A full-length version of the "lost" recording of Steve Jobs's speech during a design conference in Aspen was found and posted online on Tuesday October 2. The entry illustrates some of the prophetic ideas and views of the "technical guru". Earlier, in August, the recording of the 1983 performance was already mentioned, but this copy was only a 20-minute fragment.
The full audio recording of the talk is posted on the LifeLibertyTech blog.
Perhaps the main point of his speech is that he would like to one day fit the computer into the slate board, which is the iPad today.
Highlights from his 1983 audio performance featured by LifeLibertyTech:
• He argued that in a few years, people will be spending more time interacting with personal computers than with cars. It seems so obvious now, but it hardly seemed real then.
• He believed that society was just beginning to get acquainted with personal computers. He acknowledged that technology will continue to evolve in the near future, along with providing comfort with it. Once the PC industry became dominant in the world, it can be said to have developed relatively calmly while Jobs was busy planning for "the next great creation."
• He spoke confidently about the personal computer as a new means of communication. Again, this was said before local area networks became commonplace for us, or there was any hint of the spread of Internet access. However, he talked about the first e-mail systems. As if nothing had happened, he declared that when we got portable computers with radio communication, people would be able to walk anywhere and receive messages by e-mail. Again, this is 1983, at least 20 years before the era of mobile computing.
• He talked about the early LANs and the complexities of the various protocols that existed at the time. He predicts that we are about 5 years away from being able to access the network in the office and 10-15 years from being able to access the network in our home. Jobs was pretty close to reality in his assumptions.
• He said that Apple's strategy is to "put an incredibly large computer in a book that you can carry around and which you can learn to operate in 20 minutes." Does this look like what we have today? Jobs wanted to do this with a "radio signal" so that people didn't have to plug it into anything to communicate with "big databases" and other computers. Does this remind you of a modern iPad?
• At the end of the speech, there was a question from the audience about voice recognition. Jobs believed it could take about a decade to implement this technology. Considering Apple bought Siri in 2010, it's interesting to hear his admission about the difficulty in developing an app that processes natural speech.
"Forward-looking" is one of the most commonly used words used to describe Steve Jobs. Almost a year after he passed away, and historians are still digging out interesting facts from his life that correspond to this description.
As a reminder, you can listen to and download the recording on the LifeLibertyTech.com blog
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