Steve Jobs in 1983: The Computer Will Be the Defining Medium of Our Lifetimes
Jobs opens by framing the personal computer as an infant medium—barely seven years old as a consumer product in 1983—and argues that society and computers are "meeting for the first time" in the 1980s. He draws an explicit parallel to the electric motor's evolution from centralized plants to fractional-horsepower appliances, positioning Apple as the company that stumbled onto "fractional-horsepower computing" five years ahead of everyone else. His core thesis is that the computer will displace television as the predominant medium of communication within the lifetimes of his audience.
A recurring framework is that each medium shapes the process of communication itself, not just its content. Jobs worries that the industry is still in an "I Love Lucy stage"—mimicking old media habits rather than discovering what the new medium can uniquely do. He points to MIT's street-level photographic mapping of Aspen as an early hint of genuinely new, interactive, navigable information experiences. He is equally animated about the philosophical potential: computers that capture an individual's knowledge over a lifetime, so that someday one might ask a machine "What would Aristotle have said?"
On the product roadmap, Jobs describes a clear miniaturization arc: - Lisa (1983): breadbox-sized, $10,000 - Next step: shoebox-sized, ~$2,500 - Goal within 5–7 years: book-sized, under $1,000, with a wireless radio link
He predicts computers will outsell automobiles by 1986 and that no college student will write a paper without one, just as no science student goes without a calculator. He also previews electronic software distribution—transmitting programs over phone lines directly computer-to-computer—as a way to democratize a software ecosystem he notes already has ~20,000 titles for the Apple II.
Two concerns stand out as strikingly prescient. First, Jobs flags electronic funds transfer and financial surveillance—the ability to reconstruct a person's whereabouts from transaction history—as the privacy issue people are most worried about. Second, he raises an education and workforce alarm: California is producing nearly as many welders as computer scientists, displaced manufacturing workers (specifically citing GM layoffs) will not return to those jobs, and without retraining "they're going to burn the cities down." His response is Apple's commitment to donate one computer to every school in California (10,000 units), after a broader national bill was killed in the Senate. The bottom line Jobs leaves is that the next 15 years represent a narrow window to get this technology into society well or merely adequately—and that the design and human quality of the tools will determine which it is.
In a wide-ranging 1983 talk, Steve Jobs laid out his vision for personal computing as a transformative cultural force on par with television and print. He made bold predictions about hardware miniaturization, networked computers, software distribution, and Apple's own trajectory. The talk blends genuine foresight with the overconfidence of a 28-year-old at the helm of a rocket ship.
Society and computers are really meeting for the first time in the eighties. 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, we have an opportunity to do it great or to do it so-so.
You'll sell 100,000 copies times $25 profit per copy, or $2.5 million profit, the first year, selling just 10 percent of the people. And you can write that program with under $10,000 worth of computer equipment.
people don't want to program computers, people want to use computers.
The average age of professionals at Apple is under 30.
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.
The computer's 36 years old.
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.
The reason Apple exists is because we stumbled onto fractional-horsepower computing five years before anybody else.
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.
By 1986, we're going to ship more computers than automobiles in this country.
It doesn't cost any more money to make it look great.
By '86, '87, pick a year, people are going to be spending more time interacting with these machines than they do interacting with their big automobile machines today.
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.
When a new medium enters the scene, we tend to fall back into old-media habits.
The first time that a lot of people were shook into realizing that television had come of age was the JFK funeral.
MIT came out to Aspen 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.
We're in the I Love Lucy stage right now in our medium development.
No two Pong games are ever the same, and yet every single Pong game follows these underlying principles.
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 is dead and gone, we can ask this machine, 'Hey, what would Aristotle have said?'
We're about five years away from really solving the problems of hooking these computers together in the office. And we're about ten to fifteen years away of solving the problems of hooking them together in the home.
Right now, it fits in a breadbox and it's $10,000 and it's called Lisa. And we'll sell over $100 million of those things the first year.
If you take a look at Lisa, it is totally proportionally spaced text. We have 30, 40 fonts on the screen that come out at approximately 80-dots-per-inch resolution on the screen, approximately up to 300-dots-per-inch resolution on a laser printer.
There is going to be no college student three or four years from now that's ever going to think of writing a paper without one of these things, just like they will not think of going to a science class without a calculator today.
our ability to turn all that information, to filter it to what we're interested in, and to turn it into something useful to us, into some knowledge, is very low
over half of the gross national product is contributed by companies and people that are already in the information business today.
about 44 percent of the new jobs in California in the 1980s come directly and indirectly from high technology.
we are turning out almost as many welders in California as we are computer scientists.
we figured that that would cost approximately $50 million, and we'd go broke.
in 1981 Apple made $40 million total after working our butts off for a year.
we were willing to spend 25 percent of our '81 profits to do that.
Bob Dole in the Senate killed it, because he didn't really understand it.
There are about 20,000 programs for the Apple II. There's…for the IBM PC, which is the second most popular one now, there's about maybe 2,000 programs.
we are going to cross $1 billion in sales very shortly with under 5,000 people worldwide.
The actual turnover at Apple has been very, very low since inception. It's been under 5 percent since inception, actually.
A hundred percent of the professionals at Apple own stock in the company. A hundred percent.
we have usually about three. And that's the president, we maybe have a division manager, and then maybe under that a marketing or engineering manager.
we gambled the company on Lisa. If Lisa had bombed, Apple would be just one more computer company.
For three and a half years, the best and the brightest at Apple worked on this product.
a year ago I met this little kid in Chicago who had started this company called Aristotle Software. And he was 13. And he started it with his more mature 14-year-old friend. And a year ago, they were making about $4,000 a week off selling three game programs.
we're shipping almost a million computers a year
Voice recognition is about…it's going to be the better part of a decade away.
understanding language is much harder than understanding voice. We can sorta sort out the words, but what do they all mean? And most language is exceptionally contextually driven.
All the great product designers are off designing automobiles, or they're off designing buildings, but hardly any of them are designing computers.
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're moving rapidly into an era of electronic funds transfer. And I think that's probably the thing that people are most concerned about right now, because you could keep a history of our whereabouts and things like that just based on financial transactions.
Most of the people that got laid off from General Motors are never going to go back to work at General Motors ever, ever, ever. And unless we retrain them and give them skills, they're going to burn the cities down.
Computers are exceptionally simple but really fast—executing mundane instructions like fetching numbers and adding them together at the rate of about a million instructions per second, creating the illusion of something magical.
The development of computers parallels the electric motor: from large centralized machines, to time-shared systems, to fractional-horsepower personal computers.
Each medium shapes not only the communication that goes through it, but it shapes the process of communication.
Computer programming 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.
the first thing we've got to do is give tools to people to help them do that. Because right now, those tools are centralized.
We need a 'software radio station,' quote-unquote.
the oldest and largest organization in the world has only four layers of management, and that's the Catholic Church.
What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in 20 minutes. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it.
The next thing we will do is we will find a way to put it in a shoebox and sell it for like $2,500. And finally, we'll find a way to get it in a book and sell it for under $1,000. And we will be there within five to seven years.
Apple decided to do…is we decided we wanted to give a computer to every school in America. And there's 100,000 schools in America.
The program was announced 60 days ago. And starting next month we roll out 10,000 computers, one free to every school in California.
transmitting this stuff electronically over the phone lines, to where when you want to buy a piece of software, we take our ones and zeros… we'll send tones over the phone that the computers will understand and go directly from computer to computer.
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