Longform edition published an interview with 29-year-old Steve Jobs, which he gave to Playboy magazine in 1985. In conversation with journalists Apple founder spoke about his work in the company, relations with Ctivom Wozniak and expressed thoughts about the future of personal computing. He predicted that in the near future, people will be willing to spend significant amounts on the purchase of devices, allowing to connect "with the overall network". According to the description, it resembles the modern Internet.
- "In the future, the most valid reason to buy a computer for most people will be able to connect to a common communications network. We are only at the beginning of an era that will be a real breakthrough - the same as the phones".
Playboy: What kind of breakthrough are you talking about?
- "I can only speculate. In our region is at every step: you do not know what happens, but I understand that in the end it will be something very ambitious and significant".
Playboy: So, now you have to offer buyers of home computers to spend $ 3000, guided by faith alone?
- "In the future this will change. Now we are faced with difficulties, because we can not tell people what concrete results can be expected. If someone a hundred years ago, Alexander Graham Bell asked: "What can be done using the phone?", He could not say with certainty that his invention would change the world. He did not know that people will call to find out what movies today go to the movies, or to order products home, or to speak with relatives who live on the other side of the world.
Remember that the first telegraph was opened in 1844. It was a huge breakthrough in the field of communications. Message from New York came to San Francisco in one day. And all began to say that it would be nice to set the telegraph on every desktop in the US, and then the whole country would be more productive. But it would not work, because to use the telegraph people would have to learn how to use Morse code, to learn all these dots and dashes - it needs at least 40 hours. Most people would never have mastered it.
Fortunately, in the 1870 Bell filed a patent for the telephone. His inventions were the same function as that of the telegraph, but people did not have to specifically learn to use it. In addition, the phone has a delightful advantage: it allows you not only to communicate with words, but also to sing".