I'm 42 and I've been programming since I was 12. I really always liked this guy and never understood the knee-jerk hate around him. I of course know he's far from perfect- who isn't?- but as far as interesting, game-changing people go, he's up there. At least this interview is showing some of why I felt that way... I read this back when it was published (as I pretty much devoured everything about the computer industry ever since I first touched one around 12 years old)<p>And as a guy who ended up being a web developer, he was TOTALLY right about the "dark ages" thing. When Internet Explorer had hegemony, web dev was close to torture... It's what made me a back-end developer. Frontend was too painful.
This is interesting:<p>"It's certainly not going to be like the first time somebody saw a television. It's certainly not going to be as profound as when someone in Nebraska first heard a radio broadcast. It's not going to be that profound."<p>That's exactly what it was like for me, back in the mid 1990s, using WebChat Broadcasting System for the first time.<p>I didn't care much for computers growing up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I found them useful primarily for gaming. When I first used the Internet, it was like lightning struck, I knew immediately what it would mean, and how big it could be one day. I viewed it as an infinite canvas. Watching the early explosion of web sites just reinforced that. The computer became nothing more than a vehicle to get to the Internet for me, and it still is to this day. It completely altered my life, growing up in the middle of nowhere Appalachia. It exposed me to a world I would have never touched otherwise. I started my first Internet company with a bunch of Australians circa 1996/97 as a teenager... from nowhere Appalachia. Not as profound as someone in Nebraska hearing a radio broadcast for the first time? I beg to differ.
"The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."<p>A cogent argument for more liberal arts education.
This is one of the best interviews I've ever read/seen from him. Why? because it's different. It really seems it was made in a very pessimist time for him, he didn't even believed he could revolutionize anything anymore with tech.<p>It's amazing the passion he had for design in the product creation.
> What's wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.<p>Completely agree. Ironically one of the issues now is the pushing of tablets into schools for the sake of it with no real educational use case
Here's an interesting thought. When Jobs spoke of "Objects", did he fundamentally mean C++? Obj-C? Smalltalk? Or perhaps another level of abstraction like containerization?
<i>W: People who have something -<p>SJ: To sell!<p>W: To share.<p>SJ: To sell!<p>W: You mean publishing?</i><p>Funny how the reporter just hears what he wants to hear. Makes me wonder which of the questions asked today will sound like this in 10 years.
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"The desktop computer industry is dead."<p>I'm not sure the desktop computer industry will ever really die, at least not soon. Sure, the focus may be shifting more to mobile and web tech, but are we really one day going to be writing apps on our iPhones? Computers, laptop or desktop still have a large foot in the door of the industry, and as long as we still use them they will continue to develop and get better. I'm sure they'll be with us for a while.
Here's everything on one page:
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