[Biz] Steve Jobs Pitching Apple

Listen to Founders: https://founders.simplecast.com/episodes/265-becoming-steve-jobs-the-evolution-of-a-reckless-upstart-into-a-visionary-leader (26mins in)

the magazine’s reporter encountered Steve manning the Apple Computer booth at a computer fair. 

“I wish we’d had these personal machines when I was growing up,” Jobs tells him, before continuing on for a total of 224 words: 

People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives.

Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is, or what it can or can’t do.

Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it. It’s analogous to taking apart 1955 Chevys.

Or consider the camera. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They’ll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers.

We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re the largest personal-computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer.

People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color. There’s a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.”

Before moving on to a booth where a bunch of kids were playing a computer game called Space Voyager, the reporter asks if Steve “would mind telling us his age. ‘Twenty-two,’ Mr. Jobs said.” Speaking off-the-cuff to a passing journalist from a decidedly nontechie publication, Steve finds so many ways to demystify for the average person the insanely geeky device that he and Woz had created.”