All language subtitles for ENGSteve.Jobs.The.Lost.Interview

I'm Bob Cringely.

Sixteen years ago,

when I was making my television
series, Triumph of the Nerds,

I interviewed Steve Jobs.

That was in 1995.

Ten years earlier,
Steve had left Apple,

following a bruising
struggle with John Sculley,

the CEO he brought
into the company.

At the time of our interview,
Steve was running NeXT,

the niche computer
company he founded

after leaving Apple.

Little did we know
that within 18 months,

he would sell NeXT to Apple,

and six months later,
he'd be running the place.

The way things
work in television,

we used only a part of that
interview in the series.

And for years, we thought
the interview was lost forever

because the master
tape went missing

while being shipped from
London to the US in the 1990s.

Then, just a few days ago,
series director Paul Sen

found a VHS copy of that
interview in his garage.

There are very few TV
interviews with Steve Jobs,

and almost
no good ones.

They rarely show the charisma, candor,
and vision that this interview does.

And so, to honor
an amazing man,

here's that interview
in its entirety.

Most of this has
never been seen before.

CRINGELY: So how did you get
involved with personal computers?

Hmm. Well, um...

I ran into my first computer
when I was about 10 or 11.

And it's hard to
remember back then.

But I'm an old fossil
now. I'm an old fossil.

So when I was 10 or 11
was about 30 years ago.

And no one had ever
seen a computer.

To the extent that they'd
seen them in movies,

and they were these big
boxes with whirring...

For some reason, they
fixated on the tape drives

as being the icon of
what the computer was,

or flashing lights somehow.

And so nobody
had ever seen one.

They were very mysterious,
very powerful things,

that did something
in the background.

And so, to see one and
actually get to use one

was a real
privilege back then.

And I got into NASA, the Ames
Research Center down here.

I got to use a
time-sharing terminal.

So I didn't actually
see the computer,

but I saw a
time-sharing terminal.

And in those days... Again, it's
hard to remember how primitive it was.

There was no such thing as a computer
with a graphics video display.

It was literally a printer.

It was a teletype printer
with a keyboard on it.

And so you would keyboard
these commands in,

and then you would wait for a
while, and the thing would go...

(MIMICS CLACKING)

And it would tell
you something out.

But even with that, it
was still remarkable,

especially for
a 10-year-old,

that you could write a program
in BASIC, let's say, or FORTRAN.

And actually, this machine
would take your idea,

and it would execute your idea

and give you
back some results.

And if they were the
results that you predicted,

your program really worked. It was
an incredibly thrilling experience.

So, I became

very captivated by a computer.

And a computer, to me, was
still a little mysterious,

'cause it was at the
other end of this wire,

and I'd never really seen
the actual computer itself.

And then I got tours of computers
after that, and saw the insides.

And then I was part of this
group at Hewlett-Packard.

When I was 12, I called up Bill Hewlett,
who lived in Hewlett-Packard at the time.

And again, this dates me,

but there was no such thing as
an unlisted telephone number then.

So I could just look in the
book, and looked his name up.

And he answered the phone,

and I said, "Hi. My
name's Steve Jobs.

"You don't know me,
but I'm 12 years old,

"and I'm building
a frequency counter,

"and I'd like
some spare parts."

And so, he talked to
me for about 20 minutes.

I'll never forget
it as long as I live.

And he gave me the parts,

but he also gave me a job working
at Hewlett-Packard that summer.

And I was 12 years old then.

And that really made a
remarkable influence on me.

Hewlett-Packard was
really the only company

I'd ever seen in
my life at that age,

and it formed my view
of what a company was,

and how well they
treated their employees.

They didn't know about cholesterol
back then. But at that time,

they used to bring a big cartful of donuts
and coffee out at 10:00 every morning.

Everybody would take a
coffee and donut break.

And just little things
like that, it was clear that

the company recognized that its
true value was its employees.

So anyway, things led to
things with Hewlett-Packard,

and I started going up to
their Palo Alto research labs

every Tuesday night with
a small group of people

to meet some of their
researchers and stuff,

and I saw the first
desktop computer ever made,

which was the
Hewlett-Packard 9100.

It was about as
big as a suitcase,

but it actually had a small
cathode-ray tube display in it,

and it was completely
self-contained.

There was no wire going off
behind the curtain somewhere.

And I fell in love with it.

And you could program
it in BASIC and APL.

And I would just, for hours,
get a ride up to Hewlett-Packard

and just hang around that
machine and write programs for it.

And so that was
the early days.

And I met Steve Wozniak
around that time, too.

Well, maybe a little earlier
when I was about 14, 15 years old.

And we immediately hit it off.

He was the first person I'd met that
knew more about electronics than I did,

and so I was...

I liked him a lot, and he was
maybe five years older than I.

He'd gone off to college and gotten
kicked out for pulling pranks,

and was living
with his parents,

and going to De Anza,
the local junior college.

So we became fast friends, and
started doing projects together.

We read about...

We read about the story
in Esquire magazine

about this guy
named Captain Crunch

who could supposedly
make free telephone calls.

You've heard about
this, I'm sure.

And again, we were captivated.

How could anybody do this?

And we thought
it must be a hoax.

And we started looking
through the libraries,

looking for the secret tones
that would allow you to do this.

And it turned out, we were at

Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center one night,

and way in the bowels of
their technical library,

way down at the last bookshelf,
in the corner bottom rack,

we found an AT&T technical journal
that laid out the whole thing.

And that's another
moment I'll never forget.

When we saw this journal, we
thought, "My God! It's all real."

And so, we set out to build
a device to make these tones.

And the way it worked was,

you know when you make a
long-distance call, you used to hear...

(MIMICS DIAL TONE)

Right? In the background?

They were tones
that sounded like

the touch tone you
could make on your phone,

but they were a different
frequency, so you couldn't make them.

It turned out that, that was the signal
from one telephone computer to another

controlling the
computers in the network.

And AT&T made a fatal
flaw when they designed

the original telephone network,
digital telephone network,

was they put the signaling
from computer to computer

in the same band
as your voice,

which meant that if you
could make those same signals,

you could put it right
in through the handset.

And literally, the entire AT&T
international phone network

would think you were
an AT&T computer.

So, after three weeks, we finally
built a box like this that worked.

And I remember, the first
call we made was down to LA,

one of Woz's relatives
down in Pasadena.

We dialed the wrong number,

but we woke some guy up
in the middle of the night,

and we were
yelling at him like,

"Don't you understand we
made this call for free?"

And this person
didn't appreciate that.

But it was miraculous,

and we built these little boxes to
do blue boxing, as it was called,

and we put a little note
in the bottom of them.

Our logo was, "He's got the
whole world in his hands."

(CHUCKLES) And they worked.

We built the best
blue box in the world.

It was all digital.
No adjustments.

And so you could
go up to a pay phone

and you could take a
trunk over to White Plains,

and then take a satellite over
to Europe, and then go to Turkey,

take a cable back to Atlanta.

And you could go
around the world.

You could go around the
world five or six times

'cause we learned all the codes for
how to get on the satellites and stuff.

And then, you could call
the pay phone next door,

and so you could
shout in the phone,

and after about a minute, it
would come out the other phone.

It was... It was miraculous.

And you might ask, "Well, what's
so interesting about that?"

What's so interesting
is that we were young.

And what we learned was

that we could build
something ourselves

that could control billions of dollars'
worth of infrastructure in the world.

That was what we learned,
was that us two...

We didn't know much.

We could build a little thing
that could control a giant thing.

And that was an
incredible lesson.

I don't think there would have
ever been an Apple computer

had there not
been blue boxing.

-Woz said you called the Pope?
-Yeah, we did call the Pope.

He pretended to
be Henry Kissinger.

And we got the number of the
Vatican, and we called the Pope.

And they started waking
people up in the hierarchy.

I don't know, cardinals
and this and that.

And they actually sent
someone to wake up the Pope

when, finally, we just
burst out laughing,

and they realized that we
weren't Henry Kissinger.

Yeah, and so, we never got to talk
to the Pope, but it was very funny.

So...

So the jump from blue boxes to
personal computers, what sparked that?

Well...

Necessity, in the sense that there
was time-sharing computers available,

and there was a time-sharing
company in Mountain View

that we could
get free time on.

So, uh... But we
needed a terminal,

and we couldn't afford one,
so we designed and built one.

And that was the first thing we
ever did. We built this terminal.

And so, what an Apple I was,

was really an extension
of this terminal

putting a microprocessor
on the back end.

That's what it was. It was really
two separate projects put together.

So first we built
the terminal,

and then we built the Apple I.

And we really built
it for ourselves

because we couldn't
afford to buy anything.

And we'd scavenge parts
here and there and stuff,

and we'd build
these all by hand.

They'd take 40 to 80 hours to build
one, and then they'd always be breaking

'cause there's all
these tiny little wires.

And so, it turned out, a lot of our
friends wanted to build them, too.

And although they could scavenge
most of the parts as well,

they didn't have the
skills to build them

that we had acquired by training
ourselves through building them.

And so we ended up helping them
build most of their computers,

and it was really taking
up all of our time.

And we thought if we could make
what's called a printed circuit board,

which is a piece of fiberglass
with copper on both sides

that's etched to form the wires so
that you could build a computer...

You could build an Apple I in
a few hours instead of 40 hours.

If we only had one of those, we
could sell them to all our friends

for as much as it cost us to make
them, and make our money back.

And everybody would be happy,
and we'd get a life again.

So we did that.

I sold my Volkswagen Bus,
and Steve sold his calculator,

and we got enough money
to pay a friend of ours

to make the artwork to make
a printed circuit board.

And we made some
printed circuit boards,

and we sold some
to our friends.

And I was trying to
sell the rest of them,

so that we could get our
Microbus and calculator back.

And I walked into the first
computer store in the world

which was the Byte Shop of Mountain
View, I think, on El Camino.

(STAMMERING)

It metamorphosized into an adult
bookstore a few years later.

But at this point,
it was the Byte Shop.

And the person that ran it, I
think his name was Paul Terrell,

he said, "I'll
take 50 of those."

I said, "This is great."

He said, "But I want
them fully assembled."

We'd never thought
of this before.

So we then kicked this around,

we thought, "Why not?
Why not try this?"

And so, I spent the
next several days

on the phone talking with
electronics parts distributors.

We didn't know
what we were doing.

And we said, "Look,
here's the parts we need."

We figured we'd buy 100
sets of parts, build 50,

sell them to the Byte Shop for
twice what it cost us to build them,

therefore paying
for the whole 100,

and then we'd have 50 left, and we
could make our profits by selling those.

So we convinced these
distributors to give us the parts

on net 30 days credit.

We had no idea what that meant.
"Net 30? Sure." "Sign here."

And then, so we had
30 days to pay them.

And so we bought the parts,
we built the products,

and we sold 50 of them to
the Byte Shop in Palo Alto,

and got paid in 29 days.

And then went and paid off
the parts people in 30 days,

and so we were in business.

But we had the classic Marxian
profit realization crisis,

in that our profit wasn't
in a liquid currency,

our profit was in 50 computers
sitting in the corner.

So then, all of a
sudden, we had to think,

"Wow! How are we going
to realize our profit?"

And so we started thinking
about distribution,

"Are there any other
computer stores?"

And we started calling
the other computer stores

that we'd heard of across the country,
and we just eased into business that way.

CRINGELY: The third key figure
in the creation of Apple

was former Intel
executive Mike Markkula.

I asked Steve how
he came aboard.

We were designing
the Apple II,

and we really had much higher
ambitions for the Apple II.

Woz's ambitions were, he
wanted to add color graphics.

My ambition was that...

It was very clear to me that while
there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists

that could assemble their own
computers or at least take our board

and add the transformers
for the power supply,

and the case and the
keyboard, et cetera,

and go get the
rest of the stuff...

For every one of those, there were a
thousand people that couldn't do that,

but wanted to mess
around with programing.

Software hobbyists.

Just like I had been when I was
10, discovering that computer.

And so my dream
for the Apple II

was to sell the first
real packaged computer.

Packaged personal computer

where you didn't have to be
a hardware hobbyist at all.

And so, combining
both of those dreams,

we actually
designed the product.

And I found a designer, and we
designed the packaging and everything,

and we wanted to make it out of plastic,
and we had the whole thing ready to go.

But we needed some money for tooling
the case and things like that.

We needed a few hundred
thousand dollars.

And this was way
beyond our means,

so I went looking for
some venture capital.

And I ran across one venture
capitalist named Don Valentine

who came over to the garage.

And he later said I looked like
a renegade from the human race.

That was his famous
quote. (CHUCKLES)

And he said he wasn't
willing to invest in us,

but he recommended a
few people that might,

and one of them
was Mike Markkula.

So I called Mike on the
phone, and Mike came over,

and Mike had retired at
about 30 or 31 from Intel.

He was a product manager there and
had gotten a little bit of stock,

and made, like, a million
bucks on stock options,

which at that time, was
quite a lot of money.

And he'd been investing
in oil and gas deals,

and staying home and
doing that sort of thing.

And he, I think, was kind of
antsy to get back into something,

and Mike and I hit
it off very well.

And so Mike said, "Okay, I'll
invest after a few weeks."

And I said, "No. No. We don't
want your money. We want you."

(LAUGHS)

So we convinced Mike to actually
throw in with us as an equal partner.

And so Mike put in some
money, and Mike put in himself,

and the three of us went off,

and we took this design that was
virtually done with the Apple II,

and tooled it up
and announced it

a few months later at the
West Coast Computer Faire.

-What was that like?
-It was great.

We got the best.

The West Coast Computer
Faire was small at that time,

but to us, it was very large.

And so, we had this
fantastic booth there.

We had a projection television
showing the Apple II,

and showing its graphics,
which today, look very crude,

but at that time,
were, by far,

the most advanced graphics
on a personal computer.

And I think...

My recollection is,
we stole the show.

And a lot of dealers and
distributors started lining up,

and we were off and running.

How old were you?

Twenty-one.

-Twenty-one?
-Yeah.

You're 21, you're
a big success.

You've just done it by
the seat of your pants.

You don't have any
particular training in this.

How do you learn
to run a company?

Throughout the
years in business,

I found something, which was,
I'd always ask why you do things.

And the answers you
invariably get are,

"Oh, that's just
the way it's done."

Nobody knows why
they do what they do.

Nobody thinks about things
very deeply in business.

That's what I found.
I'll give you an example.

When we were building our
Apple Is in the garage,

we knew exactly
what they cost.

When we got into a factory
in the Apple II days,

the accounting had this
notion of a standard cost,

where you'd set
a standard cost,

and at the end of a quarter,
you'd adjust it with a variance.

And I kept asking,
"Well, why do we do this?"

And the answer was, "Well,
that's just the way it's done."

And after about six months
of digging into this,

what I realized was, the
reason you do it is because

you don't really have good enough
controls to know how much it costs,

so you guess, and then you fix your
guess at the end of the quarter,

and the reason you don't
know how much it costs

is because your information
systems aren't good enough.

But nobody said it that way.

And so, later on, when we designed
this automated factory for Macintosh,

we were able to get rid of a
lot of these antiquated concepts

and know exactly what
something cost to the second.

So in business, a lot of things
are... I call it folklore.

They're done because they were
done yesterday and the day before.

And so what that means is, if you're
willing to ask a lot of questions

and think about things
and work really hard,

you can learn
business pretty fast.

It's not the hardest
thing in the world.

-It's not rocket science.
-It's not rocket science, no.

Now, when you were
first coming in contact

with these computers
and inventing them,

and before that,
working on the HP 9100,

you talked about
writing programs.

What sort of programs?

What did people actually
do with these things?

Hmm...

See, what we did with them...

Well, I'll give you
a simple example.

When we were
designing our blue box,

we wrote a lot of custom
programs to help us design it,

and to do a lot of
the dog work for us

in terms of calculating
master frequencies

with sub divisors to
get other frequencies

and things like that.

We used the
computer quite a bit.

And to calculate how much error
we would get in the frequencies,

and how much
could be tolerated.

So, we used them in our work.

But much more importantly,

it had nothing to do with using
them for anything practical.

It had to do with using them

to be a mirror of
your thought process,

to actually learn
how to think.

It was, I think, the greatest
value of learning how to...

I think everybody
in this country

should learn how to
program a computer,

should learn a
computer language,

because it teaches
you how to think.

It's like going to law school.

I don't think anybody
should be a lawyer,

but I think going to law
school would actually be useful

'cause it teaches you how
to think in a certain way.

In the same way that
computer programing

teaches you, in a slightly
different way, how to think.

And so, I view computer
science as a liberal art.

It should be something
that everybody learns.

Takes a year in their life,

one of the courses they take
is learning how to program.

Yeah, but I learned APL,

which, obviously,
is part of the reason

why I'm going
through life sideways.

You look back and consider it

an enriching experience that taught
you to think in a different way, or not?

-Uh, no. Not that particularly.
-Okay.

Other languages
perhaps more so,

-but I started
with APL. -Uh-huh.

So, obviously, the Apple
II was a terrific success.

-Yeah.
-Just incredibly so.

And the company grew like Topsy,
and eventually went public,

and you guys got really rich.

What's it like to get rich?

It's very interesting.
I was worth

about over $1
million when I was 23,

and over $10 million
when I was 24,

and over $100
million when I was 25.

And it wasn't that important

because I never did
it for the money.

I think money is
a wonderful thing

because it enables
you to do things.

It enables you
to invest in ideas

that don't have a short-term
payback and things like that.

But especially at
that point in my life,

it was not the most
important thing.

The most important thing was the company,
the people, the products we were making,

what we were gonna enable
people to do with these products,

so I didn't think
about it a great deal.

I never sold any stock.

Just really believed that the company
would do very well over the long term.

CRINGELY: Central to the development
of the personal computer

was the pioneering work being done
at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center

which Steve first
visited in 1979.

I had three or four
people who kept bugging me

that I ought to get my rear over to
Xerox PARC and see what they were doing,

and so I finally did.
I went over there.

And they were very kind, and they
showed me what they were working on,

and they showed me,
really, three things.

But I was so blinded by the first one that
I didn't even really see the other two.

One of the things they showed me
was object-oriented programing.

They showed me that, but
I didn't even see that.

The other one they showed me was,
really, a network computer system.

They had over 100 Alto computers,
all networked, using email,

et cetera, et cetera.

I didn't even see that.

I was so blinded by the
first thing they showed me,

which was the graphical
user interface.

I thought it was the best
thing I'd ever seen in my life.

Now, remember, it was very
flawed. What we saw was incomplete.

They'd done a bunch
of things wrong,

but we didn't know
that at the time.

But still, though, they had...

The germ of the idea was there
and they'd done it very well.

And within 10 minutes,

it was obvious to me that all
computers would work like this someday.

It was obvious.

You could argue about how
many years it would take,

you could argue about who the
winners and losers might be,

but you couldn't argue
about the inevitability.

It was so obvious.

You would have felt the
same way had you been there.

Those are the exact words
that Paul Allen used.

-Yeah.
-It's really interesting.

Yeah, it was obvious.

But there were two visits.

You saw it, then you brought
some people back with you.

Yeah.

And what happened the next time? They
made you cool your heels for a while.

No.

-No? Well, Adele Goldberg says otherwise.
-What do you mean?

Well, she did the demo...

-Right.
-...when the group came back.

And she said that she argued
against doing it for three hours,

and they took you other places and showed
you other things while she was arguing.

Oh! Oh! You mean they were
reluctant to show us the demo?

She was.

-Oh, okay. Well, I have no idea.
-Oh, okay.

Yeah, I don't remember that. I
thought you meant something else.

-So they were very skillful.
-(CHUCKLES) Yeah.

-But they did show us.
-Yeah.

So...

And it's good that
they showed us,

because the technology
crashed and burned at Xerox.

-They used to call...
-(MUTTERS)

-What's that?
-No, I was just...

-Why?
-Yeah, why?

Oh, I actually thought
a lot about that.

And I learned more about that
with John Sculley later on,

and I think I understand
it now pretty well.

What happens is, like
with John Sculley...

John came from PepsiCo,

and they, at most, would change
their product once every 10 years.

To them, a new product was,
like, a new-size bottle, right?

So if you were
a product person,

you couldn't change the course
of that company very much.

So who influenced the
success of PepsiCo?

The sales and
marketing people.

Therefore, they were the
ones that got promoted,

and therefore, they were the
ones that ran the company.

Well, for PepsiCo, that
might have been okay.

But it turns out, the
same thing can happen

in technology companies
that get monopolies.

Like, oh, IBM and Xerox.

If you were a product
person at IBM or Xerox...

So you make a better copier
or a better computer. So what?

When you have a
monopoly market share,

the company is not
any more successful.

So the people that can make
the company more successful

are sales and
marketing people,

and they end up
running the companies.

And the product people get driven
out of the decision-making forums.

And the companies forget what
it means to make great products.

The product sensibility
and the product genius

that brought them to
that monopolistic position

gets rotted out by people
running these companies

who have no conception of a good
product versus a bad product.

They have no conception
of the craftsmanship

that's required to take a good idea
and turn it into a good product.

And they really have no
feeling in their hearts usually

about wanting to really
help the customers.

So that's what
happened at Xerox.

The people at Xerox PARC used to call
the people that ran Xerox "toner heads."

And they just had...

These toner heads would
come out to Xerox PARC,

and they just had no clue
about what they were seeing.

And for our audience,
toner is what?

Oh, toner is what
you put into a copier.

The toner that you add
to an industrial copier.

-The black stuff.
-The black stuff, yeah.

So basically, they
were copier heads

that just had no clue about a
computer or what it could do.

And so they just
grabbed defeat

from the greatest victory
in the computer industry.

Xerox could have owned the
entire computer industry today.

Could have been a
company 10 times its size.

Could have been IBM.

Could have been
the IBM of the '90s.

Could have been the
Microsoft of the '90s.

So...

But anyway, that's
all ancient history.

It doesn't really
matter anymore.

Sure. You mentioned IBM.

When IBM entered the market, was that
a daunting thing for you at Apple?

Oh, sure.

Here was Apple, a
one-billion-dollar company.

And here was IBM, at
that time, probably about

30-some-odd-billion-dollar
company

entering the market. Sure,
it was. It was very scary.

We made a very big
mistake, though.

IBM's first product was
terrible. It was really bad.

And we made a mistake of not
realizing that a lot of other people

had a very strong vested interest
in helping IBM make it better.

So if it had just been up to IBM,
they would have crashed and burned.

But IBM did have, I think,
a genius in their approach,

which was to have a lot of other people
have a vested interest in their success.

And that's what
saved them in the end.

So you came back from visiting
Xerox PARC with a vision.

-Mmm-hmm. -And how did
you implement the vision?

Well, I got our
best people together

and started to get
them working on this.

The problem was that we'd hired a
bunch of people from Hewlett-Packard.

And they didn't get this
idea. They didn't get it.

I remember having dramatic
arguments with some of these people

who thought the coolest
thing in user interface

was soft keys at the
bottom of a screen.

They had no concept of
proportionally-spaced fonts,

no concept of a mouse.

As a matter of fact, I remember
arguing with these folks,

people screaming at me that it would
take us five years to engineer a mouse

and it would cost
$300 to build.

And I finally got fed up.

I just went outside and
found David Kelley Design,

and asked him to
design me a mouse.

And in 90 days, we had a mouse

we could build for 15 bucks
that was phenomenally reliable.

So I found that, in a way,

Apple did not have the caliber of people
that was necessary to seize this idea

in many ways.

And there was a
core team that did,

but there was a larger team that
mostly had come from Hewlett-Packard

that didn't have a clue.

Well, there comes this
issue of professionalism.

There is a dark side and a
light side to it, isn't there?

Well, no. You know what it is?
No, it's not dark and light.

It's that people get confused.

Companies get confused.

When they start
getting bigger,

they want to replicate
their initial success.

And a lot of them think,

"Well, somehow there is some magic in the
process of how that success was created."

So they start to try to institutionalize
process across the company.

And before very long,

people get very confused that
the process is the content.

And that's, ultimately,
the downfall of IBM.

IBM has the best process
people in the world.

They just forgot
about the content.

And that's what happened
a little bit at Apple, too.

We had a lot of people who were
great at management process.

They just didn't have a
clue as to the content.

And in my career,

I found that the best people are the
ones that really understand the content,

and they're a pain
in the butt to manage.

But you put up with it because
they're so great at the content.

And that's what
makes great products.

It's not process.
It's content.

So we had a little bit
of that problem at Apple.

And that problem eventually
resulted in the Lisa,

which had its
moments of brilliance.

In a way, it was very
far ahead of its time,

but there wasn't enough
fundamental content understanding.

Apple drifted too far
away from its roots.

To these Hewlett-Packard
guys, $10,000 was cheap.

To our market, to our distribution
channels, $10,000 was impossible.

So we produced a product
that was a complete mismatch

for the culture
of our company,

for the image of our company,

for the distribution channels of our
company, for our current customers.

None of them could afford
a product like that.

And it failed.

-Now you and John Couch...
-Right.

...fought for
leadership of the Lisa.

Absolutely, and I
lost. That's correct.

How did that come about?

Well, I thought Lisa
was in serious trouble.

I thought Lisa was going off in this
very bad direction as I've just described.

And I could not convince enough people
in the senior management of Apple

that that was the case and we ran
the place as a team for the most part.

So I lost.

And at that point in time...
I brooded for a few months.

But it was not
very long after that

that it really occurred to me that
if we didn't do something here...

The Apple II was
running out of gas,

and we needed to do something
with this technology fast

or else Apple might cease to
exist as the company that it was.

And so I formed a small
team to do the Macintosh,

and we were on a mission
from God to save Apple.

No one else thought so, but
it turned out we were right.

And as we evolved the Mac,

it became very clear that this was
also a way of reinventing Apple.

We reinvented everything.
We reinvented manufacturing.

I visited probably 80
automated factories in Japan,

and we built the world's first
automated computer factory in the world

in California here.

So we adopted the 68,000
microprocessor that Lisa had.

We negotiated a price that was a fifth
of what Lisa was going to pay for it

because we were going to
use it in much higher volume.

And we really started to design this
product that could be sold for $1,000

called the Macintosh.

And we didn't make it.

We could have sold it at $2,000.
Although, we came out at $2,500.

And we spent four years
of our life doing that.

We built the product.

We built the
automated factory,

the machine to
build the machine.

We built a completely
new distribution system.

We built a completely
different marketing approach.

And I think it
worked pretty well.

Now, you motivated this
team. You had to guide them.

We had to build the team.

Build the team, motivate it,
guide them, deal with them.

We've interviewed just lots and lots
of people from your Macintosh team.

Great.

And what it keeps coming down to
is your passion, your vision, and...

How do you order your
priorities in there?

What's important to you in
the development of a product?

You know...

One of the things
that really hurt Apple

was after I left, John Sculley
got a very serious disease,

and that disease... I've
seen other people get it, too.

It's the disease of thinking that a
really great idea is 90% of the work,

and that if you just tell all these
other people, "Here is this great idea,"

then, of course, they can
go off and make it happen.

And the problem with
that is that there is just

a tremendous amount
of craftsmanship

in between a great idea
and a great product.

And as you evolve that great
idea, it changes and grows.

It never comes
out like it starts

because you learn a lot more as
you get into the subtleties of it,

and you also find there is tremendous
tradeoffs that you have to make.

There are just certain things
you can't make electrons do.

There are certain things

you can't make plastic do or glass
do or factories do or robots do.

And as you get into all these
things, designing a product

is keeping 5,000 things in
your brain, these concepts,

and fitting them all together and
continuing to push to fit them together

in new and different
ways to get what you want.

And every day you discover something new,
that is a new problem or a new opportunity

to fit these things together
a little differently.

And it's that process
that is the magic.

And so we had a lot of
great ideas when we started.

But what I've always felt,

that a team of people doing something
they really believe in is like...

When I was a young kid, there was a
widowed man that lived up the street.

And he was in his 80s.

He was a little
scary-looking.

And I got to know
him a little bit.

I think he might have paid me
to mow his lawn or something.

And one day, he said,

"Come on into my garage. I
want to show you something."

And he pulled out this
dusty, old rock tumbler.

It was a motor and a coffee can
and a little band between them.

And he said,
"Come on with me."

We went out to the back
and we got just some rocks.

Some regular, old, ugly rocks.

And we put them in the can

with a little bit of liquid
and a little bit of grit powder.

And we closed the can up,

and he turned this motor on, and
he said, "Come back tomorrow."

And this can was making a
racket as the stones went around.

And I came back the next
day, and we opened the can,

and we took out these amazingly
beautiful polished rocks.

The same common stones
that had gone in,

through rubbing against
each other like this,

creating a little
bit of friction,

creating a little
bit of noise,

had come out these
beautiful polished rocks.

And that's always been,
in my mind, my metaphor

for a team working really hard on
something they're passionate about

is that it's through the team, through
that group of incredibly talented people,

bumping up against each other,

having arguments,
having fights sometimes,

making some noise,
and working together,

they polish each other
and they polish the ideas,

and what comes out are these
really beautiful stones.

So it's hard to explain, and it's
certainly not the result of one person.

People like symbols, so I'm
the symbol of certain things.

But it really was a
team effort on the Mac.

Now, in my life, I observed
something fairly early on at Apple,

which...

I didn't know how
to explain it then,

but I've thought a
lot about it since.

Most things in life,

the dynamic range between average
and the best is, at most, two-to-one.

If you go to New York City,

and you get an average taxicab
driver versus the best taxicab driver,

you're probably going to get to your
destination with the best taxicab

maybe 30% faster.

In an automobile, what's the
difference between average and the best?

Maybe 20%.

The best CD player and
an average CD player?

I don't know. 20%.

So two-to-one is a big
dynamic range in most of life.

In software, and it used to
be the case in hardware, too,

the difference between
average and the best

is 50-to-1,
maybe 100-to-1.

-Easy. Yeah.
-Okay?

Very few things in
life are like this.

But what I was lucky enough to
spend my life in, is like this.

And so I've built
a lot of my success

off finding these
truly gifted people,

and not settling for B and C players
but really going for the A players,

and I found something.

I found that when you get
enough A players together,

when you go through the incredible
work to find five of these A players,

they really like
working with each other

because they've never had
a chance to do that before.

And they don't want to
work with B and C players.

And so it becomes
self-policing,

and they only want to
hire more A players,

and so you build up these pockets
of A players, and it propagates.

And that's what the Mac team was
like. They were all A players.

And these were extraordinarily
talented people.

But they're also
people who now say

that they don't have the
energy anymore to work for you.

Mmm-hmm. Sure.

Oh, I think if you talk to a
lot of people on the Mac team,

they will tell you it was the hardest
they've ever worked in their life.

Some of them will tell you
that it was the happiest

they've ever been
in their life.

But I think all of
them will tell you

that is certainly one of the most
intense and cherished experiences

they will ever
have in their life.

Yeah, they did.

You know, it's...

Some of those things are not
sustainable for some people.

What does it mean when you
tell someone their work is shit?

It usually means
their work is shit.

Sometimes, it means, "I think
your work is shit, and I'm wrong."

(CHUCKLES)

But usually, it means their work
is not anywhere near good enough.

I had this great quote
from Bill Atkinson who says,

when you say someone's work
is shit, you really mean,

"I don't quite understand it.
Would you please explain it to me?"

(LAUGHS)

No, that's not
usually what I meant.

(CRINGELY CHUCKLES)

When you get
really good people,

they know they're really good,

and you don't have to
baby people's egos so much,

and what really
matters is the work.

And everybody knows that. That's
all that matters is the work.

People are being counted on to
do specific pieces of the puzzle.

And the most important
thing, I think,

you can do for somebody who is really
good and who's really being counted on

is to point out to them when
their work isn't good enough.

And to do it very clearly
and to articulate why,

and to get them back on track.

And you need to do that

in a way that does not call into question
your confidence in their abilities,

but leaves not too much
room for interpretation

that the work that they have
done for this particular thing

is not good enough to
support the goal of the team.

And that's a hard thing to do.

And I've always taken
a very direct approach.

And I think if you talk to
people that have worked with me,

the really good people
have found it beneficial.

Some people have hated it.

And I'm also one of these people that
I don't really care about being right.

I just care about success.

So, you'll find a lot of
people that will tell you

that I had a very
strong opinion

and they presented
evidence to the contrary,

and five minutes later, I
completely changed my mind.

Because I'm like that.
I don't mind being wrong.

I'll admit that
I'm wrong a lot.

It doesn't really
matter to me too much.

What matters to me is
that we do the right thing.

CRINGELY: So how and why did
Apple get into desktop publishing

which would become
the Mac's killer app?

I don't know if you
know this, but we got

the first Canon laser printer engine
shipped in the United States at Apple,

and we had it hooked up to a Lisa,
actually imaging pages before anybody.

Before HP. Long before
HP, long before Adobe.

But I heard a few times,
people would tell me,

"Hey, there are these guys over in
this garage that left Xerox PARC.

"You ought to go see them."

And I finally
went and saw them,

and I saw what
they were doing,

and it was better than
what we were doing.

And they were gonna
be a hardware company.

They wanted to make
printers and the whole thing.

And so I talked them into
being a software company.

And within two or three weeks,

we had canceled our
internal project.

And a bunch of people wanted to
kill me over this, but we did it.

And I had cut a deal with
Adobe to use their software,

and we bought 19.9%
of Adobe at Apple.

They needed some financing. We
wanted a little bit of control.

And we were off to the races,

and so we got the
engines from Canon.

We designed the first laser
printer controller at Apple.

And we got the software from Adobe,
and we introduced the LaserWriter.

And no one at the company wanted to
do it but a few of us in the Mac group.

Everybody thought a
$7,000 printer was crazy.

What they didn't understand was
you could share it with AppleTalk.

They understood
it intellectually,

but they didn't
understand it viscerally

because the last really expensive
thing we tried to sell was Lisa.

So we pushed this
thing through.

And I had to basically do
it over a few dead bodies,

but we pushed
this thing through,

and it was the first laser
printer on the market, as you know,

and the rest is history.

When I left Apple,

Apple was the largest printer company
measured by revenue in the world.

Wow.

It lost that distinction
to Hewlett-Packard

about three or four years
after I left, unfortunately.

But when I left, it was the largest
printer company in the world.

Did you envision desktop
publishing? Was that a no-brainer?

(SIGHS) You know...

Yes.

But we also envisioned
really a networked office.

And so, in January of 1995,

when we had our annual meeting
and introduced our new products,

I made probably the largest
marketing blunder of my career.

-1985.
-1985, sorry.

I made, probably, the largest
marketing blunder of my career

by announcing the
Macintosh Office

instead of just
desktop publishing.

And we had desktop publishing
as a major component of that,

but we announced a bunch
of other stuff as well,

and I think we should have just focused
on desktop publishing at that time.

CRINGELY: After serious disagreements
with Apple CEO John Sculley,

Steve left the
company in 1985.

Tell us about your
departure from Apple.

Oh, it was very painful. I'm not
even sure I want to talk about it.

What can I say? I
hired the wrong guy.

-That was Sculley?
-Yeah.

And he destroyed everything
I'd spent 10 years working for.

Starting with me, but that
wasn't the saddest part.

I would have gladly left Apple

if Apple would have turned
out like I'd wanted it to.

He basically got on a rocket ship
that was about to leave the pad.

And the rocket
ship left the pad.

And it kind of
went to his head.

He got confused, and thought
that he built the rocket ship.

And then he

changed the trajectory

so that it was inevitably
going to crash into the ground.

But it was always the...

In the pre-Macintosh days,
and the early Macintosh days,

it was always the
Steve and John show.

You two were joined at
the hip for a while there.

Right. That's right.

-And then something happened to split you.
-That's correct.

What was that catalyst?

(SIGHS) Well, what
happened was that

the industry went
into a recession

in late 1984.

Sales started
seriously contracting.

And John didn't
know what to do.

He had not a clue.

And there was a leadership
vacuum at the top of Apple.

There were fairly strong general
managers running the divisions.

I was running the
Macintosh division,

somebody else was running the
Apple II division, et cetera.

There were some problems
with some of the divisions.

There was a person running
the storage division

that was completely
out to lunch.

And a bunch of things
that needed to be changed.

But all those problems got
put in a pressure cooker

because of this contraction
in the market place.

And there was no leadership.

John

was in a situation where
the board was not happy

and where he was probably
not long for the company.

And one thing I did not ever
see about John until that time

was he had an incredible
survival instinct.

Somebody once told me,

"This guy didn't get to
be the president of PepsiCo

"without these
kinds of instincts."

And it was true.

And John decided that

a really good person to be the root
of all these problems would be me.

And so, we came
to loggerheads.

And John had cultivated a very
close relationship with the board.

And they believed him.

So, that's what happened.

So there were competing
visions for the company?

Oh, clearly.

Well, not so much competing
visions for the company,

'cause I don't think John
had a vision for the company.

Well, I guess I'm asking, what was your
vision that lost out in this instance?

It wasn't an issue of vision.

It was an issue

of execution.

In the sense that my belief

was that Apple needed
much stronger leadership,

to unite these various factions that
we had created with the divisions,

that the Macintosh was
the future of Apple,

that we needed to rein back expenses
dramatically in the Apple II area,

that we needed to be spending
very heavily in the Macintosh area.

Things like that.

And John's vision was that he
should remain the CEO of the company.

(BOTH LAUGH)

And anything that would help
him do that would be acceptable.

I think that

Apple was in a state of paralysis
in the early part of 1985.

And I wasn't, at that time,
capable, I don't think,

of running the
company as a whole.

I was 30 years old.

And I don't think I had enough experience
to run a two-billion-dollar company.

Unfortunately,
John didn't either.

So anyway, I was told, in no uncertain
terms, that there was no job for me.

-That was really, really tragic.
-Siberia.

Yeah. It would have been far smarter
for Apple to let me work on the next...

I volunteered. I said, "Why
don't I start a research division?

"And give me a few million bucks a year
and I'll go hire some really great people.

"We'll do the
next great thing."

-And I was told there was no opportunity to do that.
-Oh, wow.

So, my office was taken away.

It was... I'll get real emotional
if we keep talking about this.

Anyway... But
that's irrelevant.

I'm just one person, and the company
was a lot more people than me.

So that's not the
important part.

The important part was

the values of Apple over the next several
years were systematically destroyed.

CRINGELY: I then asked Steve for
his thoughts on the state of Apple.

Remember, this was 1995, a year
before he would go back to Apple.

Remember, too, that when Apple bought
NeXT a year after this interview,

Steve immediately sold the Apple
stock he received as part of the sale.

Apple's dying today.

Apple's dying a
very painful death.

It's on a glide slope to die.

And the reason is because...

When I walked out
the door at Apple,

we had a 10-year lead on
everybody else in the industry.

Macintosh was 10 years ahead.

We watched Microsoft take
10 years to catch up with it.

Well, the reason that they could catch
up with it was because Apple stood still.

The Macintosh that's shipping today
is 25% different than the day I left.

They've spent hundreds of
millions of dollars a year on R&D.

A total of, probably,
$5 billion on R&D.

What did they get for it?

I don't know.

But it was...

What happened was

the understanding of

how to move these things forward
and how to create these new products

somehow evaporated.

And I think a lot of the good
people stuck around for a while.

But there wasn't an opportunity
to get together and do this

'cause there wasn't any
leadership to do that.

So, what's happened
with Apple now is that

they've fallen behind
in many respects,

certainly in market share.

And most importantly,

their differentiation has
been eroded by Microsoft.

And so, what they have now is,
they have their installed base.

Which is not growing, and
which is shrinking slowly,

but will provide a good revenue
stream for several years.

But it's a glide slope that's
just gonna go like this.

So, it's unfortunate.

And I don't really think it's
reversible at this point in time.

Neither do I. What
about Microsoft?

-That's the juggernaut now.
-Right.

And it's a Ford LTD

going into the future.

It's definitely not a
Cadillac. It's not a BMW.

-Yeah.
-It's just...

What's going on there?
How did those guys do that?

Well, Microsoft's orbit was made
possible by a Saturn V booster called IBM.

And I know Bill would get
upset with me for saying this,

but of course it was true.

And much to Bill and
Microsoft's credit,

they used that fantastic opportunity to
create more opportunity for themselves.

Most people don't remember,
but until 1984 with the Mac,

Microsoft was not in the
applications business.

It was dominated by Lotus.

And Microsoft took a big
gamble to write for the Mac.

And they came out with
applications that were terrible.

But they kept at it and
they made them better,

and eventually, they dominated
the Macintosh application market.

And then used a
springboard of Windows

to get into the PC market
with those same applications.

And now they dominate the
applications in the PC space, too.

So, they have two
characteristics.

I think they're very strong opportunists,
and I don't mean that in a bad way.

And two, they're like the
Japanese. They just keep on coming.

They were able to do that because of
the revenue stream from the IBM deal.

But nonetheless, they
made the most of it,

and I give them a lot
of credit for that.

The only problem with Microsoft
is they just have no taste.

They have absolutely no taste.
And what that means is...

I don't mean that in a small
way, I mean that in a big way.

In the sense that...

...they don't think
of original ideas

and they don't bring much
culture into their product.

And you say, "Well,
why is that important?"

Well, proportionally-spaced fonts come
from typesetting and beautiful books.

That's where one
gets the idea.

If it weren't for the Mac, they would
never have that in their products.

And so, I guess I am saddened,
not by Microsoft's success.

I have no problem
with their success.

They've earned their
success for the most part.

I have a problem with the fact that they
just make really third-rate products.

Their products have
no spirit to them.

Their products have no spirit
of enlightenment about them.

They are very pedestrian.

And the sad part is that most customers
don't have a lot of that spirit either.

But the way that we're going
to ratchet up our species

is to take the best and to
spread it around to everybody,

so that everybody grows
up with better things

and starts to understand the
subtlety of these better things.

And Microsoft's
just... It's McDonald's.

So that's what saddens me.

Not that Microsoft has won,

but that Microsoft's
products don't display...

...more insight
and more creativity.

So, what are you doing
about it? Tell us about NeXT.

-Well, I'm not doing anything about it.
-Okay.

Because NeXT is too small of a
company to do anything about that.

I'm just watching it.

And there is really
nothing I can do about it.

CRINGELY: Next,
we talked about NeXT,

the company Steve was running in
1995 which Apple was soon to buy.

NeXT software would become the heart
of the Mac in the form of OS X.

You don't really want to
hear about NeXT, do you?

-Yes, I do.
-You do. Okay.

Well, maybe the best thing,
since we don't have much time,

is I just tell you
what NeXT is today.

-Yeah, that's fine.
-The...

There hasn't been...

Clearly,

the innovation in the computer industry
is happening in software right now.

And there hasn't been a revolution
in how we create software in a long...

(SNEEZES) Sorry.

The innovation in the
industry is in software.

And there hasn't ever been a real
revolution in how we created software.

Certainly not in the last 20 years.
Matter of fact, it's gotten worse.

While the Macintosh was a revolution for
the end user to make it easier to use,

it was the opposite for the developer.
The developer paid the price.

And software got much
more complicated to write

as it became easier to
use for the end user.

So, software is infiltrating
everything we do these days.

In businesses, software is one of
the most potent competitive weapons.

The most successful
business war

was MCI's Friends and
Family in the last 10 years.

And what was that?

It was a brilliant idea and
it was custom billing software.

AT&T didn't respond
for 18 months,

yielding billions of dollars'
worth of market share to MCI,

not because they were stupid

but because they couldn't
get the billing software done.

So in ways like that
and smaller ways,

software is becoming an
incredible force in this world.

To provide new goods
and services to people,

whether it's over the
Internet or what have you.

Software is going to be a
major enabler in our society.

We have taken another one of those
brilliant original ideas at Xerox PARC

that I saw in 1979, but
didn't see really clearly then,

called object-oriented
technology.

And we have perfected it
and commercialized it here

and become the biggest
supplier of it to the market.

And this object technology lets you build
software 10 times faster and is better.

And so that's what we do.

And we've got a small-to-
medium-sized business

and we're the largest
supplier of objects.

We're a 50-to-
75-million-dollar company.

Got about 300 people.

And that's what we do.

The end of the
third show, actually,

-is the one moment where we do
look into the future... -Uh-huh.

-...as Channel 4 has asked us to do that.
-Sure.

And so what's your vision
of 10 years from now

with this technology
that you're developing?

Well, I think the
Internet and the Web...

There are two exciting things happening
in software and in computing today.

I think one is objects, but
the other one is the Web.

The Web is incredibly exciting

because it is the fulfilment
of a lot of our dreams

that the computer would ultimately not
be primarily a device for computation

but metamorphosize into a
device for communication.

And with the Web,
that's finally happening.

And secondly, it's exciting
because Microsoft doesn't own it,

and therefore, there's a tremendous
amount of innovation happening.

So I think that the Web is going to be
profound in what it does to our society.

As you know, about 15% of the
goods and services in the US

are sold via catalogs
or over the television.

All that is gonna go on the Web
and more. Billions and billions.

Soon tens of billions of dollars'
worth of goods and services

are gonna be sold on the Web.

A way to think about it

is that it is the ultimate
direct-to-customer distribution channel.

Another way to think about it is
the smallest company in the world

can look as large as the largest
company in the world on the Web.

So I think the Web...

As we look back
10 years from now,

the Web is going to be
the defining technology...

(STAMMERS)

The defining social
moment for computing.

And I think it's
going to be huge.

I think it's breathed a
whole new generation of life

into personal computing.

And I think it's
going to be huge.

Yeah.

And you're making
software that...

Oh, absolutely,
but so is everybody.

Just forget about
what we're doing.

Just as an industry, the Web is gonna
open a whole new door to this industry.

And it's another one of those things
that it's obvious once it happens,

but five years ago,
who would have guessed?

Right. That's right.

Isn't this a wonderful
place we live in?

CRINGELY: I was keen to know about
Steve's passion. What drove him?

I read an article when I was very
young in Scientific American,

and it measured the
efficiency of locomotion

for various species
on the planet.

So for bears and chimpanzees
and raccoons and birds and fish.

How many kilocalories per
kilometer did they spend to move?

And humans were measured, too.

And the condor won. It
was the most efficient.

And mankind, the
crown of creation,

came in with a rather
unimpressive showing

about a third of the
way down the list.

But somebody there had the brilliance
to test a human riding a bicycle.

Blew away the condor. All
the way off the charts.

And I remember, this
really had an impact on me.

I really remember this that
humans are tool builders,

and we build tools that can dramatically
amplify our innate human abilities.

And to me...

We actually ran an ad like
this very early at Apple.

The personal computer was
the bicycle of the mind.

And I believe that with
every bone in my body

that of all the
inventions of humans,

the computer is going to
rank near, if not at, the top

as history unfolds
and we look back.

And it is the most

awesome tool that we
have ever invented,

and I feel incredibly lucky

to be at exactly the right
place in Silicon Valley,

at exactly the right
time, historically,

where this invention
has taken form.

And as you know, when you
set a vector off in space,

if you can change its direction
a little bit at the beginning,

it's dramatic when it gets
a few miles out in space.

I feel we are still, really,
at the beginning of that vector.

And if we can nudge it
in the right directions,

it will be a much better
thing as it progresses on.

I think we've had a chance
to do that a few times,

and it brings all of us associated
with it tremendous satisfaction.

But how do you know
what's the right direction?

Ultimately, it
comes down to taste.

It comes down to taste.

It comes down to trying to expose yourself
to the best things that humans have done,

and then try to bring those
things into what you are doing.

Picasso had a saying. He said, "Good
artists copy. Great artists steal."

And we have always been shameless
about stealing great ideas.

And I think part of what
made the Macintosh great

was that the
people working on it

were musicians and poets and
artists and zoologists and historians

who also happened to be the best
computer scientists in the world.

But if it hadn't been
for computer science,

these people would have all been doing
amazing things in life in other fields.

And they brought with them,
we all bought to this effort,

a very liberal arts air,

a very liberal arts attitude

that we wanted to pull in the best
that we saw in these other fields

into this field.

And I don't think you get
that if you're very narrow.

CRINGELY: One of the questions I
asked everyone in the series was,

"Are you a hippie
or a nerd?"

Oh, if I had to pick one of
those two, I'm clearly a hippie.

-Yeah.
-Yeah.

Okay, that... In 30 seconds...

All the people I worked with were
clearly in that category, too.

-Really?
-Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, why?

Do you seek out hippies, or
are they attracted to you?

Well, ask yourself,
"What is a hippie?"

This is an old word that
has a lot of connotations,

but to me, 'cause I grew up...

Remember that the '60s happened
in the early '70s, right?

So we have to remember that.

And that's sort of when I came
of age, so I saw a lot of this.

And a lot of it happened
right in our backyard here.

So, to me, the spark of that

was that there was
something beyond

what you see every day.

There is something
going on here in life...

Beyond just a job, and a family, and
two cars in the garage, and a career,

there is something
more going on.

There is another
side of the coin

that we don't talk about much,

and we experience it when there's
gaps, when we just aren't really...

When everything is not
ordered and perfect,

when there is a gap,

you experience this
inrush of something.

And a lot of people have
said all throughout history,

you find out what that was.

Whether it's Thoreau,

or whether it's some Indian
mystics, or whoever it might be,

and the hippie movement
got a little bit of that,

and they wanted to find
out what that was about,

and that life wasn't about what
they saw their parents doing.

And of course, the pendulum swung too
far the other way, and it was crazy,

but there was a germ
of something there.

And it's the same thing that causes people
to wanna be poets instead of bankers.

And I think that's
a wonderful thing.

And I think that that same
spirit can be put into products,

and those products can be
manufactured and given to people,

and they can
sense that spirit.

If you talk to people that use
the Macintosh, they love it.

You don't hear people
loving products very often.

Really.

But you could
feel it in there.

There was something
really wonderful there.

So, I don't think that most of the
really best people that I've worked with

have worked with computers for
the sake of working with computers.

They've worked with computers
because they are the medium

that is best capable
of transmitting

some feeling that you have, that
you want to share with other people.

-Does that make any sense to you?
-Oh, yeah.

And before they
invented these things,

all these people would
have done other things.

But computers were invented,
and they did come along,

and all these people did get
interested in school or before school,

and said, "Hey, this is the medium
that I think I can say something in."

-CRINGELY:
Mmm-hmm. -You know?