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Comment by tompccs | Hacker News Reader

People talk about CEOs with "vision", and usually it's a substitute for a more concrete explanation of what the value-add of non-technical upper management is.

Reading this exchange is fascinating. Jobs doesn't spell out the future - he doesn't know it either - but he has an unwavering faith that computers will be central to it, and can even quite effectively explain how and why. The interviewer seems in retrospect hopelessly naive, but he no doubt represented the mainstream opinion of the time. For Jobs to understand this and bet his career on it (remember, most people betting their careers on computers would have been able to find work even if they had never left the science lab or big corporations - Jobs was speculating on a completely different future) shows, I think, that he deserves the place and high-regard in technological history he has been given.

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"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."

Steve saw the internet coming in 1985. Wow.

Besides the fact that the internet was already around by 1985, and e-mail and Usenet groups were a known thing in nerd circles, in France a network for the masses, Minitel, had already been rolled out. Jobs was not so much prescient as simply aware of what was going on around him.

Which is still leaps and bounds ahead of today's C-level exec

Every C-level tech executive schedules two hours a day of reading HackerNews, right?

that depends on the exec, but on average? sigh.

In my experience, it's a rare and desired trait.

> the internet was already around by 1985

Sort of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

"In 1986, the NSF created NSFNET, a 56 kbit/s backbone to support the NSF-sponsored supercomputing centers."

That was a year after the interview. I think you have to give the man some credit for forecasting that this particular technology would be the one to break out of the geek circle to really change the world for everyone.

NSFNET was just a long-haul backbone, part of the underlying physical network at the time.

The Internet is really defined by the inter-networking protocols, since the very term "internet" implies it can ride on different physical networks. To be a part of the Internet you just have to speak the TCP/IP protocol stack. The same wikipedia page points out these were standardized around 1982.

yep, I remember the email that went out at the time my local university switched over to NSFNET. Before that they had a bunch of leased lines talking to various other local universities. Still Internet.

I recall circa 1985 I really wanted to sign up for QuantumLink, aka Q-Link, which I had seen advertised on the back of a C64 video game package (maybe M.U.L.E.?). The idea of chatting with other people through my computer was fascinating. I was six. I asked my mother about it and with splendid foresight of the modern world, she said no, that I would probably get molested or something.

"Quantum Link users could send electronic mail, use on-line chat rooms, download files, read the news, send instant messages to other users, and play a number of multiplayer games, including classic board games and games inspired by contemporary TV game shows. In late 1986, Q-Link expanded, adding casino games, a database dedicated to rock music, an on-line auction service and the ability for users to have customised avatars digitised from photos they sent in to the service."

https://paleotronic.com/2018/07/01/a-1980s-quantum-link-to-a...

Arthur C Clarke did the same thing in 1974 [1]. The reprint of the Steve Jobs interview is a good read nevertheless.

[1] http://youtu.be/OIRZebE8O84

>Steve saw the internet coming in 1985. Wow.

This will probably blow your mind:

https://youtu.be/Ao9X1GsUPys?t=125

1988 presentation where Alan Kay confidently predicts media-driven websites that became the norm only around 2010. He also talks about virtual reality and real-time 3d graphics.

We still haven't caught up with his vision for exploratory interactive computing and user-driven simulations.

The fact that computers can/will/should be networked and also used for interactive collaboration rather than just raw number crunching was evident to some people as far as 1962. Maybe even earlier.

http://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/

Augmenting Human Intellect is not an easy read, but it is well worth it, and not just as a matter of historic curiosity.

Excellent links, haven't seen the Kay presentation before :)

For anyone interested in going down this (extraordinarily interesting) rabbit hole: the book What the Dormouse Said [0] by John Markoff paints a vivid picture of early (1945-1984ish) computer history. Featuring Engelbart, Jobs, Jim Fadiman, Stanford, MIT, Xerox, Tim Leary, and more. A light yet informative read; highly recommended.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Per...

> 1988 presentation where Alan Kay

Great find! He nailed it.

"Man is the animal that learned to shape tools, and then the tools shaped man. We're very aware of the first part as ourselves as tool shapers, but we’re very unaware of how the tools come back and shape us..."

Then ties that into what will become the internet:

"That communications net is going to take us from a situation where we use computers from the outside, to a situation where in effect we'll be living inside one vast computer.

It sounds awful, but in fact we already live inside a number of grids. We live inside a power grid, where we wouldn't know what to do if it was taken away. Soon we’re going to be living inside of an information and knowledge grid. Such that wherever we go, we’re always going to be in contact, with power to make things happen, communication to get people to do things and ways of processing the information that comes around."

> https://youtu.be/Ao9X1GsUPys?t=125 > 1988 presentation where Alan Kay [...]

I'm getting no sound throughout the whole video, and youtube lists it as having music from a particular Debussy recording, which is then also unavailable (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhogGOTnT9I)

Muting the sound is the usual response to streams and videos that plays audio that someone claims to own the rights to. Is this another casualty to how easy youtube makes it for copyright trolls (or people indistinguishable to copyright trolls)?

It plays fine for me, but it does have a 3D demo with some classical music at the end, so maybe YouTube disabled sound based on your location.

Also compare https://www.gwern.net/Timing

Many of us (I was 12 at the time) thought this was fairly obvious in 1985. I had a 2400 baud modem, and an account on a local university minicomputer. It didn't take long to learn how to telnet to other computers all over the world, play MUDs, etc, all for free (whereas just calling the next town over cost $$$).

At the time he said that, he almost certainly had access to Stanford's infrastructure and PARC, and could see what people were doing with internetworking. I think what was interesting at the time was the comparison of the walled gardens (CompuServe, GENIE, etc) to the wild west (Internet), where (at least to me) it was "obvious" that the internet was superior because it was open and free and made it easy for kids like me to learn how to write code/apps that used the internet (as example, internet remembers my email address and code from that time, http://mudmagic.com/codes/download/other/DINK20.com)

On one hand, yes, he did (in a way) and that helped him when he came back to Apple with the iMac.

In another, a lot of people did. I had a TRS80 Model 100 and was blown away by CompuServe and BBSs in the mid 80s. I managed to finagle a SLIP connection to a local university in 1990, and knew that was the future. Anyone who had access to it did, because those were the people building Netscape and Yahoo, etc. It wasn't hard to see that was the future once you knew it existed. Even Bill Gates did, but he got distracted by CD ROMs and their huge local storage capacity and took his eyes off the ball. MS had an Internet connection very early on.

>For Jobs to understand this and bet his career on it ... he deserves the place and high-regard in technological history he has been given

I'm sure Jobs was brilliant, but this kind of praise still reminds of this Enrico Fermi's story [1]:

During the "Manhattan project" (the making of nuclear bomb), physicist Enrico Fermi asked General Leslie Groves, the head of the project, what is the definition of a "great" general. Groves replied that any general who had won five battles in a row might safely be called great. Fermi then asked how many generals are great. Groves said about three out of every hundred. Fermi conjectured that if the chance of winning one battle is 1/2 then the chance of winning five battles in a row is 1/2^5 = 1/32 = 3%. "So you are right, General, about three out of every hundred. Mathematical probability, not genius."

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0607109.pdf

I can't believe that a brilliant man like Fermi would actually say that.

The outcomes of battles are not random events. It's equivalent to saying that Floyd Mayweather, who so far has won 50 out of 50 of his fights, is not a great boxer, because, out of millions of people boxing, there mathematically ought to be one person who just won 50 times in a row. The thing is winning battles (or boxing fights) is not flipping a coin - it involves little more skill than that.

What Fermi is saying is that if 3 out of every 100 generals are great, these 3 should be able to win more than 5 consecutive battles in order to beat the statistical noise.

In your example, Mayweather's chance of winning 50 fights by sheer luck is 10^-15. We don't have 10^15 fighters around, so his achievement cannot be attributed to chance.

Unlike a general, Jobs didn't enter into a series of battles with binary outcomes. He built a company - Apple - from scratch which changed the shape of the world.

I'm not saying that Jobs was the only person with that vision and that he was rewarded accordingly, but that his vision and insight were obvious to anyone who cared to listen, and that he followed through on that vision with incredible success.

Imagine instead of a general a tank designer whose tanks went on to change the face of warefare. That's Steve Jobs.

I'd probably use the term quaint over naive, in 1985, only the most hardcore of households had an Apple IIe, IIc, IBM PC, etc. And no cell phones, so it really was so early on. Consumer tech hadn't really come into its own yet. It pre-dated CD (for music), and the Sony Walkman with cassettes and an Atari/Intellivision game console were about the extent most people had with computers. I'm not even sure if there was traditional tech journalism at the time? I mean, my family had some Apple-centric magazine that came every now an then....

Not sure what your context of "traditional" is, but Computer Shopper and Dobbs were around then.

1985 is also the year the Amiga came out. Got chills when I saw the commercial.

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