Steve Jobs 1983 IDCA Conference Speech

Steve Jobs 1983 IDCA Speech

2014.011.0001 – IDCA Time Capsule Collection

Good morning. Introductions are really funny. They paid me $60 so I wore a tie. How many people, how many of you are 36 years, older than 36 years old? Yeah. You were born pre-computer. The computer is 36 years old. And there’s something sort of, I think that there’s going to be a little slice in the timeline of history as we look back. Pretty meaningful slice right there.

 

A lot of you are products of the television generation. I’m pretty much a product of the television generation, but to some extent starting to be a product of the computer generation, and the kids growing up now are definitely products of the computer generation, and in their lifetimes, the computer will become the predominant medium of communication, just as the television took over from the radio, took over from even the book.

 

Boy, I’ll talk about anything you want to talk about today. I have about 15 or 20 minutes of stuff that I just wanted to cover really quickly, and then whatever you want to talk about, we can talk about. How’s that? Yeah. How many of you own an Apple? Any? Or just any personal computer? Uh-oh. How many of you have used one or seen one? Anything like that? Good. Okay.

 

What is a Computer?

Let’s start off with what is a computer? What is a computer? It’s really simple. It’s just a simple machine, but it’s a new type of machine. The gears, the pistons have been replaced with electrons. How many of you have ever seen an electron? That’s the problem with computers, is that you can’t get your hands on the actual things that are moving around. You can’t see them, and so they tend to be very intimidating, because in a very small space there’s billions of electrons running around, and we can’t really get a hold on exactly what they look like.

 

Computers are very adaptive. It’s a very adaptive machine. We can move the electrons around differently to different places, depending upon the current state of affairs, the results of the last time we moved the electrons around. So if you were here last night and you heard about the brain and how it’s very adaptive, a computer is in the same way very, very adaptive.

 

Second thing about a computer, it’s very new. It was invented 36 years ago in 1947. The world’s first degree in computer science offered by a university, which was the University of California at Berkeley, and it was a master’s degree, was offered in 1968, which means the oldest person that has a degree in computer science is 39 years old, and the average age of professionals at Apple is under 30. So it’s a field that’s dominated by fairly young people.

Third thing about computers, they’re really dumb. They’re exceptionally simple, but they’re really fast. The raw instructions that we have to feed these little microprocessors, even the raw instructions that we have to feed these giant Cray-1 supercomputers are the most trivial of instructions. They’re get some data from here, get a number from here, fetch a number, add two numbers together, test to see if it’s bigger than zero, go put it over there. It’s the most mundane thing you could ever imagine.

 

But the key thing about it is that, let’s say I could move 100 times faster than anyone in here. In the blink of your eye, I could run out there and I could grab a bouquet of fresh spring flowers or something, and I could run back in here and I could snap my fingers, and you’d all think I was a magician or something. And yet, I was basically doing a series of really simple instructions, moving, running out there, grabbing some flowers, running back, snapping my fingers, but I could just do them so fast that you would think that there was something magical going, and it’s the exact same way with the computer.

 

Brief History of Computers

Let’s look at the brief history of computers. Best way to understand it is probably an analogy. Take the electric motor. The electric motor was first invented in the late 1800s, and when it was first invented, it was only possible to build a very, very large one, which meant that it could only be cost justified for very large applications. And therefore, electric motors did not proliferate very fast at all.

 

But the next breakthrough was when somebody took one of these large electric motors and they ran a shaft through the middle of a factory and through a series of belts and pulleys brought, shared the horsepower of this one large electric motor on 15 or 20 medium-sized workstations, thereby allowing one electric motor to be cost justified on some medium-scale tasks, and electric motors proliferated even further then. But the real breakthrough was the invention of the fractional horsepower electric motor. We could then bring the horsepower directly to where it was needed and cost justify it on a totally individual application. And I think there’s about 55 or so fractional horsepower motors now in every household.

 

If we look at the development of computers, we see a real parallel. We look, the first computer was called the ENIAC in 1947. It was developed particularly for ballistic military calculations. It was giant. Hardly anyone got a chance to use it. The real breakthrough, the next real breakthrough, was in the 60s with the invention of what was called time sharing. And what we did was we took one of these very large computers and we shared it. Since it could execute so many instructions so quickly, we’d run some on Fred’s job over here and then we’d run some on Sally’s job and we’d run some on Don’s job and we’d run some on Susie’s job. And we’d share this thing and it was so fast that everyone would think they had the whole computer to themselves.

Time sharing was what really started to proliferate computers in the 60s. And most of you, if you’ve used computer terminals connected with some umbilical cord to some large computer somewhere else, that’s time sharing. That’s what got computers on college campuses in large numbers.

 

The reason Apple exists is because we stumbled on to fractional horsepower computing five years before anybody else. That’s the reason we exist. We took these microprocessor chips, which is sort of a computer on a chip, and we surrounded it with all the other stuff you need to interact with a computer and we made a computer that was about 13 pounds. And people would look at it and they’d say, well, where’s the computer? This is just the terminal. We’d say, no, that is the computer. And after about five minutes of repeating this, they’d finally, a light bulb would go on in their minds and they’d decide if they didn’t like it, they could throw it out the window or run over it with their car, but that this was the entire computer. That’s why we exist.

 

Fractional horsepower computing. Because fractional horsepower computing has created a revolution. It was invented in 1976, the first personal computer. This year, in 1983, the industry is going to ship over three million of the little buggers. Three million. By 1986, we’re going to ship more computers than automobiles in this country.

 

The Need for Better Design

Let me digress for a minute. One of the reasons I’m here is because I need your help. If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or they’re off designing buildings, but hardly any of them are designing computers. And if we take a look, we’re going to sell those three million computers this year. We’re going to sell those 10 million computers in 86, whether they look like a piece of shit or they look great.

 

It doesn’t really matter because people are going to just suck this stuff up so fast that they’re going to do it no matter what it looks like. And it doesn’t cost any more money to make it look great. There are going to be these objects, this new object that’s going to be in everyone’s working environment and it’s going to be in everyone’s educational environment and it’s going to be in everyone’s home environment. And we have a shot at putting a great object there, or if we don’t, we’re going to put one more piece of junk object there.

 

By 1986, 1987, take a year, people are going to be spending more time interacting with these machines than they do interacting with their big automobile machines today. People are going to be spending two, three hours a day sometimes interacting with these machines, longer than they spend in a car. And so the industrial design, the software design and how people interact with these things certainly must be given the consideration that we give automobiles today, if not a lot more.

 

And if you take a look, what we’ve got is we’ve got a situation where most of the automobiles are not being designed in the United States, Europe, Japan. Televisions, audio electronics, watches, cameras, bicycles, calculators, you name it, most of the objects of our life are not designed in America. We’ve blown it. We’ve blown it from an industrial point of view because we’ve lost the markets to the foreign competitors. We’ve also blown it in the design point of view.

 

And I think we have a chance, focusing on this new computing technology, meeting people in the 80s. The fact that computers and society are out on a first date in the 80s. We have a chance to make these things beautiful and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves.

 

In addition to that, we’re going to spend over $100 million in the next 12 months on media advertising. Apple alone, IBM will spend at least an equivalent amount. And we generate tens of millions of dollars worth of brochures, posters, more than the auto industry, again, as a comparison. And this stuff can either be great or it can be lousy. And we need help. We really, really need your help.

 

The Computer as a New Medium

Okay, let’s go back to this revolution. What is happening? What’s happening is the personal computer is a new medium of communication, one of the media. So what’s a media? It’s a technology communication. A book is a medium, telephone, radio, television. These are mediums of communication and each medium has pitfalls to it, has shortcomings, has boundaries which you can’t cross, but it also generally has some new unique opportunities.

The neat thing is that each medium shapes not only the communication that goes through it, but it shapes the process of communication. Perfect example. If you compare the telephone to what we’re seeing now in electronic mail, where we link a bunch of computers together and we can send messages to an electronic mailbox, which people can then receive at their leisure. We see that, indeed, in one sense we’re sending voice through these wires and in another sense we’re sending ones and zeros through these wires.

 

So, the content that’s traveling through the medium is certainly different. But the most interesting thing that’s different is the process of communication. When I talk on a telephone with anyone, we both have to be on the phone at the same time. When I’m working or when I want to send something to somebody with a computer terminal, I want to do a drawing and zip it over and put it in their mailbox. They don’t need to be there. They can retrieve it at 12 a.m. in the morning. They can retrieve it three days later. They can be in New York and retrieve it.

 

One of these days, when we have portable computers with radio links, they can be walking around Aspen and retrieve it. And so the process of communication itself changes as the mediums evolve. So, what I’m claiming is that computers are a medium and that personal computers are a new and different medium from large computers.

 

What happens when a new medium enters the scene is that we tend to fall back into old media habits. And let’s look at a few transitions from one medium to another. Radio to television, television to this incredible new interactive medium of the video disc. If you go back and you look at the first television shows, they’re basically radio shows with a television camera pointed at them. And it took us the better part of the 50s to really understand how television was going to come into its own as its own medium.

And I really think the first time that a lot of people were shook into realizing that television had come of age was the JFK funeral. The nation, a lot of the world experienced the JFK funeral in their living room at a level of intensity that wouldn’t have been possible with radio. I think another more upbeat example was the Apollo landing. That experience was not possible with the previous medium and yet it took us the better part of 20 years for that one to really evolve.

 

Let’s look at the next transition. We have this optical video disc which can store 55,000 images on a slide or an hour of video randomly accessible. What are we using it for? Movies. We’re dropping back into the old media habits. And there’s a few experiments though that are starting to happen and you start to believe that five years, ten years from now that’s going to come into its own.

 

A neat experiment happened right here in Aspen. MIT came out to Aspen about four or five years, I think about four years ago, and they had this truck with this camera on it and they went down every single street, photographed every single intersection in every single street in Aspen. They photographed all the buildings and they’ve got this computer and this video disc hooked up together and on the screen you see yourself looking down a street and you can touch the screen and there’s some arrows on the screen and you can touch walk forward and all of a sudden it’s just like you’re walking forward in the street.

 

And you get to an intersection and you can stop and you can look right and you can look straight and you can look left and you can decide which way you want to go. You can even go in some of the shops. It’s an electronic map that gives you the feeling you’re walking through Aspen. Then there’s four little buttons in the corner because they came back and they did exactly the same thing all four seasons. So you can be looking down a street, hit winter, all of a sudden you get the same street with three feet of snow on it. It’s really amazing.

 

That’s not incredibly useful. But it points to some of the interactive nature of this new medium which is just starting to break out from movies and it’s going to take another five to ten years to evolve.

 

Okay, let’s go back to computers. We’re in the I Love Lucy stage right now in our medium development. What we did was microcomputers, personal computers, first come on the scene. What do we do? We fall back into old media habits. We run these weird languages like COBOL.

 

The Evolution of Personal Computing

We do business accounting on them. That’s the kind of stuff we have been doing on them historically. It took us about four years before we started breaking out of that and we’re just starting to break out of it now. When you look at Lisa, Lisa enables a person like me.

I’m not an artist in the sense that many of you are. I can sit down and I can draw artistic pictures with that thing because there’s a program called Lisa Draw and if I don’t like what I’ve just drawn, I can erase it. I can move it. I can shrink it. I can grow it. I can change its texture. There’s a little airbrush. The more I scrub, the darker it gets.

 

I can put soft edges on things, hard edges on things. And so I, I have no talent at drawing at all, can make neat drawings and then I can cut them out and I can paste them into my documents so that I can combine pictures and words. And then I can send it onto the electronic mailbox so somebody else that’s living here in Aspen can dial up a phone number and get their mail and see this drawing that I made. So we’re starting to break out and you can just see it now and it’s really exciting.

 

So, where we are is that the personal computer is a new medium and that society and computers are really meeting for the first time in the 80s. In 15 years, it’s going to be all over in terms of this first phase, getting these tools out into society in large numbers. But during the next 15 years, if we really, we have an opportunity to do it great or to do it so-so. And what a lot of us at Apple are working on is trying to do it great.

 

Understanding Computer Programs

We’ll look at one last thing and we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. What is a computer program? Do you know what a computer program is? Anybody?

No? Sort of? Sort of. It’s an odd thing. It’s really an odd thing. It’s, you can’t, I mean, you’ve never seen an electron, but computer programs have no physical manifestation at all. They’re simply ideas expressed on paper. Computer programs are archetypal.

What do I mean by that? Let’s compare computer programming to television programming. Again, if you go back and you look at the tapes of the JFK funeral in 1963, I guess, you’ll start to cry. You will feel a lot of the same feelings you felt when you were watching that 20 years ago.

Why? Because through the art of television programming, we are very good at capturing a set of experiences, an experience, two experiences, 20 experiences, and being able to recreate them. We’re very good at that. It doesn’t take a lot of money, and it’s somewhat limited, but we can do a pretty good job of that.

 

You can really feel the excitement of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Computer programming does something a little different. What computer programming does is it captures the underlying principles of an experience. Not the experience itself, but the underlying principles of the experience, and those principles can enable thousands of different experiences that all follow those laws, if you will.

 

And the perfect example is the video game. What does the video game do? It follows the laws of gravity, of angular momentum, and it sets up this stupid little pong game, but the ball always follows these laws. No two pong games are ever the same, and yet every single pong game follows these underlying principles.

 

The Hammurabi Game: An Interactive Learning Experience

I’ll give you another example. There’s a neat program called Hammurabi, and Hammurabi, there’s seven-year-old kids playing this. And it’s a game, and he comes up on the screen, and he goes, and you’re King Hammurabi. He goes, oh, King Hammurabi. And you get to be King Hammurabi of the ancient kingdom of Sumeria for ten years. He goes, oh, King Hammurabi, this is year one. You have a thousand bushels of weed in storage, you have a hundred people, and you have a hundred acres of land. Land is trading at twenty-four bushels an acre.

 

Would you like to sell any land? No. Would you like to buy any land? No.

 

How much would you like to plant? And it turns out that if you don’t plant enough, some of your people will starve the next year. And if you plant a lot, then people will come from the surrounding villages, because you’ve got a hot village to live in, and you feed them well. So you plant a certain amount, but you need to, then it says how much, oh, I’m sorry.

 

So, you feed your people a certain amount, and then it asks you how much you would like to plant. And you have to plant so much as well in order to get the grain the next year. But you can’t plant more acres than you have people to plant the acres. And so if you go on a land-buying spree at the beginning, and you don’t feed your people well because you spent all your grain buying land, then you don’t have the people to plant the land.

 

So, it doesn’t do you any good. If you don’t plant the land, and you feed your people a ton, all these other people come from the surrounding villages, but they starve the next year. And there are these seven-year-olds, and it goes on year two, year three, and every once in a while it throws in the rats, ate some of the grain, and you’re in deep trouble. What are you going to do?

 

Kill some people, or sell some land, or whatever. And it’s crude. But basically there are these seven-year-old kids playing with this macroeconomic model. And you can argue about the content of the model, but one thing you can’t argue about, they will sit there for hours and play that and learn.

 

And we’ve got to get our models better and better and more sophisticated, but that is an interactive way of learning that none of us ever had when we were growing up. And again, thousands of individual experiences, but all based on that one set of underlying principles. When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers, and the thing that probably kept me out of jail was books, because I could go read what Aristotle wrote or what Plato wrote, and I didn’t have to have an intermediary in the way. And a book was a phenomenal thing.

 

It got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle. The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think as we look towards the next 50 to 100 years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit or an underlying set of principles or an underlying way of looking at the world, then when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life, his or her whole life, and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday after the person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this? And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing. So what do you want to talk about?

Yeah. Yeah, it’s a mess. Okay. Okay.