I was part of a writer/photographer team that interviewed Steve Jobs during his Next years; we conducted the interview at an Ann Arbor trade show the day before the 1989 Loma Prieta/San Francisco earthquake.
Until now, I never connected the two.
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Jobs was the consummate showman; the Next workstation hadn’t yet been released, but was supposed to pack engineering workstation power in a sexy 12″ cube.
The Next booth was built in secrecy behind shrouds, and when it came time to populate it with machines, Jobs lined up twelve people — each carrying a Next workstation — and sent them through the crowd.
I couldn’t decide if it was showmanship or megalomania, but later realized it was simply attention to detail — the act of someone who would later throw out expensive, “good enough” prototype smartphones because they featured more than one button.
The interview itself was predictably opaque; Jobs played things pretty close to the vest, and interviewers often tied themselves into knots looking for an opening, which Jobs never supplied. I remember almost nothing from the interview except that he warned us we’d get only one picture at its conclusion.
One.
In retrospect, that fact probably should have opened the interview.
I bought one of the original 128K Macs, a brilliant machine crippled by Jobs’ insistence that it have no expansion slots — one of the decisions that initially wounded the Macintosh in the PC market.
A sleek, no-slot PC is a pretty cripple, but a one-button mp3 player (or smartphone, or tablet) is no cripple at all, and the aesthetic that hampered Jobs in the computer world paid off in the consumer goods markets, where he really hit his stride.
It would be presumptuous to say Jobs eventually realized perfect boxes weren’t the goal as much as a perfect experience (though it neatly explains iTunes and Pixar), and I have little desire to join the thousands already casting about in the dark about a man we didn’t know.
I’ll simply suggest he had the effect on many of us of a long, rolling earthquake, and yesterday the rumbling ceased, and we are the poorer for it.
(Update: A couple other short, excellent Jobs posts worth visiting: Sotto Voce and Nicholas Carr’s one-icon tribute)
Thanks for the link, it’s an honor to be mentioned alongside Mr. Carr and yourself. I’ve linked to your excellent post as well. Do you know if the one photo you were allowed is available on the web, as well as the article you wrote? I’d be very interested in seeing them both.
I think you really hit the nail on the proverbial head when you note that the fundamental aesthetic that Mr. Jobs was seeking was not as well suited to computers as it was to smaller, personal electronics. Maybe my “dream” hypothesis isn’t that far off the mark after all.
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No picture, no interview. This was 1989 after all — the year “http” was invented.
The interview was unremarkable stuff; Jobs wasn’t revealing much about the Next cube, and Ross Perot — who had recently signed on with Jobs — was the bigger story. We were more concerned with the hardware than the visionary.
The picture was taken by yours truly with one of the first commercial digital cameras — the Sony Mavica. It was an awful thing — clunky and slow — and since it was taken under the trade show floor fluorescents, it was almost certainly awful.
I glossed over this the first read — a trade show in Ann Arbor, MI? Hard to imagine Steve Jobs doing that recently.
I’m not sure he was seen as a visionary back then anyway — in fact, perhaps the opposite. If I remember rightly, my impression at the time was that Apple dropped him, and he was off hunting for the next big thing (oops — ah well, I’ll leave that pun in there…) Apple wasn’t doing that well anyway, and it was pretty clear then that PCs had won the computer wars. Steve Jobs was the founder of an also-ran company.
For me, the thing that really made the difference was open architecture — PC clones were that age’s equivalent of “giving away free copies to attract paying customers”. The analogy isn’t exact, but when you had the best software companies making software for PC instead of Mac because of the numbers, the decision for corporations about what computer to get wasn’t tough. That’s where companies like IBM and Compaq cleaned up. (Actually, I know this first hand — in 1988 ours was the first student newspaper in Canada and one of the first in North America (maybe the first?) to go to Desktop Publishing from the tyepsetter. I chose IBM over Mac because of cost, because IBM was more “mainstream”, and because it was catching up in the graphics department, where Mac ruled for a long time.)
Of course ultimately Apple did worse without Jobs than with him, which is why he came back (in 1997?). Still, I would venture to say that it was the iPod that marked his ascension to “visionary” — without it, he certainly would have been remembered, but not in the same way.
All of which is to say that when you were interviewing Steve Jobs back then, it likely wouldn’t have had the same star-quality as it would say at the launch of the iPad.
Still, must have been interesting to meet the man and see him in action at a trade show. Very cool story.
~Graham
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Graham Strong,
It was the Educomm conference (computers in education), and Next initially targeted the academic market. It was big deal to the college IT types.
The lack of slots in the Mac was pure Jobs; he said he wanted computers to be as common and as easy to use as your average toaster (toasters have slots, but only for toast).
Great from a “visionary” perspective (he was just a decade and a half too early), but hard in a market where people wanted slots — and and an open market for the hardware running under the software.
One thing I will say about the Jobs who returned to Apple and essentially saved the company; he was a different Steve from the one who was fired.
This was after Next and Pixar, both of which offered him a perspective that was lacking in the early 80s.