Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985) | Hacker News Reader

Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs (1985)

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> Jobs: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this café [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward…” and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this café, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—“Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.

Wow, I don't know why but this explanation blows me away. So simple and yet so accurate.

I always get this feeling as an excel power user

I wonder if Steve saw this lecture by Richard Feynman, where Feynman uses a similar metaphor to explain how computers work.

Probably, great artists steal.

... -> I think Steve Jobs said that -> I think Bob Dylan said that -> I think Abraham Lincoln said that

Actually, I said that.

I absolutely love how Feynman speaks and writes about computers. Most of the time he's criticizing them for their ability to entice you to waste time by seeing what you can do with them.

So, I second. Great anecdote!

link?

Most likely this one: https://youtu.be/EKWGGDXe5MA

Check out Feynman's very cool "Thinking Machines" t-shirt. He was working with Danny Hillis at the time.

I don’t know, should it be special to be able to explain things? I think it should actually be normal

Most people are actually pretty bad at explaining things in a clear, concise, helpful way, very often especially people well-versed in the field they are trying to explain. Communicating complex concepts to non-experts is indeed a fairly rare skill.

I once had a job interview that had a task where only one person was allowed to view an object made of random Lego bricks, they would communicate the structure to another person, that person would communicate it to a builder. The idea being to replicate the object. It's not easy.

XYZ coords done.

This idea you had, interestingly, has nasty traps.

1. You need to specify an “origin” which is (0,0).

This is hard because there is more than one good choice (base or top of a brick?), the structure base may be more than a single brick wide, and you still need an orientation for the base bricks relative to the table, since if they’re at an angle, it isn’t the same.

2. This fails, or at least complicates, on structures that are not fully connected, like 2 towers next to each other. XYZ doesn’t have tools for two towers, rotated, at an angle not parallel to the table.

3. You’re fucked on units if there are any “small” half bricks in the structure, which are common in lego sets.

4. It’s not human optimized. If you forget the origin (easy in a big structure, you fail.

It’s not a bad idea, for some forms of the problem, but this underconsideration is why explaining things is hard.

To truly explain concepts to another, you have to be able to think like them or at least imagine what it would be like to think like them; you have to listen to them, observe them and react accordingly. In addition you need to be a subject matter expert to such a degree that you can invent or recall appropriate analogies and metaphors which suit your audience. All told this is a rare find, requiring either instinct, or long experience.

> there is more than one good choice

I've had to explain to folks many times (and convince myself) that at some point, once you recognize there are multiple valid 'good' options, you need to move forward. There's often little long term benefit to identifying the 'better' or 'best' option for many projects - you just need an agreed consensus on the ground rules.

Also, what seems to be left off of these exercises sometimes is the concept of subroutines. At some point, rather than giving you explicit instructions for PB&J (like, extend hand, move towards knife, curl fingers around knife handle, move arm back to original position, etc), that can be coded as a named macro/subroutine, and we can just say "grab knife". (or... "grab knife by handle!")

> pretty bad at explaining things

I find this difficult to believe. An innate ability of humans is to teach others - evolution has selected for it, because humans need to be taught, as their living skills are not innate.

I don't see how the ability to teach others would be an evolved ability. Learning from others, yes. But teaching others is a different skill than learning.

For an obvious, everyday example, parents teach their children a heluva lot.

The same is true of many other animals, but I wouldn’t say a cat is particularly good at explaining how to hunt.

I have a cat who was separated from its mother too early. It shows some vague abilities at hunting, but is quite inept at it.

I've also seen a documentary that claimed humans have a unique ability to respond to pointing. Pointing is a big part of teaching. No animal has as lengthy a childhood as humans, and that is to teach them how to survive.

It just doesn't make any sense that people are inherently bad at teaching.

> It just doesn't make any sense that people are inherently bad at teaching.

Whether it makes sense or not, what is your personal experience with others who try to teach you? Did you have nothing but highly effective teachers in school?

If you did, you are in the rare minority.

The negation of:

"Most people are actually pretty bad at explaining things in a clear, concise, helpful way, very often especially people well-versed in the field they are trying to explain. Communicating complex concepts to non-experts is indeed a fairly rare skill."

is not:

"nothing but highly effective teachers".

Why not?

Because the negation of 10% is 90%, not 10%.

Except that we are not talking about numbers, we are talking about human behavior. Applying a formula to that, as you are attempting to do, is not going to give you the conclusions you expect.

FYI he's applying logical operations to sentences as logical propositions, which is valid and precise. Not hand wavey, and condescending like you are doing.

Looks like all three of us are being a bit condescending here.

Here is the actual logic: if people are not inherently bad at teaching, that means they are mostly effective at it, right? Were most of the teachers you've had in your life effective at teaching? Mine certainly were not.

Perhaps you were having problems with the use of my word "nothing" instead of "mostly," which is just a colloquialism. Idioms of language rarely respond to logic in the way numbers do.

It's clear you are arguing for the sake of arguing and this community is worse for it.

That's an unfair assumption to make. Calling me hand-wavey doesn't add anything to the community either.

I think @marktangotango is trolling you. Best to ignore.

You changed your wording from "highly effective" to "mostly effective". It's a crucial change, and so I infer you accepted my point :-)

No I didn't? It still says "highly."

Look at your post I just replied to. It does not say "highly".

I thought you meant I edited my original post that spawned your objections, which I haven't.

I'll admit to being surprised at such a reaction over the choice of either of these words over the other. My meaning was clear in either case.

Don't be too surprised. Hackers tend to treat natural language like a programming language, unfortunately. Challenge them on it, and get ridiculed.

Your point has been lost in all the nonsense, but I agree with it.

Not just you're (derogatively named?) hackers but anyone who uses natural language for precise meaning; lawyers, mathematicians, philosophers. People who say what they mean, and mean what they say.

I don't perceive the tone you are projecting onto the OP, fwiw.

That's my point. I don't think cats are very good at explaining things, but they still manage to teach their young to hunt. I see that as coming from a strong ability to imitate, rather than a strong ability to explain.

Every so often I review the iPhone introduction keynote, and marvel at how Jobs crafted such an engaging and compelling hour. It's a very special talent.

Especially with the team getting toasted in the audience assuming it was all going to blow up. Even hardware succumbs to a distortion field. I too love watching it.

there's 491384 ways to "explain" computers, his one is interesting because it's both metaphorical and yet very precise.

> I don’t know, should it be special to be able to explain things?

Given that so few people can explain something, yes. The problem is that explaining requires a very deep understanding which so few people attain. This Feynman story sums it up perfectly[1]:

Once, I [David Goodstein] said to him, "Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics." Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But he came back a few days later to say, "I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it."

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-...

Perhaps it should be normal.. but it isn't. Which is also why we have great teachers, and ineffective teachers.

This is sort of how I was introduced to programming in 1996. The teacher told the class she needed instructions to make a PB&J sandwich, and basically kept interpreting things incorrectly until everything was super precise.

That PB&J coding lesson has been used forever. It's a good learning tool.

Jobs wasn't Woz level, but he was no fool either.

Jobs was on another plane entirely. One where having more than technical acumen was necessary to actually have impact in the world.

I understand but it's easy to imagine jobs only as a salesman that just grabs others ideas blindly.

Most salespeople take a product that exists and convince you to buy it. Steve took a product that didn't exist and convinced you to build it. His talent was organizing people around a common vision, not just selling the result.

I think more importantly was getting together the people to sell it. Much or even all of the product apple had built were already products. But Steve was able to package it and spin it in a way that made it exciting and must have.

One of their watershed products was the iPod. I had a several mp3 players before the iPod was created. But apple made them cool and thus mainstream.

I had them too. They all sucked. Apple didn't make them cool, Apple made them work (in a human way that the others just didn't). That made them cool.

True, he was no fool. What he was, was a wizard at spin doctoring. I have seen his kind in action in lesser circumstances, as they can pick up an idea, any idea, and then spin round and present it as their own without really knowing the depth of the topic.

Hmm I don't know if I buy that Jobs was merely a spin doctor stealing credit for others ideas. Being a product manager and a company leader like that takes a lot of vision, intelligence, leadership, etc.

I wasn't aware that people doubted the intelligence or acumen of Steve Jobs.

It's hard to be sure. As I said, he has no woz proof of work, at best they made blue bloxes and he was hired at Atari (or HP can't recall) but left early.

Now his explanation says a lot about is inner thinking.

Hmmm, also he had some noteable achievements afterwards, such as transforming Apple into one of the most successful companies ever, again.

1984, pre-internet! Or at least pre WWW and big internet

>Playboy: Those are arguments for computers in business and in schools, but what about the home?

...

This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes.

Playboy: What will change?

Jobs: The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into 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 . Playboy: Specifically, what kind of breakthrough are you talking about?

Jobs: 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.

Interesting. This is only 5 years after Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC, where he would later say he “missed [their developments in] networking” because he was so fascinated by their GUI work.

He probably missed it, but others at the company probably didn't.

Then again there is very little detail in the statement, and much of it could already be true with the modems and BBSs of the time.

Hell, a year after this interview LucasArts opened up Habitat for beta testing on Quantum Link. The client side running on C64 no less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

As Gibson likes to put it: the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed.

(I am not an expert on anything.)

At this stage Sun was already selling networked workstations and trumpeting that "the network is the computer". DNS ramped up in 1985, while SMTP was already a few years active, and from a user's POV the good ole modern IPv4-on-Unix-machines Internet was already a reality if still not open to all comers. Speaking of Gibson, Neuromancer was already out, too. Basically Jobs was, for someone in his position—and for someone who iirc was in regular contact with Apple employee Alan Kay at this stage—more or less up to speed here, not really visionary. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8317553

Speaking of Sun workstations though, remember that at the time of this 1985 interview Jobs was about four months from being fired from Apple. The Big Mac project he'd been pushing at the time looks very much like his attempt to do basically a NeXT—a networked Unix workstation with a new GUI layer and Mac/Apple fairy dust—inside Apple as the next Macintosh, and he founded NeXT by the end of the year in response to Gassée's termination of Big Mac after he (Jobs) left (basically in favour of the more incremental Macintosh II, it seems).

His miss on networking wasn't just about not understanding ethernet. Remember, this interview predates the assumption that the Internet would win. For a long time that wasn't really clear, and there were many players in walled-garden networks. This was a moment in time when people connected to computer networks over phone lines via modems, and whoever controlled the network most people dialed in to was the biggest player in networked computers. At that time, the biggest was CompuServe.

In 1985, Apple started a service called AppleLink that connected apple dealers, developers, and employees. You'd connect through a Mac client app and a dial-up modem. I believe it was built on top of some GE service. They later had Steve Case build "AppleLink Personal Edition" -- more user friendly and with more user content -- which they decided not to ship. Case retained the rights and eventually released it as "America Online" which became the most famous walled garden network. (And much later, Apple released a re-branded AOL as "eWorld". Which means Apple failed multiple times at this connected-netowrk business. No wonder Jobs was all-in on the Internet by the time he announced NeXT.)

> reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network.

It's difficult to avoid the comparison with Bill Gate's book "the road ahead" published a decade later, that first neglected and then had to be revised in hardback edition to include the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_boo...

Gates was wrong about the internet, but he assumed that proprietary networks like MSN, AOL, etc would be the network.

Given the dominance of Facebook, etc, he may have been right the first time!

Microsoft was utilizing the Internet for business by the mid 1980s, they weren't oblivious to it. Gates viewed there as being two approaches that might win, one he preferred to call the Information Superhighway (basically closed platforms over high-speed cable), and the other being the Internet. He thought the Internet would lose because of how slow it was in the early days, and it was very mediocre at video and interaction initially. Gates and Microsoft were fully aware of the coming value in networking up systems, the only debate was what form that would take, not whether it would be a big deal.

I remember when the tcp stack for Windows 3x was a third party application. https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/

Beautiful interview. Love him or hate him, you have to respect him.

I loved this passage:

Playboy: Do you know what you want to do with the rest of this lifetime?

Jobs: There’s an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: “For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.” As I’m going to be 30 in February, the thought has crossed my mind.

Playboy: And?

Jobs:

And I’m not sure. I’ll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I’ll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back. And that’s what I may try to do. The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind. Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

> For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.

So if you live longer than 60, I wonder that means of those years in-between, after age 30.

Trying to undo the damage of the first 30 years.

>Playboy: And in the meantime?

>Jobs: The developments will be in making the products more and more portable... maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer.

Hard to believe this was 1984, it almost sounded like the original iPhone was 20+ years in baking

Depends on how much one read into the whole "merging" thing.

Hindsight is 20/20 as they say...

Especially since not “telephone” and “computer” implied non-portability at the time. A pretty prescient statement even so.

Well the first smartphone was prototyped around 1992 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

My first computer science lecture in 1979 was on digital convergence and my lecturer said there, it was actually to all intents and purposes already over, we were just living through a long tail transition. He put it back to 1962 and telstar, although doubtless you could push back further.

So if you want to say Jobs was 'visionary' in '85, remember he had 6 years of lead time, if all he did was pay attention to what was being said in academia about ubiquitous networks.

The mouse was demo'd in 1968 at the mother by Engelbart. So Again, Jobs was really just doing a good sell job on something we had pretty deep long insight into.

Respect is due, but lets temper it. Standing on the shoulders of giants is for physics. In computer science we stand on each others toes..

Bingo. There were a whole lot of informed people running around Apple. Jobs and his like have a knack of picking up ideas, and then spin round and present them as their own without ever giving a hit of attribution.

if you read the entire interview you may note he didn’t take personal credit for anything.

Except that no one was building the future the way Jobs did. Having the idea for something is only part of the battle, actually implementing it in a usable fashion is the most important part of it.

If you look at the Xerox Alto, and the Macintosh, it's amazing how much more advanced the Macintosh was at UI and how much easier to use it was, and how much less expensive it was (Jobs actually supposedly helped design the Mac mouse, which was really good and super cheap).

Jobs, along with Gates are the Entrepreneurs. Engelbart and Kay are the Academics.

I think this is true. He was a master at removing things to get the essential core, but sometimes it felt over-remorselessly. the one-button thing. A good example of cheap and works: I'm told the floppy disk controller on the apple II or III was a finite state machine implemented by gate logic and two PROM memories. I used a lisa in its year of release and the difference between a lisa and what emerged as that generation of mac was pretty high, but the core? much the same. Appletalk on twisted pair? no addresses but zeroconf: every device named itself. That was smart.

I'm amazed at how mature he sounds in this interview at age 29, like far more direct, honest, confident and smart than say, Zuckerberg. He was very prescient and when wrong (he didn't anticipate the clone makers, saying there wouldn't be another $200M+ PC company) it was an area he really didn't care to be involved in.

Compared to Zuckerberg, sure. But 29 is hardly that young to be this articulate and wise. I feel like sentiments like this is much more about hero worship than a statement about how unusually well spoken he his compared to most people his age.

Excellent point. Thank you for making me think about this.

Zuckerberg did some things to achieve success.

Jobs did some things to achieve success, one of which was speaking well.

Well, it's not meaningful to compare Jobs to Zuck in any way than that they were founders of large, powerful companies.

I think the more interesting things is that Jobs embodies what Apple did best: being able to explain/present technology in a very understandable way. I felt that he didn't make you come to him, he brought it to you.

He was very intelligent, confident and opinionated. But what made him great was his salesmanship combined with the above. I have yet to see/hear another tech CEO/founder that made as much sense as Jobs for the things he cared about.

He was just as articulate at 22. When you see his interviews during the launch of the Apple I, you see the same Jobs as in this interview several years later.

Not to take away from your point but people have different strengths. Zuckerberg is bad at social skills but (evidently) a great hacker and amazing at business strategy. It took Jobs a long time to master business management that allowed Apple to become a hugely successful company. Zuckerberg (and others, e.g. Bill Gates) got it right away.

I think the interview makes it clear he had mastered a great deal about business management already.

Compared to Zuckerberg anyone not-evil looks great.

Jobs had many flaws which are often elided in his hagiographies.

As did Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Lincoln, Washington, Churchill, et al.

Very different circumstance. Jobs at that stage was a mini-celebrity and a multi-millionaire. Zuck right now is one of the most famous people in the world, hold incredible power (maybe even more than some of the worlds governments) and is a multi-billionaire.

Most people think Zuck is evil or abnormal. He is a regular dude. He is just sitting on a couple million of hydrogen bombs ready to explode. Facebook is very influential today and the parties it affects are not just companies but governments. These are not easy entities to deal with.

> [the information] revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution.

I remember people thinking this was a crazy idea, but his forecast was largely correct:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?source=frontpage-immediat...

And it still has a ways to go.

The petrochemical revolution is more than the market cap of an oil company. The petrochemical revolution guides the way we've built our cities for the past 100+ years, how we ship our goods and how we travel the world. The entire transport system - cars, trucks, ships, planes - almost all petrochemical. And the negative side too. Vast fields of tarmac (petrochemical) parking lots (petrochemical) for strip malls. Urban sprawl. Well over a million people killed on roads every year. Millions more affected by chemical byproducts. Acid rain. Global warming.

Computers are only getting started. They'll get there eventually though; computers are to the brain what engines are to the body.

Not only those aspects of the petrochemical revolution, it's also the total pervasiveness of plastic products in our lives.

> The petrochemical revolution guides the way we've

conducted foreign policy should have received top billing. Unless you were intentionally excluding items not in both sets.

Petrochemicals also enabled mechanized warfare. That's a bigger impact on killing power than any squabbles in the Middle East. I expect deaths in Levantine squabbles are also dwarfed by road accidents.

I've seen this a bunch of times on hn.

Each time I read a little more and notice/learn something new.

I'll be the first to point out his flaws, but goddam Steve Jobs was a smart guy. It amazes how much he knew exactly what he was doing.

2014 comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559

(Also, previous postings from 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 and 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619869 with a single comment each.)

Beautiful interview. I forgot how young, bombastic and intellectual Jobs was when he started Apple.

> The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into 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.

The last bit made me laugh out loud. It's technically true (!) and probably the iPhone was far more disruptive than personal computers.

> You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. So Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be—not an astronaut, not a football player—but this.

Wow. Little did he know it would happen to himself not long after.

"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 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." He is probably right. And yet, how tragic. Forty hours is not that long. Imagine that the telephone hadn't been invented. Would we still today be living in a society where people went to the telegraph office to send telegraphs but basically no one could telegraph themselves?

> Jobs: [...] there’s been virtually zero innovation since IBM got dominant control of that market place 15 years ago. They are going to do the same thing in every other sector of the computer market place if they can get away with it. The IBM PC fundamentally brought no new technology to the industry at all. It was just repackaging and slight extension of Apple II technology, and they want it all. They absolutely want it all.

> This market place is coming down to the two of us, whether we like it or not. I don’t particularly like it, but it’s coming down to Apple and IBM.

> [...]

> Playboy: It’s not all competition [...]: You buy your disk drives from Sony, for instance.

> Jobs: We buy many of our components from [...]. We save a ton of energy not having to make and design floppy-disk drives or microprocessors that we can spend on software.

So, nowadays Apple is the new IBM and "needs" serious competition...

>Playboy: One of the experts in the field says that for this industry to really flourish, and for it to benefit the consumer, one standard has to prevail.

>Jobs: That’s simply untrue.

This is a little funny given the walled garden he oversaw the creation of (It seemed like it was intended to improve chances of success by implementing a single standard for an ecosystem), but I'm excluding some context and just poking some fun. Overall it was a good read - he had some excellent foresight about computing and the culture around it. Very cool.

It's interesting that the Japanese never really did their own personal computers, as Jobs supposed. He was probably right though, computers are a different beast to things like the stereo, because it's always changing a la Moore's Law.

Jobs definitely saw the bigger picture: computers must be tools for everybody, not just technical people. The work that was done by Xerox PARC, Apple, Microsoft, Google and countless others over the years to make complex tools usable by everybody is simply phenomenal.

I don't think this would have been possible elsewhere on Earth. There was a unique combination of people, places, events and things that allowed all of these innovations to flourish.

I've always thought the Steve Jobs Playboy Interview was a PR coup for Apple (and, in retrospect, Playboy). I suspect Regis McKenna had a hand in both the questions and the answers. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regis_McKenna)

As someone who grew up in the era of PC clones, it's interesting to me to see so much of the interview focus on the IBM vs. Apple angle. Apple was a non-factor in the 90s and IBM didn't have a very strong presence in the consumer market, at least not more than Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc.

Other than the Commodore 64 that was entry level and about to crash, the winners of the first half of the 80s were IBM then Apple: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ (Scroll to bottom for graph.)

The Amiga should have been a factor by ‘85, if there was parental supervision over there. ;)

Dude is 29 years old and already this timeless bullshit that in my day kids were idealistic and now they just care about money. (Although, maybe there are fluctuations about the mean and 1985 was an extreme.)

Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8316559

Anyone knows why the "The Playboy Interview: Moguls" (kindle) ebook seems to be no longer available at amazon?

Someone has to say it: So, there are really people reading the interviews!

Without the influence of LSD I don't think you would have gotten the Mac. You would have gotten Guis inspired by Xerox park but the whole vision of the computer as a work of art and a device to make art that was tied into Jobs inspirations from his psychedelic experiences.

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