'A Bicycle of the Mind' - Steve Jobs on the Computer

i remember uh reading an article when i was about 12 years old

i think it might have been scientific american where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet earth how many kilocalories did they expend to get from point a to point b
and the condor one came in at the top of the list
uh surpassed everything else and humans came in about a third of the way down the list

which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation and uh

but somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle
human riding a bicycle blew away the condor all the way off the top of the list
and it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders

and we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes
and so for me a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind

something that that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities
and i think we're just at the early stages of this tool very early stages

and we've come only a very short distance

and it's still in its formation

but already we've seen enormous changes i think that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next hundred years in

 

in program six we're going to look at some of the past predictions of why people have been so wrong about the future

and one of the notions is that today's vision of a standalone computer is just as limited as those past visions of it being only a number cruncher

what's the difference philosophical between a network machine and a standalone machine?

 

um let me answer that question a slightly different way
there have been if you look at why the majority of people have bought these things so far

uh there have been two real explosions that have propelled the industry forward

the first one uh really happened in 1977 and it was the spreadsheet

i remember when dan feilstra who ran the company that marketed the first spreadsheet walked into my office at apple one day and pulled out this disc from his vest pocket and said i have this incredible new program i call it a visual calculator

and it became visicalc and that's what really drove propelled the apple ii to to the success it achieved more than any other single event and and with the invention of lotus 123

and i think it was 1982 that's what really propelled the ibm pc to the level of success that it achieved so that was the first explosion was the spreadsheet

the the second really big explosion in our industry has been desktop publishing happened in 1985 with the macintosh and the laser writer printer and at that point people could start to do on their desktops things that only typesetters and printers could do prior to that and that's been a very big revolution in publishing

and those have really those two explosions have been the only two real major revolutions which have caused a lot of people to buy these things and use them

uh the third one is starting to happen now and the third one is let's do for human to human communication what spreadsheets did for financial planning and what public desktop publishing did for publishing let's revolutionize it using these desktop devices

and we're already starting to see the signs of that

as an example in an organization

we're starting to see that as business conditions change faster and faster with each year
we cannot change our management hierarchical organization very fast relative to the changing business conditions

we can't have somebody working for a new boss every week

we also can't change our geographic organization very fast matter of fact even slower than the management one

we can't be moving people around the country every week

but we can change an electronic organization like that

and what's starting to happen is as we start to link these computers together with sophisticated networks and great user interfaces

we're starting to be able to create clusters of people working on a common task in us you know literally in 15 minutes worth of setup
and these 15 people can work together extremely efficiently no matter where they are geographically and no matter who they work for hierarchically

and these organizations can live for as long as they're needed and then vanish and we're finding we can reorganize our companies electronically very rapidly and that's the only type of organization that can begin to keep pace with the changing business conditions

and i believe that this collaborative model has existed in higher education for a long time
but we're starting to see it applied into the commercial world as well
and this is going to be the third major revolution that these desktop computers provide is revolutionizing human to human communication and group work we call it interpersonal computing in the 1980s we did personal computing
and now we're going to extend that as we network these things to interpersonal computing

i um i saw my first computer when i was 12
and it was at nasa we had a local nasa center nearby
and it was a terminal which was connected to a big computer somewhere

and i got a time sharing account on it

and i was fascinated by this thing

and i saw my second computer a few years later which was really the first desktop computer ever made was made by hewlett packard it's called the 9100a and it ran a language called basic

and it was very large i had a very small cathode ray tube on it for display

and i got a chance to play with one of those maybe in 1968 or nine
and uh spent every spare moment i had trying to write programs for it i was so fascinated by this
uh and so i was probably fairly lucky and then my introduction to computers very rapidly moved from a terminal
uh to within maybe 12 months or so actually seeing the one of the first probably the first desktop computer ever ever really produced

and uh so my point of view never really changed from from being able to get my arms around it even though my arms probably didn't quite fit around that first one

so i read somewhere that you had no intention of building a company

but you're just out to do something for yourselves if you can

give me right i don't know the question they asked to get that

 

but well at the time we started apple um waz was working for hewlett-packard i was working for atari actually for nolan bushnell designing video games

and uh we we went to atari and showed him our early prototypes and we went to hp and we encouraged each company to hire the other one
and let us do this for them

and we got we got turned down in both places probably for good reasons
but we started a company because it was the only alternative left not because we wanted to

 

when did you ever think that it was going to really this was really going to happen this was going to go from just an
interesting idea to

 

oh it didn't take very long it happened for me when i saw people that could never possibly design a computer could never possibly build a hardware kit could never possibly assemble their own keyboards and monitors could never even write their own software using these things

then you knew something very big was going to happen when we got to that stage where we were high enough on the
food chain if you will that a lot of people could use these things and they were really liking it

 

what computer networks offered education?

 

well uh you know education's been on computer networks for longer than almost anyone else uh the department of defense has an office called darpa and they funded a thing called arpanet many many years ago to try to build a command and control network for military purposes

and they did a very brilliant thing after they got a prototype  working they gave it to the university community in america
and said bang on this for a while and see if it works and help us make it better

and after a few years of the university community doing that they created a separate version for military purposes
but they left the educational version going
and that has tied together the research community of the united states now for about a decade and is vital to the functioning of higher education in this country so higher education has actually led the way that's why we started off focusing exclusively on higher education

because where else could you find five thousand people on a network but carnegie mellon university as an example
so higher education has been five years ahead of business in using computers in some of these powerful new ways which we're going to see now ripple into business in the first half of the 90s
it's pretty exciting

 

how about lower education how about school how about lower

um sharing valuable resources
so far uh computer use in k through 12 has been primarily apple twos and uh i wish uh i wish that they'd been upgrading to macintosh is faster than they have been but i think i think that that's slowly happening and ibm is getting in there as well the primary purpose of computing in k-12 has been just computer literacy

and there's been a bottleneck because there hasn't been enough sophisticated courseware written
and that's a problem for our society in general amongst all the other problems with our k-12 education system one could talk about that for a few days easily

how did the pc change the world?

well though the analogy is nowhere perfect
and and certainly one needs to factor out the environmental concerns of the of the analogy as well

there is a lot to be said for comparing it to going from trains from passenger trains to automobiles

and uh the advent of the automobile gave us a personal freedom of transportation

in the same way the advent of the computer gave us the ability to start to use computers without having to convince other people that we needed to use computers
and the biggest effect of the personal computer revolution has been to allow millions and millions of people to experience computers themselves decades before they ever would have in the old paradigm

and to allow them to participate in the making of choices and controlling their own destiny using these tools
but it has created it has created problems
and the largest problems are that uh now that we have all these very powerful tools
we're still islands and we're still not really connecting these people using these powerful tools together

and that's really been the challenge of the last few years in the next several years is

how to connect these things back together so that we can can rebuild a fabric of these things rather than just individual points of light if you will

and get the benefit of both the passenger train and the automobile

i'm part of this electronically connected community that's going to provide us wonderful new capabilities and and communications abilities

but we still always want to be able to disconnect that network spigot take it off and take our standalone computer somewhere

let's say home now

what's going to happen rapidly is with radio links and with fiber optics to the home you're going to be able to hook your computer up to your network at home

but there's always going to be that cabin in the middle of nowhere that i want to go for a two-week vacation where i want my computer and if it doesn't work in a completely standalone way i'm i'm going to be not happy so we have to provide a fluid way for these things to kind of dock into the mother lode network

but also undock and allow me as an individual to carry my computer up into yosemite backpacking and where there's you know no radio links and no fire into the network and find out what happened when i left and share some of my thoughts maybe with some other folks

so we're working on that that's our goal for the next five years is that seamless transition between the standalone computer
and the computer is part of this network community

it also keeps away the orwellian aspects of always being hooked into the network

right that's right now i actually think what an interesting paradox is
it is the network which is ultimately going to define and create the home computer market not keeping our recipes on these things or something like we thought in 1975 being a part of that network and not being able to stay away from it while you're at home will drive people to get to computers in every house
just like we have a telephone in every house well

xerox park was a research lab set up by xerox when they were making a lot of profits in the copier days

and they were doing some computer science research which was basically an extension of some stuff started by a guy named doug engelbart when he was at sri duggan invented the mouse and invented the bitmap display and some xerox folks that that xerox i believe hired away from doug or split off from doug somehow and got to xerox we're continuing along in these in this vein

and i first went over there in 1979
and i saw what they were doing with the larger screens uh proportionally spaced text uh and the mouse
and it was just instantly obvious to anyone that this was the way things should be

um and so i remember coming back to apple thinking our future has just changed this is where we have to go

the problem was that xerox had never made a commercial computer this group of people at xerox was was uh was more concerned with with uh looking out 15 years than they were looking out 15 months and trying to make a product that somebody could use

so there were a lot of issues that they hadn't solved like menus other things like that

and at apple what we had to do was to do two things one was complete the research which really was only about fifty percent complete

and the second was to find a way to implement it at a low enough cost where people would buy it and that that was really our challenge

what did you succeed in doing with the mac

well the macintosh as you remember when it came out we called it the computer for the rest of us

and what that meant was uh that while experts could use some of the computers that were already out most people didn't want the again the computer was was not an end in itself it was a means to an end and so most people didn't want to learn how to use the computer they just wanted to use it

and the macintosh was supposed to be the computer for people that just wanted to use a computer without having to learn how to use one spent six months now

it turned out that the the paradox was that to make a computer easier to use you needed a more powerful computer
in the first place because you were going to burn a lot of the cycles on making it easy to use
and so this computer that was easy to use was actually more powerful and could do more things

than the less easy to use computer and it took people a few years to figure that out about the macintosh but i think i think people did

actually there's a funny joke that we were clowning around one day and one of our group is an ibm person and so he's saying you know some little girl walks up and sees a prompt yeah and goes to her daddy says it's broken you know where's my desktop you know where's where's my metaphor and
we've gotten we've adopted this new metaphor what how has that changed the look of computers?

well i think i think the macintosh was created by a group of people who felt that there wasn't a strict division between sort of science and and art or in other words that mathematics is really a liberal art if you look at it from a slightly different point of view

and why can't we interject typography into computers why can't we have computers uh talking to us in in english language

and looking back five years later this seems like a trivial observation but at the time it was cataclysmic and its consequences and the battles that were fought to push his point of view out the door were very large

the um balance between thinking and doing i mean one of the things in the semiconductors was you had risk takers and bob noyce you know learned how to hang glide at age 40 you know these people like laying their butts in the line 

how important was that in the early days i mean we're going back to 75

 

well again after seeing my entire life's been spent only in one industry which is this one

and but i've been in it now for about 15 years and i've seen a lot of people make a lot of things i've seen a lot of people fail a lot of things and my my point of view on this or my observation is that the doers are the major thinkers uh the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the think or doer in one person

and if we really go back and we examine uh you know did leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it of course not leonardo was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints he also was a fairly good chemist knew about pigments knew about human anatomy and combining all of those skills together the art and the science the thinking and the doing was what resulted in the exceptional result and there is no difference in our industry the people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers and when you when you uh a lot of people of course it's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete but somebody

it's very easy for somebody to say oh i thought of this three years ago

but uh usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really work through the hard intellectual problems as well

 

focusing now on the third program where we've gone from semiconductors

and the vision is ibm is this big machine univac big large machine and we take the line through of integrated circuit microprocessor and we actually got some great stuff from ted hoff about you know it's it's a light bulb

you know you burns out you replace it you know um then we lead up into the beginnings of the personal computer so what were you doing at the time and how did that get started?

um actually you know it wasn't intel that first figured out that the microprocessor was a computer they designed these things to be used in calculators
and they thought the reason that the microprocessor came about was they thought if they could design a slightly programmable one the next customer that walked in the door that wanted a slightly different

calculator they could just spend a few months rather than a few years designing a new piece of silicon
but i think the thought of making a computer never really occurred to them

and it was the hobbyists that thought about making a computer that thought about making a computer out of these things
it was this it was the computer hobbyist community that first did that

and i don't think intel quite understood that for a few years
but again the first thing that happened was these people came together and formed a club the homebrew computer club at stanford was the first one in the country and uh it was a beehive of all of these people who were interested in these small little computers people that might have been ham radio operators people that might have you know worked with large computers were all gathered together to share discuss their uh their latest little projects

it was very exciting and there was not a month that would go by where some breakthrough didn't happen
and then the first magazine came along which was bite magazine to communicate on a national scale with all these hobbyists so that it was a very very exciting dynamic time fun what did i think when i saw that

we first saw that that wise was building that that board

well it didn't quite work that way actually what happened was was that waz and i uh had known each other since i was about 12 or 13 years old and we built our first project together was we built these little blue boxes to make free telephone calls

and uh we had the best blue box in the world it was this all digital little blue box i don't think it works anymore so
but uh we had a we had a fun time doing that so when it came to building a computer together um waz focused mostly was was the brilliant hardware engineer and focused on the core design of the computer and i was worrying about which parts we ought to use and how we were going to build these things and how it sort of somebody that wasn't

the waz was going to manage to buy all the extra parts you still needed to buy and plug this thing together
because you still needed to buy your own keyboard and your own display and your own power supply
and so you needed to be pretty much of a hardware hobbyist

now we made the a very important decision was to not offer our computers a kit
even though you needed to buy these extra parts the main computer board itself came fully assembled we were the first company in the world to do that everybody else was offering their little computers a kit and what that meant was was there was maybe an order of magnitude more people who could actually buy our computer and use it than if they had to build it themselves

and the apple ii was actually the first computer to come fully assembled where you didn't have to do anything and the reason there was it was our observation that for every hardware hobbyist
someone who could either build the kit themselves or at least find these five or ten extra parts they needed
there were a thousand potential software hobbyists and if they didn't have to do anything with the hardware except use it
make ran at that time that meant write their own programs still there was a much larger group of people that could take advantage of this so we wanted to reach them and that was the real breakthrough in the apple ii

the um the first uh face-to-face gathering of personal computer hobbyists from all around the country was the show put on atlantic city in 1976
and it was in the basement of some dingy hotel
and it just happened to be about 300 degrees outside so the basement was it was like a steam bath
and it was impossible to be down there for longer than a half an hour without being completely drenched

and nevertheless there were a few hundred hobbyists completely drenched walking around for hours and we had a little tiny booth there was a tablecloth over of a hotel table

and there were waz and i and a friend or two of ours went there and we had our few apple ones there and a little poster we'd made and that was really our first uh the first computer show in the in the the world a year later i think uh maybe maybe even nine months later there was the first west coast computer fair which was a much more professional operation by in comparison with atlantic city but still very very hobby oriented compared with what goes on today and that was in san francisco and there were maybe uh a hundred companies showing their wares and it was attended by maybe a thousand people which was a lot for our industry at that time 13 000 wow really 13 000 people that's a lot that's jim warren told me that that's a lot i i'd be surprised at that but maybe he's better than i do six thousand thousands of people and um that's when we introduced the apple ii and i think the apple ii was probably the hit of the show at that time