Quotes from 1995 Steve Jobs Interview

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1449

by tilt • 15 years ago

129 38 15 years ago

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ed209• 15 years ago

One of my fav Jobs quotes (not catchy, but practical) is:

"...there needs to be someone who is the keeper and reiterator of the vision..."

If you have your own project/startup, then that's you. Even if you just reiterate it to yourself.

It features in this video that's making the rounds at the moment http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOlqqriBvUM&feature=youtu...

technoslut• 15 years ago

The one I found most interesting is:

"Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art."

It's clear that Jobs had viewed the iPad as being a way to help change education. Though you can't program on the iPad currently, I have no doubt that it will eventually come in the future.

Jobs also shared the same belief as Alan Kay. Kay was angered that Scratch wasn't currently possible under Apple's rules and viewed the Dynabook as a way to teach children how to code. A comment like this shows that Jobs probably had this in his mind but wanted to take baby steps with what he probably viewed as the future of Apple. It could also be that he wanted to get the foundation of iOS correct before moving into something more complicated as programming.

I wonder if Jobs felt the same way in his later years. I'm guessing he did. With traditional blue collar jobs disappearing, computer science is becoming an ever-increasing necessity for the future workforce.

saint-loup• 15 years ago

I'm tempted to generalize this sentence to "Learning (anything) teaches you how to think".

Computing certainly conveys a stronger worldview than, say, skateboarding, but I really think mastering any activity can be a valuable and profound lesson.

coob• 15 years ago

> Though you can't program on the iPad currently

Ah but you can:

http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/

staktrace• 15 years ago

You should read his biography (by Walter Isaacson). The intersection between arts and technology was a huge point of focus with Jobs.

tensor2• 15 years ago

I suppose everybody interprets this comment differently. My reading of it is one of extreme ignorance of what computer science is. Computer science is part applied math, and part pure math. It is most certainly not in any way a liberal art.

Further, it is crucial to most of Jobs own technologies in a very deep way. Indeed it is crucial to all of computing. Learning to program teaches you to think, but doing math and applying math does not? This is not a comment to be proud of.

Every applied science crucially depends on mathematics in some form. Thus, I take this as ignorance on Jobs part. It fits right in line with Jobs feeling justified in taking the entire credit for technologies that he mostly copied from academia. Yes, he and Apple modified some of them, especially the early GUI days. But more recently they lifted others like Siri verbatim. But Jobs has never acknowledge the huge shoulders he stood on.

In my opinion, Jobs' primary skill was art. Not technical innovation, not science. One could argue he recognized good engineering I suppose, but software architecture is also arguably more art than science in that there are few objective measures of it that people agree on.

VMG• 15 years ago

Am I too much of a conspiracy theorist when I doubt that the tape was really "lost"?

kmfrk• 15 years ago

When the BBC don't mind taping over their Monty Python archive and other precious troves of TV and websites, I think any kind of incompetence is possible in the TV channel industry.

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

In their defense, it's not usually until much after the original recording that someworks are trully recognized as valuable.

That and videtape (and storage space) were not always cheap.

funkah• 15 years ago

yes

troels• 15 years ago

"Don't attribute to malice which can be explained by incompetence" - or something like that ..

augustl• 15 years ago

Is it possible to watch the actual interview somewhere?

EDIT: So it's only available in the US? That's pretty old school.

gwern• 15 years ago

In theaters, I understand.

askedrelic• 15 years ago

http://www.stevejobsthelostinterview.com/

I guess it's doing a limited theater run for awhile, in SF and Austin. I saw it last week in SF and Cringely showed up and did a Q&A afterwards, he mentioned wanting to have the interview seen in a shared setting.

lysol• 15 years ago

Just keep in mind every quote needs 'sic' after the end of it, because these transcriptions are pretty bad.

bravura• 15 years ago

'sic' means the exact opposite of that:

"Sic—generally inside square brackets, [sic], and occasionally parentheses, (sic)—when added just after a quote or reprinted text, indicates the passage appears exactly as in the original source. The usual purpose is to inform readers that any errors or apparent errors in the copied material are not from transcription—that they are reproduced exactly from the original writer or printer. A bracketed sic may also be used as a form of ridicule or as a humorous comment, typically by drawing attention to the original writer's mistakes."

billpatrianakos• 15 years ago

I'm sorry but these weren't all that great. I'm glad you appreciated them, though, and I have to point out that there are definitely some typos in there but we can get the meaning anyway. They kind of seemed like repeats of quotes I'd read before but worded differently. Its too bad because I usually go all fanboy for anything Steve related.

leak• 15 years ago

Glad I read the comments before I posted but exactly this. I'm definitely not a Steve hater but this isn't gospel. These "quotes" you hear on a daily basis if you have ever been around a small business, startup, or worked with others.

avk• 15 years ago

My favorite quote: "What causes people to be poets instead of bankers? When you put that into products people can sense that. And they love it."

hack_edu• 15 years ago

"Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art."

Imagine all the hate the source of this quotation would receive on here if this didn't come from The Steve.

nolanw• 15 years ago

Well it's certainly not a science as the scientific method is nowhere to be found. The closest thing to it at most universities is the math department, which seems to end up in the arts faculty as often as not. I'd argue there's widespread acceptance that neither math nor computer science are sciences (in the sense that, say, physics or biology are), and if something isn't a science, it's either an art or its own thing.

Who did you have in mind as the source of hatred?

baddox• 15 years ago

Where do you live? I've never heard of a college math department being part of the art department. In the USA, computer science departments are usually either closely attached to the math department, or are part of the engineering school if the college has one.

Obviously, your whole argument depends on the definition of "science" more than anything. Using the naive middle school definition of science, as in "the scientific method," perhaps math and CS don't qualify (although there is in fact a lot of experimental/observational work in CS, particularly in "real-world" applications like general-purpose encryption/compression, cache invalidation, process scheduling, etc.). However, using a broader definition of science, like the one Wikipedia gives, it's clear that math and CS easily qualify.

dylangs1030• 15 years ago

I don't agree. I think the quotes listed are sufficiently universal, but not implicitly obvious, that they would be appreciated from just about any source. Unless of course that source was being hypocritical. I don't think this is a case of Jobs worship - it just seems like the sort of advice Paul Graham would have given. Good, solid advice.

tesseract• 15 years ago

Three of the traditional seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) are today considered branches of mathematics - is it really so hard to imagine computer science taking a place among these?

celoyd• 15 years ago

And only two of them are today considered humanities, which is what a lot of non-humanities people seem to be thinking when they say liberal arts.

As someone who briefly attended a liberal arts college, when I hear liberal arts I understand it to mean something that encourages dance majors to take materials science courses just as much as vice-versa.

namank3• 15 years ago

Anyone know where I can watch this interview?

I'm not in the US...

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

It will undoubtedly be available on DVD eventually. It will probably also be online (Amazon, iTunes) and on various torrents.

namank3• 15 years ago

Hope the DVD is released, its definitely not anywhere else - YouTube took it down for copyright issues.

Quotes from 1995 Steve Jobs Interview

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