a suitcase, but it actually had a small cathode ray tube display in it, and it was completely self-contained.
There was no wire going off behind the curtain somewhere.
and and I fell in love with it and you could program it in basic and APL and
and I would just for hours you know get get a ride up to Hewlett Packard and
just hang around that machine and write programs for it and so that was the
early days and and I met Steve Wozniak around that time too maybe maybe a
a little early when I was about 14, 15 years old.
And we immediately hit it off.
He was the first person I'd met that knew more
about electronics than I did.
And so I liked him a lot.
And he was maybe five years older than I.
He'd gone off to college and gotten kicked out
for pulling pranks and was living with his parents
and going to the DeAnne's of the local junior college.
So we became fast friends and started
doing projects together.
We read about the story in Esquire magazine about this guy named Captain Crunch,
who could supposedly make free telephone calls.
You've heard about this, I'm sure.
And we, again, we were captivated.
How could anybody do this?
And we thought it must be a hoax.
And we started looking through the libraries,
looking for the secret tones that would allow you to do this.
And it turned out we were at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center one night, and way in the bowels of their technical library, way down at the last bookshelf, in the corner bottom rack, we found an AT&T technical journal that laid out the whole thing.
And that's another moment I'll never forget.
When we saw this journal, we thought, my God, it's all real.
And so we set out to build a device to make these tones.
And the way it worked was, you know when you make a long distance call, you used to hear,
doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, right in the background?
They were tones that sounded like the touch tone you could make on your phone,
but they were different frequencies, so you couldn't make them.
It turned out that that was the signal from one telephone computer to another,
controlling the computers in the network.
And AT&T made a fatal flaw when they designed the original telephone network,
digital telephone network was they put the signaling from computer to computer in the same
band as your voice, which meant that if you could make those same signals, you could put it right in
through the handset. And literally the entire AT&T international phone network would think you were
an AT&T computer. So after three weeks, we finally built a box like this that worked.
and I remember the first call we made was down to LA,
one of Waz's relatives down in Pasadena.
We dialed the wrong number, but we woke some guy up
in the middle of the night and we were yelling at him like,
don't you understand we made this call for free?