In 1985 werd Steve Jobs erg uitgebreid geïnterviewd door Playboy magazine, een lang interview dat op meerdere momenten en meerdere locaties werd gedaan. Dat interview is nu voor het eerst op het web op Lonform.org gepubliceerd, en wat ons betreft een aanrader voor iedereen die wat meer over Steve Jobs te weten wil komen.

Het is sowieso een grappig interview om te lezen, want de interviewer lijkt nog niet erg goed te weten wat computers eigenlijk precies zijn en is duidelijk nog niet overtuigd dat computers ook in een huis thuishoren. Duidelijk andere tijden.

En juist in die context is het volgens ons interessant dat weer eens duidelijk wordt hoezeer Steve Jobs een visionair was. Want in een tijd waar het internet nog nauwelijks bestond, ARPANET was net twee jaar voor dit interview overgestapt van NCP naar TCP/IP als netwerkprotocol, zag Steve Jobs duidelijk al het potentieel ervan:

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.

Playboy: Then for now, aren’t you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?

Jobs: In the future, it won't be an act of faith. The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?" he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. 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. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.

Meer over de geschiednis van het Internet vind je in dit Wikipedia-artikel, het hele interview van Playboy met Steve Jobs is hier te lezen.

Mooi om te lezen! Geweldig die laatste zin over de telefoon:

Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.

Ook een leuke (1984!):

Jobs: The developments will be in making the products more and more portable, networking them, getting out laser printers, getting out shared data bases, getting out more communications ability, maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer.

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