Steve Jobs is 28 years old and seems a little nervous as he begins his speech to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fiddles with his bow tie and quickly takes off his suit jacket, dropping it on the floor when he can't find another place to put it. It's 1983, and he's about to ask designers for help improving the look of the coming wave of personal computers. But first he'll tell them that these computers will destroy the lives they've led thus far.
“How many of you are 36 years old … older than 36?” he asks. That's how old the computer is, he says. But even the younger people in the room, including himself, are a kind of “precomputer,” members of the television generation. A distinctly new generation, he says, is emerging: “In their lives, the computer will be the dominant means of communication.”
Quite a statement at the time, considering that, according to Jobs's impromptu poll, few in the audience owned a personal computer or had even seen one. Jobs tells the designers that they not only shall They will soon no longer use it, but it will be indispensable and deeply woven into the fabric of their lives.
The video of this speech is the centerpiece of an online exhibition called The objects of our lifepresented by the Steve Jobs Archive, the ambitious history project dedicated to telling the story of Apple’s legendary co-founder. When the exhibition went live earlier this month, following the discovery of a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection, I found it not only a compelling reminder of the late CEO but also relevant to our own times, when another new technology is arriving with as much promise as it does peril.
The occasion for the speech was the annual Aspen International Design Conference. The theme of that year's event was “The Future Isn't What It Used to Be,” which made Jobs the perfect speaker. While much of the conversation revolves around his vision for making products beautiful, the underlying message comes straight out of that Bob Dylan song: Something is happening, but you don't know what it is. He told his audience things that seemed absurd: that in a few years there would be more computers shipped than cars, and that people would spend more time with those computers than in those cars. He told them that computers would be connected to each other, and that everyone would use something called electronic mail, which he had to describe because it was such a foreign concept at the time. Computers, he insisted, would become the dominant means of communication. His goal was to make all that happen, to get to the point “where people use these things and they say, 'Wasn't it always like this?'”
Jobs' vision seemed to convince his audience, which earned him a standing ovation. Before he left Aspen that week, Jobs was asked to donate an object that would be placed in a time capsule commemorating the event. It would be unearthed in 2000. Jobs removed the mouse from the Lisa Computer he had brought along for the demo, and it was sealed in the capsule, along with an 8-track tape of the Moody Blues and a six-pack of beer.
The speech itself is a time capsule of sorts. Jobs was right when he said that one day we wouldn't be able to imagine what life was like before the new tools he was making mainstream. Those of us who are still around, who were, in Jobs's words, “born before the computer,” often surprise young people by describing how we did our jobs (manual typewriters! photocopies!), communicated with each other (payphones!), and entertained ourselves (three channels of TV! Lucky charm!) before computers became our virtual appendages.
