I found this interview with Steve Jobs and the Playboy Magazine in 1989. I sat glued to the screen for 15 minutes while i lavished in the brilliance that is Steve Jobs. Here is a snippet of the juicy goodness contained within the rest of the interview.
PlayBoy: Those are arguments for computers in business and in schools, but what about the home?
So far, that's more of a conceptual market than a real market. The primary reasons to buy a computer for your home now are that you want to do some business work at home or you want to run reductional software for yourself or your children. If you can't justify buying a computer for one of those two reasons, the only other possible reason is that you just want to be computer literate. You know there's something going on, you don't exactly know what it is, so you want to learn. This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes.
PB: What will change?
SteveJobs: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a competitor for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people––as remarkable as the telephone.
PB: Specifically what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?
SJ: I can only begin to speculate. We see that a lot in our industry: You don't know exactly what's going to result, but you know it's something very big and very good.
PB: Then for now, aren't you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?
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SJ: In the future, it won't be an act of faith. The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you cooing to be able to do with a telephone?" he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that the first public telegraph was inaugurated in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn from this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.
PB: Meaning what?
SJ: It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we're in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won't work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are the "slash q-zs" and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel––one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. It's the first "telephone" of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. you don't simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.
You can find the rest of the interview here.
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