New Steve Jobs recordings from the '80s released

https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/New-Steve-Jobs-recordings-from-the-80s-released-15572216.php

by mindcrime • 6 years ago

360 132 6 years ago

dewey3• 6 years ago

Anyone else who can't look at the page at all? I get the "Your Choices Regarding Cookies" popup but there's no button to confirm my choice.

mindcrime2• 6 years ago

I'm not having that same problem, but maybe try this?

https://outline.com/7fmau4

dewey3• 6 years ago

Thanks, that works. That's what I saw FWIW: https://imgur.com/a/ZeuoQrq

Reedx• 6 years ago

The recordings and actual story: https://www.fastcompany.com/90541084/this-unheard-steve-jobs...

dewey3• 6 years ago

The full story is actually here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90541084/this-unheard-steve-jobs...

coldcode• 6 years ago

When you listen to some of these early recordings, you realize how far ahead Job's thinking was from almost everyone else. Then you realize it took him decades to eventually ship these things. Despite being often a dreadful person to deal with, he was an original thinker who could actually ship things even it took most of a lifetime.

I left Apple a year before he came back, I still regret it.

mbesto• 6 years ago

Despite being often a dreadful person to deal with, he was an original thinker who could actually ship things even it took most of a lifetime.

Honestly, what is so admirable about this? There are a lot of people who take visionary stances and ultimately fail - these stories rarely get talked about. I'm sure there are more than a handful of visionary stances that Jobs took that never formed. It's survivorship bias at its finest.

Don't get me wrong, Jobs is/was an impressive person, but he gets a Midas-like reputation that is beyond cult like.

thu21113• 6 years ago

I dunno, I'd be more interested in long-form talks he gave when he was older, after he'd rebuilt Apple. Even though I've read his biography there's a surprising dearth of information out there about topics that seem important, at least if you want to learn management skills from his example.

Take the question of how technical he actually was. The famous books and movies about Jobs hardly cover this at all. There's not even any agreement today about it, look at the contradictory answers to this question:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-technical?share=1

And I'm always reminded of this story where he asks about the light well gathering characteristics of CMOS vs CCD:

https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-thrive-in-a-technic...

The biographies that are out there are OK as far as they go, but they're ultimately made by people who are in love with the idea of a humanities student getting rich running a tech company and telling those nerds where to go. They don't explore how he was able to recruit and keep people with strong skills, how he could tell them apart from those who just weren't as sharp. They don't explore how involved he was with at the time radical decisions like the macOS Aqua UI, merging BSD/NeXT/MacOS Classic, what exactly shipped in the first iPhone and so on. I've heard he was very involved with all kinds of minor things like the decision to keep using Objective-C well past its sell-by date, but again, such details come out in scraps here and there.

If you look at other tech firms like Yahoo, after being taken over by people without a strong engineering background they went into decline and failed. Merely being "not a nerd" is hardly sufficient. To match what he accomplished requires skill in deal making, recruitment, retention, skills evaluation, technology, marketing, etc. Yet this story remains largely untold.

ksk3• 6 years ago

Well, the other thing is that smart people like Steve Jobs can easily learn new skills and acquire knowledge even after college. He worked in tech for decades, so I'm sure he's read more a few books and/or experimented with tech hands-on :) Heck isn't programming one of those skills that we say you don't need to go college for?

reaperducer4• 6 years ago

experimented with tech hands-on

And by "experimented," you mean he was employed by Atari as a solder jockey and more. The guy knew tech in ways today's javascript abstractionists could never imagine.

scarface74• 6 years ago

Yahoo was failing when their original founders were on board.

You can listen to some of the old Debug podcasts with Nitin Ganatra and Don Melton for some first hand accounts.

reaperducer4• 6 years ago

There's not even any agreement today about it

There's a lot of revisionist history about whether Jobs understood the tech or not. I believe a lot of it comes from the later-day Woz worship that's been spreading since Mr. Jobs' death.

If you go back and read interviews of the era when Jobs was asked technical questions by technical people, he clearly understood far more than we give him credit for today.

pfraze• 6 years ago

I hear that kind of thing from two types of people: nontechnical people who are looking for a contrarian hot-take, and technical people who subscribe to the "credibility hierarchy" that's correlated to how close you work to the metal. They make fun of that nonsense in the first episode of Silicon Valley and it's probably one of my favorite jokes in the series [1].

1. https://youtu.be/kXQE2uGnR_U?t=19

JohnBooty4• 6 years ago

I'm at a loss for specific examples of Jobs not understanding a piece of hardware or software technology.

He made a lot of bets on the future and what he felt people would want to buy and use. Many worked out and some didn't.

But what are the examples of him allegedly not understanding specific bits of hardware or software technology?

For me, though I certainly didn't agree with all he did, it seemed he had a keen functional understanding of the underlying hardware and software. He couldn't sit down and write some code (which is fine) but he understood the pros and cons and was able to understand and shape where it was headed.

cercatrova• 6 years ago

I recommend reading a book called Think Simple if you want to learn more about Jobs' business philosophy, it's more of a discussion of his tactics moreso than a memoir or biography.

thu21113• 6 years ago

Thankyou. I will check it out.

egsmi2• 6 years ago

Take the question of how technical he actually was. The famous books and movies about Jobs hardly cover this at all. There's not even any agreement today about it, look at the contradictory answers

I'm not surprised. Is there even agreement on the definition of technical? How can we know if anyone is technical, let alone Steve Jobs?

Also, his partner was Woz. One has to be a bit more than "technical" to have it make sense to take a design from Woz.

mch82• 6 years ago

Ed Catmull writes about Jobs’ matured management style in Creativity Inc.

https://www.creativityincbook.com/

JohnBooty4• 6 years ago

    Take the question of how technical he actually 
    was. The famous books and movies about Jobs 
    hardly cover this at all. There's not even 
    any agreement today about it, look at the 
    contradictory answers to this question:

I'm amazed that there's even a debate about this.

He couldn't sit down and write code, or debug a PCB. That's fine. I don't need or even want my executives to be the best engineers in the house. I want them to respect and understand engineering and work in tandem with us.

Jobs was exactly the right sort of "technical" for management and the C-level: he was able to understand the pros and cons of technical details and, rather often, make good predictions about where things were going.

(He was also frequently a jerk, if not outright abusive, and I don't condone that -- but that's a separate matter entirely from his technical chops or lack thereof)

I can think of plenty of calls he made that I disagreed with. Some were bad calls, period. Other calls were "correct" for what he was trying to achieve, but I didn't agree with what he was trying to achieve. Other times, he was simply too ambitious, pushing some software vision before hardware had quite caught up.

But I've never seen an example of him simply failing to sufficiently understand the hardware or software.

ayewo• 6 years ago

With respect to your last paragraph, that's because Jobs doesn't really fit the mould that we "construct" as humans when trying to understand other people.

In general, tech industry leaders should be able to manage context-switching between technical and non-technical decision-making, but very few leaders can excel at it, if their life were to depend on it. This is why we have very few of them like Andy Grove, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs & Elon Musk.

A lot of engineers do not consider Steve Jobs to be technical partially because he was admitted to study a non-technical degree (unlike Andy, Jeff or Elon) and partially because of the way he is documented to have ripped off engineers he has worked with. The reasoning is if he was capable of doing the work himself, why hire someone else to do it or at least devalue their work in a way he wouldn't like to be treated?

Also in tech, we generally fall into two buckets: technical and non-technical, but Jobs as a person didn't neatly fit into either bucket as evidenced by this description taken from Wikipedia. It aptly describes Jobs in a way that different writers fail to do:

He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of a brain and kind of a hippie ... but he never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too intellectual for the hippies, who just wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind of an outsider.

This phenomenon, in IMHO, is why a lot of writers explain his contributions from the perspective they are most familiar with. A non-technical writer trying to extol his virtues as a business leader will generally not be qualified to speak about his technical leadership abilities, causing readers to think his technical skills are average at best (or even non-existent, similar to his contemporaries in business). The converse is true.

jkcorrea4• 6 years ago

For those interested, AllAboutSteveJobs.com keeps a pretty good repository of Jobs moments. My personal favorite is his 1997 WWDC talk [1]. In one talk he demonstrates what it is to be a great leader organizationally, publicly, and as a product visionary.

He also opens himself up to harsh criticism from people who were, in a lot of ways, rightfully pissed at him. He takes both tough questions and ad hominem attacks gracefully and reframes the narrative in a positive way without disparaging the questioner [2]. To me, this is in stark contrast to the staged events with canned/screened questions that most tech leaders run today.

He also lays out much of the vision for products that are still being rolled out 10-20 years later. Crazy.

Really recommend watching the full thing if you have time, but also linking to a little excerpt from one of the best moments.

[1] (full video): https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...

[2] (insult excerpt): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

mrpippy• 6 years ago

It's a fascinating talk. I've uploaded a much better quality version to the Internet Archive (after Apple had it taken down from YouTube):

https://archive.org/details/wwdc-1997-fireside-chat-steve-jo...

jkcorrea4• 6 years ago

Ahh that is much better, I'll update my link. Thanks :)

imglorp2• 6 years ago

Why would they want it removed? It's free advertising.

tambourine_man2• 6 years ago

I've seen this many times, so great. Imagine Cook taking random developer's questions at WWDC today.

In that same year, the famous Gates at the big screen speech. The audience was booing. Can you imagine something even close to that today?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY

jkcorrea4• 6 years ago

For what it's worth, I think Cook is a better CEO for the current era than Jobs would have been. He's not a strong public speaker, sure, but he's an operator who can execute on the vision Jobs laid out better than anyone.

On a personal level he's also a much more compassionate/empathetic person which I think plays well in the current social climate. I can't imagine Jobs getting away with some of his fabled antics today.

Finally, and probably due to the previous point, Cook is much more adept at playing the geopolitics game with India, China, Trump, etc..

But yes, him fielding random developer questions would be awkward at best. Which is why they shoo him off stage in favor of Craig/Sruji/some mid-level manager to talk tech every chance they get.

agumonkey2• 6 years ago

When I watch these confs and compare to today I see an empty pattern. Something's missing.

ps: by that I mean, the show goes on but the soil is dry, I don't think the world dreams or needs more digital tech. It's ironically in autopilot.

egsmi2• 6 years ago

Imagine Cook taking random developer's questions at WWDC today.

Sure. Developers today would ask him about AppStore policies and things like that. No one would ask technical questions as it wouldn't make sense. And I am quite sure this scene will only ever exist in my imagination. :)

duxup• 6 years ago

I think it is ultra hard to really convey the vision for what you're doing, what you did, and where you're going to really put developer decisions in context.

It's super easy to declare whatever executive to be some evil guy because he shot your product down because he killed your framework or whatever.

But sometimes these things are painful, but are done for the 'right' reasons.

Steve was able to communicate those things, I think most folks can't and thus don't.

endlessvoid94• 6 years ago

You nailed it w/ your comment about how different today's most common public forums w/ leaders are run.

I also enjoy how, in that Q&A session, he lays out a ton of what Apple would actually release in the subsequent decade.

codetrotter• 6 years ago

Clickable link for the site you mentioned: https://allaboutstevejobs.com/

hajile• 6 years ago

I've always loved that "insult" excerpt in showing the reality distortion field in full sway.

He says he's completely ignorant about the technology. Despite the tech potentially being better and him not knowing, he sidesteps his ignorance and damns the messenger with faint praise "I'm sure you could make some cool-looking demo" before moving on to platitudes about "people over tech". By the time 5 minutes has elapsed, he's mostly avoided the first question and everyone has completely forgotten the second question existed.

klodolph• 6 years ago

I don’t know what your personal experience is with OpenDoc is. I’ve used it, although I was never an OpenDoc developer. The developer isn’t really asking a question. They’re stating a challenge in the form of a question. This is something that happens here in the HN comments all the time, when people get into heated discussions.

If someone asks me a question like that, I sure as hell am not going to try and give it a direct answer. The only reason the question was asked was to provoke Jobs into a particular line of discussion.

Speaking of OpenDoc itself—sure, it seemed tragic when it got shut down. But it got completely steamrolled by—well, exactly what Jobs said—Java, in its various incarnations. The vision of how you combine data from different sources and different programs in 1997 onwards and put them in a single place is by writing Java apps, possibly some combination of web apps and applets.

There have also been some analysis pieces out there on how Apple missed out on its potential in the 1990s because it didn’t embrace networking the way that, for example, Sun did. HyperCard, for example, could have been the web or it could have been FileMaker or it could have been PowerPoint.

nostromo• 6 years ago

And people watching the video don’t realize that the questioner was referencing a very rude comment Jobs had just made about a team of Apple developers, that had just been fired by Jobs, saying they had not done anything for seven years.

KKKKkkkk1• 6 years ago

He says he's completely ignorant about the technology.

Yeah, contrast that with Elon twittering about floating floating point [0] and too many zeros in fp32 [1].

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1307822172556193793

jccc2• 6 years ago

Apple was barely above comatose, running on vapors. The point was that even OpenDoc being "better" tech does not automatically mean Apple could/should make it into products and sell those products to customers. Apple needed to invest rapidly diminishing resources into actual products it can sell to actual customers that would save the company from imminent death.

Whether you like, dislike, agree or disagree with that argument, I don't think it can be dismissed as "platitudes about 'people over tech.'"

Jobs had to make bird's-eye-view decisions, and articulated that point of view pretty well here.

Miraste• 6 years ago

It's a mistake to lump the rest of his response under "platitudes." What he's saying there-work backwards from the customer experience rather than forwards from the tech-is the strategy that took Apple from bankrupt to $2 trillion. Technical people dismiss it all the time. If the technology is better, the thinking goes, it will win out eventually. It's the thought process that launched the Zune, Windows Phone, and decades of attempts at tablets. Apple's entire existence is predicated on letting other "clever" companies try this and torpedoing them with worse but vastly more usable versions of their advanced technology.

notafraudster• 6 years ago

The answer is not perfect -- the questioner might be correct that Jobs doesn't have a handle on the tech side of things. But I did think that the answer was coherent. He concedes that, without going into details, OpenDoc may be the better option technically, and surely in a sort of contrived case it would be possible to come up with situations where it is. I can't speak to the accuracy of the claim given I am not familiar with whatever the actual arcane debate was at the time, but I immediately infer from context that this is the questioner mad that Apple is giving up superior technology in favour of broader adoption technology.

Then he says that it's actually not about the tech, it's about the extent to which the tech enables a good end-user experience. The printer anecdote is imperfect, but it is him highlighting a point he referred to many times in his career, which is that tech (and especially tech specs) is just a means to an end and people just by the end. Like how 3.x era Android phones often had more RAM or nominally higher clockspeed but were substantially less responsive to their contemporary iPhone competitors.

I do think he dodges the second question entirely, but the second question is, in so many words, "You suck at your job. Care to comment?" so, like, what is the ideal answer to that? Crucially, he correctly senses that many in the audience empathize with the aggressive tack taken by the questioner and he admits that it's a fair tack and he has no real defence. If someone tells me "you suck at your job", I think I'd be more likely to respond to validate their anger than to actually take it to be a factual claim in need of rebuttal. If anything I'm shocked that Jobs had the empathy to read that correctly.

I don't see it as RDF so much as it is an honest and coherent and adequate but imperfect answer.

setpatchaddress• 6 years ago

No, RDF was a more intimate thing -- Steve's ability to tunnel into your brain through his eyes. No one was intense like Steve.

What he was trying to convey here was that you can have the best technology in the world, but if there's no purpose for it -- if people don't want it -- you have nothing.

OpenDoc and Newton, one of them a solution in search of a problem, and the other fifteen years ahead of its time, didn't seem like obvious winners to the former NeXT and current Pixar CEO. This shouldn't be a surprise.

philwelch3• 6 years ago

One of the fatal faults of NeXT was that it was built around the basic concept of developing cool technology and trying to build a product around it. I think in that context, Jobs answered the question perfectly.

RogerL• 6 years ago

It's worth pointing out that the question was a pointed response to Job's first answer, where he was asked about Open Doc. Along the way, Jobs said the people complaining to the press hadn't done any meaningful work for the last 7 years.

It's not really a question you should answer IMO. Whether the complainers did significant work or not is independent of what Jobs did. It's just a dumb 'gotcha' question with no gotcha. If the questioner had a legitimate beef with Jobs' productivity he could have been specific. And Jobs was extremely clear in his original answer as to what he was doing - reviewing tech, and 'putting a bullet in the head' to tech that didn't fit the overarching goals of Apple.

pritovido• 6 years ago

He was not telling people platitudes over tech, or avoiding the question whatsoever. He was telling people his thinking process.

In essence is what real marketing is all about. That is not about finding how to sell something that they have but designing a strategy for the company to focus on creating what people need and are willing to pay that makes sense for the company.

That technology is secondary is something that(most) engineers just don't get, because they have never sold anything or created a company in the first place.

By the way he did not say that he was ignorant. He was not ignorant about anything his company did. He is saying that someone could know more about the tech but that what he actually cares about is how this tech is used, that is his job.

Of course the decision maker does not know all the details. He is not God. His job is to focus on the important details for the company to survive and prosper, not trying to look cool.

opo• 6 years ago

Here is a different take on it: "...But Jobs's response is a perfect demonstration of what to do in this situation."

https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-de...

JohnBooty4• 6 years ago

    He says he's completely ignorant about the technology.

That's not how I've always interpreted it. Seems more like he's admitting he's not an expert in it, in deference to the audience member who's clearly pretty invested in the technology.

     Despite the tech potentially being better and him not 
     knowing, he sidesteps his ignorance and damns the 
     messenger with faint praise "I'm sure you could make 
     some cool-looking demo"

Wasn't Jobs right? What was OpenDoc good for other than tech demos? Was there ever a killer app?

Document-based computing was intriguing, and in some ways it was of course a GUI extension of the Unix philosophy of chaining together multiple tools.

But how well did it ever work? How do you sell that?

Considering how badly companies struggle with GUIs to begin with, wouldn't we have compounded that by passing around these Frankenstein OpenDocs that were mashed together chunks of data that you had to use multiple bits of commercial software to manipulate? What if your fancy OpenDoc has 28 types of documents and the recipient only has 27 of the required viewers/editors installed? What about software version hell? What about document version hell? Maybe open and well-defined interchangeable data formats were the answer, but when has that ever worked out and why would software vendors even want to buy into that?

Ultimately, in some ways it would have been cool to email a Lotus 1-2-3 doc embedded in a Word doc mashed together with an AutoCAD file but what was this solving? It's at best slightly more elegant than just three separate files, and at worse a complete and utter nightmare.

Consensus seems to be that it was truly a solution without a problem, and at any rate not the kind of thing that would turn around a consumer-facing tech company.

    before moving on to platitudes about "people over tech".

Again, not how I interpreted it. Seemed to me he pretty blunt - he didn't see how OpenDoc could be productized. It wasn't solving anybody's problems, and even the biggest OpenDoc fan (do they exist?) would probably have to admit it seems like more of a backend or groupware foundation. Not a way to sell Macs.

    has completely forgotten the second question existed.

I'd say it was within his right to ignore a personal question. Especially since a lot of what he'd done during the years in question was quite public - NeXT, Pixar, etc. I support the first part of the guy's query, I guess, but it was rather graceful for Jobs to merely sidestep the question rather than address it more bluntly.

ksec4• 6 years ago

And yet 20 years later, even when people watch the video they still dont get it.

God I wish this man is still alive, Apple would be so much better now.

StillBored• 6 years ago

Its vision. He knows what fits in his vision, and he knows what doesn't and can name the reasons why not and what it would take to make it work. At the same time he can on the spot explain it, and if nothing else at least the listener understands the reasons, and not just the decision. Its crazy refreshing in the midst of soundbites and technology which doesn't serve the end user.

Frankly, I think he nails it all in the first couple minutes. He's the chief NAK'er. Being able to say "no" is more important than yes. Yet so many people are afraid of hurting people's feelings or don't have the political will to do it. Although at that point in his career it had already bitten him once at apple.

Also, can you imagine a current apple employee publicly disparaging one of their products like Jobs did the Newton and various other things? Take the watch, he might have loved it, but I can totally hear him complaining about how it was a subpar experience to the iphone, which you have in your pocket, cue the speech recognition bit. Also the thinly veiled bits about if the clone hardware were actually better..

michelb• 6 years ago

I think Steve would have sounded like a broken record, much like Ive has been. New times require new people, and some people at Apple should REALLY be replaced by fresher ones.

I doubt Steve/Ive would have let the new widget and icon customisation in iOS14 see the light of day, but it is a MASSIVE hit in a younger demographic.

Dig1t• 6 years ago

Ahh what is this website!? sfsgate.com is so horrible. GIANT ads everywhere, popups, everything is jumping down as the page loads.

The actual recordings are on Soundcloud here: https://soundcloud.com/user-626311220

Please save yourself the pain of visiting this travesty of a website.

ciarannolan2• 6 years ago

Do you use an ad blocker? Or browse with js off by default?

I do both and this site looks fine, like any other article online.

tambourine_man2• 6 years ago

I think we can agree that one shouldn't need that in order to have a decent experience on the web.

ehsankia• 6 years ago

Ads aside, when an article is written specifically about a rare video/audio that has been released, I expect it to be right at the top and clearly visible. Even with ad-block, you have to get past a long intro and dig for that single word link in the middle of the article to get to the audio.

est31• 6 years ago

On a related note, I remember watching shareholder meeting like events from Tesla on youtube where Elon Musk admitted that the first roadster prototype didn't work and had to be cooled after the demo. I can't find it any more. Is this still public?

ChickeNES• 6 years ago

At about 35 minutes in there was a video demonstrating their automated PCB assembly line, and luckily it's on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSj6kvv7_Sg

gscott• 6 years ago

At the very end they simply slide in the motherboard into the case. That is the way it should be.

amatecha6• 6 years ago

Thank you! I'll post this as a comment on the SoundCloud post itself, with credit to you for finding the link

b0rsuk• 6 years ago

Seems like Steve Jobs is the modern equivalent of a saint in US.

klmadfejno• 6 years ago

Then you've got a bubble to break out of

S_A_P• 6 years ago

If news orgs are hurting in general why do they insist on spending so much money in bandwidth and hosting costs to force feed me video that has nothing to do with the article Im reading? I suppose this has to generate some sort of revenue stream but it is user hostile... I attempted to block the object with uBlock Origin which proved unable to do so. I then just went into the DOM and deleted the nodes containing the player and that instantly caused Firefox to consume mass CPU quantity.

I will say this here, and Im a sample set of 1. I would be 100% more sympathetic to the cause of paying for news if I wasnt part of the shell game that is click through, engagement, page view and ad revenue metrics.

laksdjfkasljdf• 6 years ago

"If you want to make a revolution, you've got to raise the lowest common denominator in every single machine," [...] "You can not use features that are not built into every computer."

* Looks around. See the entire Gaming market and Apple dongles.

Yeah. spot on.

spsrich2• 6 years ago

Theres a nice one of him on stage at the 1988 "Monsters of Rock" singing "Bomber"

steve_taylor• 6 years ago

Talking about the App Store in 1982: https://soundcloud.com/user-626311220/steve-jobs-and-steve-w...

amatecha6• 6 years ago

Actual audio recording, in case you just want to listen to it: https://soundcloud.com/user-626311220/steve-jobs-demos-next-...

sgt• 6 years ago

I had to laugh when he said having a high speed hard drive with a magnetic head over a platter is like flying a Boeing 747 six inches above the ground.

New Steve Jobs recordings from the '80s released

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