The Entrepreneur Of The Decade - Steve Jobs, 1989
No, I haven’t got the decade wrong. I just came across an old interview Steve Jobs gave Inc. magazine in 1989 when he was nominated as The Entrepreneur Of The Decade. What’s amazing is how true his visions on the future potential of the computer industry & quality have turned out.
A little historical perspective: The Personal Computer revolution* was just into it’s second decade. At the time of this interview, Jobs had co-founded three companies (Apple, NeXT & Pixar), kicked out of one (Apple) and been instrumental in launching three major computer product lines (Apple II, Macintosh & NeXT Station) that have had a lasting influence.
A personal perspective of that period: The first computer I was exposed to was the Sinclair ZX81 in 1982. This was followed by the BBC Micro. However the computer that has always been closest to me is the first computer I owned, the Apple II Plus in 1983 decked out with the works. It came with the works, 48kb standard RAM with the 16kb expansion card to make a total of 64kb! It also had a 5¼” floppy drive!! Other features included S.A.M. – a speech synthesizer card and TV output card. This was followed by an even better Apple IIe.
In 1990** I moved to the dark side - I got my first IBM compatible, a 386DX with 4MB RAM and an unbelievable 80MB Hard Disk Drive. I remember making 5 partitions of 16MB each since I didn’t know what to do with that space! I also had the first VGA*** monitor (monochrome though) in town – I would have visitors just to have a look at the monitor. 640 x 480 was an unheard of resolution.
We are now coming to the end of the third decade. Steve Jobs is now back at Apple as CEO ( Apple paid NeXT $400 for the privilege of being taken over and got CEO for free). Since the interview, he’s made Pixar into an animation powerhouse with a string of hits, sold Pixar to Disney and became their largest shareholder, successfully metamorphosed the NeXT OS into Mac OS X, launched the iPod (41 million sold so far) and the iTunes Music Store (1 billion downloads).
Footnotes:
* The Personal Computer revolution for all practical purposes started when the Apple II was introduced in 1977.
** It would be 2003 before I saw light and switched to a Mac.
*** My first VGA monitor lasted all these years of continuous use before giving up the ghost last month.
March 25th, 2006 at 9:28 am
[…] This post is not related to medicine. It is about computers. I saw Suresh’s post about Steve Jobs a few days ago. I wrote this the same night, but wasn’t able to post it. I read through the post and followed the link to read the original interview by Inc. Magazine. […]