专题 G：乔布斯遗失的访谈（1995）
补充专题 | Robert Cringely 采访 · 英文原文完整版
Background
In 1995, Robert Cringely interviewed Steve Jobs for the PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds. Jobs was running NeXT at the time, a year before selling it to Apple. Only about 10 minutes of the 70+ minute interview was used in the series. The master tape was lost while shipping from London to the US in the 1990s. In 2011, director Paul Sen found a VHS copy in his garage. This is the complete transcript.
Introduction
Bob Cringely: I'm Bob Cringely. Sixteen years ago, when I was making my television series, Triumph of the Nerds, I interviewed Steve Jobs. That was in 1995. Ten years earlier, Steve had left Apple, following a bruising struggle with John Sculley, the CEO he 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. 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's that interview in its entirety. Most of this has never been seen before.
1. Entry Into Personal Computers
Cringely: So how did you get involved with personal computers?
Jobs: Hmm. Well, I ran into my first computer when I was about 10 or 11. It's hard to remember back then—I'm an old fossil now. No one had ever seen a computer. To the extent that they'd seen them in movies, they were these big boxes with whirring... Somehow, they fixated on the tape drives as being the icon of what the computer was, or flashing lights.
I got into NASA Ames Research Center. I got to use a time-sharing terminal. I didn't actually see the computer, but I saw a time-sharing terminal. There was no such thing as a computer with a graphics video display. It was literally a printer—a teletype printer with a keyboard on it. You would keyboard these commands in, wait for a while, and it would tell you something out.
But even with that, it was still remarkable, especially for a 10-year-old, that you could write a program in BASIC, let's say, or FORTRAN. And actually, this machine would take your idea, and it would 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.
When I was 12, I called up Bill Hewlett, who lived in Hewlett-Packard at the time. There was no such thing as an unlisted telephone number then, so I could just look in the book. 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 then.
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. They used to bring a big cartful of donuts and coffee out at 10 every morning. Everybody would take a coffee and donut break. It was clear that the company recognized that its true value was its employees.
I met Steve Wozniak around that time, maybe a little earlier when I was about 14, 15 years old. We immediately hit it off. He was the first person I'd met that knew more about electronics than I did. He was maybe five years older than I. We became fast friends and started doing projects together.
We read a story in Esquire magazine about this guy named Captain Crunch who could supposedly make free telephone calls. We were captivated. How could anybody do this? We thought it must be a hoax. We started looking through libraries for the secret tones. We were at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center one night, 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. That's another moment I'll never forget. When we saw this journal, we thought, "My God! It's all real."
We set out to build a device to make these tones. AT&T made a fatal flaw when they designed the original digital telephone network—they put the signaling from computer to computer in the same band as your voice. If you could make those same signals, you could put it right in through the handset. Literally, the entire AT&T international phone network would think you were an AT&T computer. After three weeks, we finally built a box like this that worked.
We built the best blue box in the world. It was all digital. No adjustments. You could go up to a pay phone, take a trunk over to White Plains, take a satellite over to Europe, go to Turkey, take a cable back to Atlanta. You could go around the world five or six times.
And what we learned was that we could build something ourselves that could control billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure in the world. We didn't know much. We could build a little thing that could control a giant thing. I don't think there would have ever been an Apple computer had there not been blue boxing.
Cringely: Woz said you called the Pope?
Jobs: Yeah, we did call the Pope. He pretended to be Henry Kissinger. We got the number of the Vatican and called the Pope. They started waking people up in the hierarchy. They actually sent someone to wake up the Pope when, finally, we just burst out laughing, and they realized that we weren't Henry Kissinger.
2. The Jump to Personal Computers
Cringely: So the jump from blue boxes to personal computers, what sparked that?
Jobs: Necessity. There was a time-sharing company in Mountain View that we could get free time on, but we needed a terminal and we couldn't afford one. So we designed and built one. And that was the first thing we ever did. What an Apple I was, was really an extension of this terminal putting a microprocessor on the back end.
We really built it for ourselves because we couldn't afford to buy anything. We'd scavenge parts. They'd take 40 to 80 hours to build one, and they'd always be breaking 'cause there's all these tiny little wires.
A lot of our friends wanted to build them, too. So we thought if we could make what's called a printed circuit board, you could build an Apple I in a few hours instead of 40 hours. I sold my Volkswagen Bus. Steve sold his calculator. We got enough money to make a printed circuit board.
I walked into the first computer store in the world, the Byte Shop of Mountain View. The person that ran it, Paul Terrell, said, "I'll take 50 of those." I said, "This is great." He said, "But I want them fully assembled." We'd never thought of this before.
We convinced these distributors to give us the parts on net 30 days credit. We had no idea what that meant. "Net 30? Sure. Sign here." We bought the parts, built the products, sold 50 of them to the Byte Shop, and got paid in 29 days. Then went and paid off the parts people in 30 days. So we were in business.
But we had the classic Marxian profit realization crisis—our profit was in 50 computers sitting in the corner. So we started thinking about distribution. "Are there any other computer stores?" We started calling the other computer stores we'd heard of across the country, and just eased into business that way.
3. Mike Markkula's Investment
Cringely: The third key figure in the creation of Apple was former Intel executive Mike Markkula. I asked Steve how he came aboard.
Jobs: We were designing the Apple II. Woz wanted to add color graphics. My ambition was that for every one hardware hobbyist that could assemble their own computer, there were a thousand people that couldn't do that, but wanted to mess around with programming—software hobbyists. Just like I had been when I was 10. My dream for the Apple II was to sell the first real packaged personal computer where you didn't have to be a hardware hobbyist at all.
We needed some money for tooling the case. A few hundred thousand dollars. So I went looking for venture capital. I ran across Don Valentine who came over to the garage. He later said I looked like a renegade from the human race. He wasn't willing to invest in us, but he recommended Mike Markkula.
Mike had retired at about 30 from Intel. He'd made like a million bucks on stock options. I think he was antsy to get back into something. Mike and I hit it off very well. Mike said, "Okay, I'll invest after a few weeks." And I said, "No. No. We don't want your money. We want you." So we convinced Mike to actually throw in with us as an equal partner.
Cringely: You're 21, you're a big success. You don't have any particular training in this. How do you learn to run a company?
Jobs: Throughout the years in business, I found something: I'd always ask why you do things. And the answers you invariably get are, "Oh, that's just the way it's done." Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks about things very deeply in business.
I'll give you an example. When we were building our Apple Is in the garage, we knew exactly what they cost. When we got into a factory in the Apple II days, the accounting had this notion of a standard cost, where you'd set a standard cost, and at the end of a quarter, you'd adjust it with a variance. I kept asking, "Why do we do this?" The answer was, "Well, that's just the way it's done."
After about six months of digging into this, I realized: the reason you do it is because you don't really have good enough controls to know how much it costs, so you guess, and then you fix your guess at the end of the quarter. And the reason you don't know how much it costs is because your information systems aren't good enough. But nobody said it that way.
In business, a lot of things are... I call it folklore. They're done because they were done yesterday and the day before. If you're willing to ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard, you can learn business pretty fast. It's not the hardest thing in the world. It's not rocket science.
4. Why Everyone Should Learn Programming
Cringely: What sort of programs? What did people actually do with these things?
Jobs: We used them in our work—to calculate frequencies for the blue box. But much more importantly, it had nothing to do with using them for anything practical. It had to do with using them to be a mirror of your thought process, to actually learn how to think.
I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer. Because it teaches you how to think. It's like going to law school. I don't think anybody should be a lawyer, but I think going to law school would actually be useful 'cause it teaches you how to think in a certain way. In the same way that computer programming teaches you, in a slightly different way, how to think.
I view computer science as a liberal art. It should be something that everybody learns. Takes a year in their life, one of the courses they take is learning how to program.
5. On Getting Rich
Cringely: What's it like to get rich?
Jobs: It's very interesting. I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25. And it wasn't that important because I never did it for the money. I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don't have a short-term payback and things like that.
But especially at that point in my life, it was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the company, the people, the products we were making, what we were gonna enable people to do with these products. I never sold any stock. Just really believed that the company would do very well over the long term.
6. The Xerox PARC Visit (1979)
Jobs: I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing. So I finally did. They showed me three things. One was object-oriented programming—I didn't even see that. One was a networked computer system with over 100 Alto computers using email—I didn't even see that.
I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life.
Now, remember, it was very flawed. What we saw was incomplete. But still, the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well. Within 10 minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday. You could argue about how many years it would take, you could argue about who the winners and losers might be, but you couldn't argue about the inevitability.
Cringely: Adele Goldberg said she argued against doing it for 3 hours.
Jobs: Oh! They were reluctant to show us? I have no idea. But they did show us. And it's good that they showed us, because the technology crashed and burned at Xerox.
7. On Xerox's Failure
Jobs: I actually thought a lot about that. And I learned more with John Sculley later on. What happens is, like with John Sculley—John came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was a new-size bottle. If you were a product person, you couldn't change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company.
Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox—so you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums.
The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.
The people at Xerox PARC used to call the people that ran Xerox "toner heads." These toner heads would come out to Xerox PARC, and they just had no clue about what they were seeing.
Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been a company 10 times its size. Could have been IBM. Could have been the Microsoft of the '90s.
8. Implementing the Vision
Cringely: How did you implement the vision?
Jobs: I got our best people together. The problem was that we'd hired a bunch of people from Hewlett-Packard. And they didn't get this idea. They didn't get it. I remember having dramatic arguments with some of these people who thought the coolest thing in user interface was soft keys at the bottom of a screen. They had no concept of proportionally-spaced fonts, no concept of a mouse. People screaming at me that it would take us five years to engineer a mouse and it would cost $300 to build.
I finally got fed up. I went outside and found David Kelley Design, and asked him to design me a mouse. In 90 days, we had a mouse we could build for 15 bucks that was phenomenally reliable.
People get confused. Companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, "Somehow there is some magic in the process of how that success was created." So they start to try to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content.
That's, ultimately, the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content. That's what happened a little bit at Apple, too. We had a lot of people who were great at management process. They just didn't have a clue as to the content.
In my career, I found that the best people are the ones that really understand the content, and they're a pain in the butt to manage. But you put up with it because they're so great at the content. And that's what makes great products. It's not process. It's content.
Cringely: Now you and John Couch fought for leadership of the Lisa. How did that come about?
Jobs: Absolutely, and I lost. I thought Lisa was in serious trouble. I could not convince enough people in the senior management of Apple. So I lost. I brooded for a few months. But it was not very long after that that it really occurred to me that the Apple II was running out of gas. We needed to do something with this technology fast or else Apple might cease to exist.
So I formed a small team to do the Macintosh. We were on a mission from God to save Apple. No one else thought so, but it turned out we were right. We reinvented everything. We reinvented manufacturing. I visited probably 80 automated factories in Japan, and we built the world's first automated computer factory in the world in California. We spent four years of our life doing that. We built the product. We built the automated factory, the machine to build the machine. We built a completely new distribution system. We built a completely different marketing approach. And I think it worked pretty well.
9. Execution and Building a Motivated Team
Cringely: How do you order your priorities? What's important to you in the development of a product?
Jobs: One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease—I've seen other people get it, too. It's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and that if you just tell all these other people, "Here is this great idea," then, of course, they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do or factories do or robots do.
Designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new, that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it's that process that is the magic.
The Rock Tumbler Metaphor:
When I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his 80s. One day, he said, "Come on into my garage. I want to show you something." He pulled out this dusty, old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them. We went out to the back and we got just some rocks. Some regular, old, ugly rocks. We put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder. We closed the can up, and he turned this motor on, and he said, "Come back tomorrow."
I came back the next day, and we opened the can, and we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks.
That's always been, in my mind, my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they're passionate about. It's through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people, bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.
On the 50-to-1 Talent Dynamic:
Most things in life, the dynamic range between average and best is at most 2-1. If you go to New York City, and you get an average taxicab driver versus the best taxicab driver, you're probably going to get to your destination maybe 30% faster. In an automobile, what's the difference between average and the best? Maybe 20%. The best CD player and an average CD player? I don't know. 20%. 2-1 is a big dynamic range in most of life.
In software—and it used to be the case in hardware, too—the difference between average and the best is 50-to-1, maybe 100-to-1. Very few things in life are like this. But what I was lucky enough to spend my life in, is like this.
I've built a lot of my success off finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for B and C players but really going for the A players. I found that when you get enough A players together, when you go through the incredible work to find five of these A players, they really like working with each other because they've never had a chance to do that before. And they don't want to work with B and C players. So it becomes self-policing. They only want to hire more A players. You build up these pockets of A players, and it propagates. That's what the Mac team was like. They were all A players.
10. Giving Feedback
Cringely: What does it mean when you tell someone their work is shit?
Jobs: It usually means their work is shit. Sometimes, it means, "I think your work is shit, and I'm wrong." But usually, it means their work is not anywhere near good enough.
Cringely: Bill Atkinson says when you say someone's work is shit, you really mean, "I don't quite understand it. Would you please explain it to me?"
Jobs: No, that's not usually what I meant. When you get really good people, they know they're really good. You don't have to baby people's egos so much. What really matters is the work. And everybody knows that. That's all that matters is the work.
The most important thing, I think, you can do for somebody who is really good and who's really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn't good enough. And to do it very clearly and to articulate why, and to get them back on track. You need to do that in a way that does not call into question your confidence in their abilities, but leaves not too much room for interpretation that the work they have done for this particular thing is not good enough to support the goal of the team. And that's a hard thing to do.
I've always taken a very direct approach. If you talk to people that have worked with me, the really good people have found it beneficial. Some people have hated it.
I'm also one of these people that I don't really care about being right. I just care about success. You'll find a lot of people that will tell you that I had a very strong opinion and they presented evidence to the contrary, and five minutes later, I completely changed my mind. Because I'm like that. I don't mind being wrong. I'll admit that I'm wrong a lot. It doesn't really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.
11. Desktop Publishing
Cringely: How did Apple get into desktop publishing which would become the Mac's killer app?
Jobs: We got the first Canon laser printer engine shipped in the United States at Apple, and we had it hooked up to a Lisa, actually imaging pages before anybody. Before HP. Before Adobe. But I heard, "Hey, there are these guys over in this garage that left Xerox PARC. You ought to go see them." I finally went and saw them, and I saw what they were doing, and it was better than what we were doing.
They were gonna be a hardware company. I talked them into being a software company. We bought 19.9% of Adobe at Apple. We got the engines from Canon. We designed the first laser printer controller at Apple. We got the software from Adobe, and we introduced the LaserWriter.
No one at the company wanted to do it but a few of us in the Mac group. Everybody thought a $7,000 printer was crazy. What they didn't understand was you could share it with AppleTalk. I had to basically do it over a few dead bodies, but we pushed this thing through.
When I left Apple, Apple was the largest printer company measured by revenue in the world.
Cringely: Did you envision desktop publishing?
Jobs: Yes. But we also envisioned really a networked office. In January of 1985, I made probably the largest marketing blunder of my career by announcing the Macintosh Office instead of just desktop publishing.
12. Leaving Apple
Cringely: Tell us about your departure from Apple.
Jobs: Oh, it was very painful. I'm not even sure I want to talk about it. What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. And he destroyed everything I'd spent 10 years working for. Starting with me, but that wasn't the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would have turned out like I'd wanted it to.
He basically got on a rocket ship that was about to leave the pad. And the rocket ship left the pad. And it kind of went to his head. He got confused, and thought that he built the rocket ship. And then he changed the trajectory so that it was inevitably going to crash into the ground.
Cringely: What was that catalyst?
Jobs: What happened was that the industry went into a recession in late 1984. Sales started seriously contracting. And John didn't know what to do. He had not a clue. There was a leadership vacuum at the top of Apple.
John was in a situation where the board was not happy. One thing I did not ever see about John until that time was he had an incredible survival instinct. Somebody once told me, "This guy didn't get to be the president of PepsiCo without these kinds of instincts." And it was true. John decided that a really good person to be the root of all these problems would be me.
Cringely: So there were competing visions for the company?
Jobs: It wasn't an issue of vision. It was an issue of execution. My belief was that Apple needed much stronger leadership, that the Macintosh was the future of Apple, that we needed to rein back expenses dramatically in the Apple II area, that we needed to be spending very heavily in the Macintosh area.
I wasn't, at that time, capable, I don't think, of running the company as a whole. I was 30 years old. I don't think I had enough experience to run a $2 billion company. Unfortunately, John didn't either.
I volunteered. I said, "Why don't I start a research division? Give me a few million bucks a year and I'll go hire some really great people. We'll do the next great thing." And I was told there was no opportunity to do that. My office was taken away.
13. The State of Apple (1995)
Jobs: Apple's dying today. Apple's dying a very painful death. It's on a glide slope to die.
When I walked out the door at Apple, we had a 10-year lead on everybody else in the industry. Macintosh was 10 years ahead. We watched Microsoft take 10 years to catch up with it. Well, the reason that they could catch up with it was because Apple stood still. The Macintosh that's shipping today is 25% different than the day I left.
They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D. A total of, probably, $5 billion on R&D. What did they get for it? I don't know. What happened was the understanding of how to move these things forward and how to create these new products somehow evaporated.
Their differentiation has been eroded by Microsoft. What they have now is their installed base. Which is not growing, and which is shrinking slowly. It's a glide slope that's just gonna go like this. I don't really think it's reversible at this point in time.
14. On Microsoft
Cringely: What about Microsoft? How did those guys do that?
Jobs: Microsoft's orbit was made possible by a Saturn V booster called IBM. And I know Bill would get upset with me for saying this, but of course it was true.
Much to Bill and Microsoft's credit, they used that fantastic opportunity to create more opportunity for themselves. Most people don't remember, but until 1984 with the Mac, Microsoft was not in the applications business. It was dominated by Lotus. Microsoft took a big gamble to write for the Mac. They came out with applications that were terrible. But they kept at it and they made them better, and eventually they dominated the Macintosh application market. Then used a springboard of Windows to get into the PC market. I think they're very strong opportunists, and I don't mean that in a bad way.
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way. They don't think of original ideas and they don't bring much culture into their product. Proportionally-spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books. That's where one gets the idea. If it weren't for the Mac, they would never have that in their products.
I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success. I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. No spirit or enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers don't have a lot of that spirit either.
But the way that we're going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody, so that everybody grows up with better things. Microsoft's just... It's McDonald's. So that's what saddens me. Not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoft's products don't display more insight and more creativity.
15. NeXT and Object Technology
Jobs: While the Macintosh was a revolution for the end user to make it easier to use, it was the opposite for the developer. Software got much more complicated to write as it became easier to use for the end user.
The most successful business war was MCI's Friends and Family in the last 10 years. And what was that? It was a brilliant idea and it was custom billing software. AT&T didn't respond for 18 months, yielding billions of dollars' worth of market share to MCI, not because they were stupid but because they couldn't get the billing software done.
We have taken another one of those brilliant original ideas at Xerox PARC that I saw in 1979, but didn't see really clearly then, called object-oriented technology. We have perfected it and commercialized it here. This object technology lets you build software 10 times faster. We're a 50-to-75-million-dollar company, got about 300 people.
16. Vision for the Web (1995)
Cringely: What's your vision of 10 years from now?
Jobs: I think one is objects, but the other one is the Web. The Web is incredibly exciting because it is the fulfilment of a lot of our dreams that the computer would ultimately not be primarily a device for computation but metamorphosize into a device for communication. And with the Web, that's finally happening.
Secondly, it's exciting because Microsoft doesn't own it, and therefore, there's a tremendous amount of innovation happening.
About 15% of the goods and services in the US are sold via catalogs or over the television. All that is gonna go on the Web and more. Billions and billions. Soon tens of billions of dollars' worth of goods and services are gonna be sold on the Web. A way to think about it is that it is the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel. Another way to think about it is the smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company in the world on the Web.
As we look back 10 years from now, the Web is going to be the defining technology. The defining social moment for computing. It's breathed a whole new generation of life into personal computing.
Cringely: And it's another one of those things that it's obvious once it happens.
Jobs: Right. That's right. Isn't this a wonderful place we live in?
17. The Bicycle for the Mind
Cringely: What drove you?
Jobs: I read an article when I was very young in Scientific American, and it measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. So for bears and chimpanzees and raccoons and birds and fish. How many kilocalories per kilometer did they spend to move? And humans were measured, too. And the condor won. It was the most efficient. And mankind, the crown of creation, came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list.
But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle. Blew away the condor. All the way off the charts.
I remember, this really had an impact on me. Humans are tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. The personal computer was the bicycle of the mind. I believe that with every bone in my body that of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near, if not at, the top as history unfolds and we look back.
As you know, when you set a vector off in space, if you can change its direction a little bit at the beginning, it's dramatic when it gets a few miles out in space. I feel we are still, really, at the beginning of that vector. And if we can nudge it in the right directions, it will be a much better thing as it progresses on. I think we've had a chance to do that a few times, and it brings all of us associated with it tremendous satisfaction.
18. Taste, Liberal Arts, and Stealing Ideas
Cringely: But how do you know what's the right direction?
Jobs: Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you are doing.
Picasso had a saying. He said, "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been for computer science, these people would have all been doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them—we all brought to this effort—a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude that we wanted to pull in the best that we saw in these other fields into this field. I don't think you get that if you're very narrow.
19. On Being a Hippie
Cringely: Are you a hippie or a nerd?
Jobs: Oh, if I had to pick one, I'm clearly a hippie. All the people I worked with were clearly in that category, too.
Source: 1995 interview by Robert X. Cringely for PBS "Triumph of the Nerds." Full VHS copy discovered in director Paul Sen's garage in 2011. Transcript via sameerbajaj.com.