The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech from 1983: Foreshadowing Wireless Networking & iPad

http://lifelibertytech.com/2012/10/02/the-lost-steve-jobs-speech-from-1983-foreshadowing-wireless-networking-the-ipad-and-the-app-store

by peterkchen • 14 years ago

98 64 14 years ago

lifelibertytech.com

eckyptang5• 14 years ago

We had everything he said back then - it was just rather bulky. It's not a visionary statement - it's logic.

I wish everyone would stop harping on about Jobs - he was a marketing expert not a visionary.

pinaceae• 14 years ago

oh boy aren't you smart. the old "just marketing" troll.

  all you need to make an mp3 player successful is marketing.
  all you need to make a smartphone successful is marketing.
  all you need to make notebooks successful is marketing.

my god, it is so simple!

fire all the designers, engineers, coders, all the fucking nerds and replace them with marketing people! brilliant. this is exactly how you become one of the most valuable companies on this planet.

quick, call HP, Dell and Nokia to tell them about this grandiose insight!

czr803• 14 years ago

Bit harsh, but I sympathise with your frustration. The "only marketing" trope is so shallow that it is annoying how it survives.

voyou• 14 years ago

People say "Apple just does just marketing" like marketing is easy or unimportant. But, you know what, Apple's success really is about marketing, and that's a good thing. Apple haven't made that many purely technical innovations, but what they have done is look at new technology, figure out what people might want to do with it, tweak the technology to focus on doing that thing, and then explain to people how Apple's product can help them do something they want to do. This is "marketing," it's what makes technological innovations accessible to people, and it's something Apple should be praised for.

mmariani• 14 years ago

Yeah sure! Let's just call John Sculley to replace Tim Cook. He'll fix Apple good.

PS: the "tape" is awesome, thanks.

w0utert• 14 years ago

> We had everything he said back then - it was just rather bulky. It's not a visionary statement - it's logic.

> I wish everyone would stop harping on about Jobs - he was a marketing expert not a visionary.

Yes, in hindsight it's all so logical. Anybody could have done it, Apple was simply the first to redefine the MP3 market, the digital music distribution market, the phone market, the mobile app market, the laptop market, the tablet market, all by chance. And marketing of course. Marketing and chance, there ain't nothing more to it. Just like founding NeXT, only to buy it 10 years later to create a whole new operating system and foundation of frameworks to program it, agile enough to run on hardware ranging from smartphones to workstations, it was all Jobs' marketing genius. The same marketing genius that founded Pixar, and had Intel scrambling to pay the traditional PC manufacturers to produce the PC equivalents of MacBook Airs.

Really, Steve Jobs and Apple are all.marketing, no doubt about it... :-/

zorbo• 14 years ago

This article is bunk. I'd advise the author to stay far away from fortune tellers and palm readers.

moonsoonmenu• 14 years ago

To everyone saying Steve Jobs is just a "marketer" obviously doesn't know what it takes to run a company, let alone his full genius. Now watch as Apple starts falling down.

hayksaakian2• 14 years ago

Steve Jobs was obviously holding Apple back, only just recently did we finally get a 4 inch screen, 4G LTE, and (keep in mind he publicly decried this form factor) an iPad mini 7ish inch tablet

long live tim cook

hayksaakian2• 14 years ago

my source: http://liliputing.com/2010/10/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-bashes-7-...

rustynails775• 14 years ago

It's brave to say Jobsy held Apple back - he brought Apple back from the ashes.

Jobsy supposedly passed on much advice to Tim Cook - on where to go with the next few models. Jobsy may not have been against 4G LTE and a 4 inch screen - he may have recommended Tim to go down that path.

molmalo2• 14 years ago

I think that an important distinction has to be made about this kind of people. Unlike many journalists, and 'futurists' out there, trying to predict what the future will be like, people like Jobs and Gates[1] do not make bold predictions, just for the sake of making them. Instead they have a vision and they work to make that vision real.

That's the reason of why, when they speak, sometimes the things they tell may seem to be a little bit odd at the time, but eventually that things became real.

There are a few examples of this in the interview made by AllThingsD to Gates and Jobs together in 2007. [1] At 35:30 Gates said that he was sure the tablet market was about to explode (while jobs was looking at him with a funny poker face), and later, he basically described Kinnect, a few years before Project Natal was made public.

If Google haven't revealed Glass or their autonomous cars, and Larry or Sergey came out speaking about driver-less cars, and wearable devices, some would think that they are dreaming, but the truth is that they are describing their vision, and they are working to make it real.

It's like what jobs said at min 43, when asked about 5 years from 2007 (yeah, right now!). And he said: "I don't know, " [...] "but something comes along, gets really popular, people love it, get used to it, you want it on there".

They are not wizards, they happen to know what currently exists, and what's being developed. So, instead of making weird assumptions (like: "ok, assuming that we will develop a material 1000 times stronger, 100 times lighter and 10 times cheaper, we'll have X in ten years"), they rationalize about what's the logical evolution of the technology, based on what they know.

[1] http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB... , Min 28 and forward.

cefstat• 14 years ago

Exactly! As Alan Kay said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it".

I don't find it is so important that people like Jobs, Gates, Brin, etc. have sometimes correctly predicted the future. What is important is that they executed, and turned these predictions to reality. Even more. They turned these predictions to everyday reality for most people, instead of a select few.

It annoys me when these people are compared to people who just throw a million ideas around and then, when one of these ideas becomes reality, they claim that they are so good at predicting the future.

molmalo2• 14 years ago

That quote came to my mind, while I was writing my comment, and I think it's magnificent. I love it, because it basically tells you: Don't lay there just dreaming about the future, go out and build the future!

gruseom• 14 years ago

Alan Kay said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it".

Kay popularized that quote, but didn't invent it. It goes back to a 1963 book called Inventing the Future by physicist Dennis Gabor: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/09/27/invent-the-future/

elorant• 14 years ago

Plus they have tons of data available from market research that capture various trends and what people are looking for even if they (the people) can’t express it product wise. I believe that 9 out of 10 products that we call innovative aren’t just invented out of the blue. They are the result of meticulous observation of trends and users' habits.

gnaffle• 14 years ago

While they weren't invented out of the blue, I don't think most of them come from meticulous observation of trends and market research.

Rather I think what happens is that some technology matures, and then some people that are familiar with that technology are able to recognize that it can be made into a real product that has market potential.

These people don't need market research, because from their standpoint, with their knowledge, it's "obvious". Eg. if you knew about the internet and email in the 80s, it would be obvious that it would replace telex at some point, even though you might be off with the timing of that transition.

simonh2• 14 years ago

Not in Jobs case. He had absolutely nothing good to say about market research. He was a strong believer in the adage that if you asked what people wanted out of a car back in 1900 they'd just describe a better horse.

Gates on the other hand was a big believer in market research and focus groups. I think that's why he was so into pen computing. He was unable to get past the windowing, desktop, pointing device paradigm.

001sky• 14 years ago

Repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4605117

goggles99• 14 years ago

And Sci-Fi has done far more for tech innovation than Steve Jobs. Too bad the authors never get any credit.

jgrahamc• 14 years ago

This tape really is worth listening to for anyone who was not involved with computers in 1983. Jobs clearly sees what is happening in the home computer revolution. He's not alone in that, many of us at that time realized that the computer was going to take over everywhere.

Around that time I worked on a project for a company that made machines to stick labels on product packets. Those machines were electromechanical and worked but were quite inflexible. I was asked to prototype a computer control of one of the machines and wrote the code by hand and demonstrated that not only was computer control cheaper and smaller it was way more flexible. For example, the electromechanical machines were unable to detect when there was a missing sticker on the roll of stickers to be applied to the products. It was trivial with computer control (and an IR detector) to add that functionality.

The machine was a 6502-based box whose interface was a hex keypad and a 6 digit seven segment display. You typed your program in in hex and ran out, but it and enough I/O channels to run the machine.

Here is is... The KIM-1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1

DodgyEggplant• 14 years ago

Startup = Vision

netcan2• 14 years ago

On a side note, is digitizing and distributing this recording violating some copyright?

netcan2• 14 years ago

Wow. He was just 28 when this was recorded, I think.

AimHere• 14 years ago

I thank Mozilla almighty for Firefox' 'Inspect Element' feature allowing me to block that intrusive element full of social networking cruft that was obscuring much of the content. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't attempt to read this article at all.

Presumably some browser/window size configurations wouldn't have a chunk of article text blocked by an obnoxious window demanding I shill this article on a bunch of websites I never visit, so I figure it's bad website design rather than an intentional retro throwback to 1998-style popup-heavy browsing, but still - if you made that site, and you're reading this, make it not happen anymore.

larrys• 14 years ago

Great tip.

For others, in Firefox, under OSX:

Tools -> Web Developer -> Inspect

Then hold down option, select the box, then click on the downarrow "delete node" and the box will disappear.

elviejo2• 14 years ago

Wow that was visionary! </sarcasm> if it wasnt for the fact that Alan Kay had invented the dynabook concept in 1968 and had cardboard prototype of an ipad in 1972. And he went and helped create that vision in xerox parc.

and later went to work for apple were jobs was able to copy more of his ideas.

So yeah what a prediction say in 1983 what Alan Kay invented in 1968.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

DeepDuh• 14 years ago

You sound bitter. So other people have thought of and built parts of what jobs' team brought together, ergo Jobs was not a visionary? You can hate Apple and SJ's personality as much as you want, but don't let it blind you. Lisa and Mac invented more over the Xerox UI than you think, plus they got the license from Xerox in a fair deal against shares.

elviejo2• 14 years ago

You mean the macintosh project that Steve Jobs took away from its original inventor Jeff Raskin?

Im not bitter it just bothersme the fanboyism that is so prevalent in Sillicon Valley...if we want to improve our craft we need to know it's history.

otaku888• 14 years ago

Is it me or is there a recent trend of more and more apple/steve jobs/ios threads? There seems to be so many of them, when ios6 came out there were quite literally a wall of related threads on the front page.

Is it because most people these days use macbooks for development?

sspiff• 14 years ago

I came here, thinking it would be another typical Jobs speech, and was expecting mindless Apple fanboys to praise everything about it.

But 5 minutes in, I realize this speech is actually filled with content, and good content at that.

icebraining• 14 years ago

He confidently talks about the personal computer being a new medium of communication. Again, this is before networking was commonplace or there was any inkling of the Internet going mainstream. Yet he specifically talks about early e-mail systems and how it is re-shaping communication. He matter-of-factly states that when we have portable computers with radio links, people could be walking around anywhere and pick up their e-mail. Again, this is 1983, at least 20 years before the era of mobile computing.

Meanwhile, and also in 1983, Steve Roberts was traveling across the US with his computer-on-a-bike and checking his email across CompuServ using satellite links, so actually doing it: http://microship.com/resources/technomadic-tools.html

huxley• 14 years ago

I seem to remember that the satellite links came later, in 1983 the Winnebiko only had CB radio for communication (no email) and an audio-casette deck to store what he was writing on his stops.

Winnebiko 2 added packet radio for email in 1986-88, but I don't think the satellite links came until Behemoth which was in the 1990s.

Neat presentation he did describing it at Xerox PARC in 1989. http://youtu.be/tDaz8vaKzdQ

ryeguy_24• 14 years ago

I highly recommend listening to this.

agumonkey• 14 years ago

Almost as if he was born with a single vision that he implemented all the way through his life.

The “Lost” Steve Jobs Speech from 1983: Foreshadowing Wireless Networking & iPad

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