That Steve Jobs made headlines, appeared in newspapers, appeared in magazines, and continues to be an active topic of conversation to this day is something we already know. What may come as a surprise to many is that Apple co-founder featured in Playboy magazine. Yes, to talk about the iPhone, among others.
It was 1985, long before the iPhone, and Steve Jobs met with the famous magazine to talk about Apple Computer. A really long and very curious interview in which Jobs could have done the divulge most important in the history of spoilers: talking about the iPhone almost 32 years before its launch.
“That’s what the Macintosh is all about. It’s our industry’s first ‘telephone'”
The original interview, available on Archive and translated by Compolaser, is indeed a very entertaining read. Throughout its 13 pages, Jobs reflects on various topics and ties them all together as a result of technology. Highlight, for example, the comment on how computers would change the way of thinking
“When I came back from India, I asked myself: what was the most important thing that stood out to me? And I think it is that Western rational thinking is not an innate human characteristic. is a learned skill. It had never happened. For me, if nobody taught us to think that way, we wouldn’t think th at way. And yet, that’s the way it is.”
“Obviously one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think. What we are discovering is that computers are really going to affect the quality of thinking because more and more of our children have these tools available to them Human beings are tool users.
A reflection which was then concretized and summarized in its well-known recommendation to learn to program because programming teaches us to think. At one point in the interview, Steve Jobs was asked why private households should invest a considerable sum to acquire these computers.
“Everyone should learn to program” comes from his time in India, according to Steve Jobs.
Jobs’ answer is very clear and quite surprising at a time when the idea of the Internet was still in its infancy. For jobs, the most remarkable thing about a computer was “to link it to a national communication network”. A step that “will represent a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people, as remarkable as the telephone”.
Steve Jobs continues to elaborate on the fact that if someone had asked Graham Bell what you could do with the telephone before he invented it, he wouldn’t have been able to answer. I couldn’t predict how many services and businesses would spring up around the phone. Jobs draws a compar ison between the telegraph and the telephone, since what might seem simply an evolution changed the rules of the game, among other things, “in addition to allowing you to communicate with words only, it allowed you to sing”.
“That’s what the Macintosh is for. It’s the first ‘phone’ in our industry. And best of all, for me, the Macintosh lets you sing like the telephone did . special print styles and the ability to draw and add images to express yourself.”
It’s true that Steve Jobs talks about the phone more as a metaphor than a finished product, but today when Jobs said “telephone”, we heard “iPhone”. An iPhone that really changed the rules of the game by “evolving”, in the broadest sense of the term, a technology that already existed. At the time, neither Apple nor Steve Jobs could wonder what this new invention would bring us, but today we know that there are many companies, huge companies, that have been built on the foundations from the iPhone.
First comes the technology, then the apps and business ideas around it. Steve Jobs was clear that any evolution is important and that, done well, it is a game-changer. Between that and the importance of connecting Macintoshes to a communications network, the analogy cannot go unnoticed. Did Jobs talk about the iPhone?
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Disclaimer: The cover image is a model conceptual.
