Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs Lost Interview 1990

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• published: 14 Oct 2014
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In 1995, Steve Jobs gave a 70 minute interview to Robert X. Cringley for a Public Broadcasting System [PBS] television series, “Triumph of the Nerds.” The television series included ten minutes from the interview. The rest of the tape was feared lost until the original tape was recently discovered in the director’s garage. Excerpt: Steve Jobs: I remember reading an article when I was about twelve years old. I think it might have been Scientific American where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B? And the Condor 1 came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation. And — but somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. A human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor, all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders. And that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind. Something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities. And I think we’re just at the early stages of this tool. Very early stages. And we’ve come only a very short distance. And it’s still in its formation, but already we’ve seen enormous changes. I think that’s nothing compared to what’s coming in the next hundred years.