The lost Steve Jobs IDCA speech from 1983

October 03, 2012 17:08

In 1983, Steve Jobs gave a speech to a relatively small audience at a somewhat obscure event called the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA). The theme of that year's conference was 'The Future Isn't What It Used To Be', which looking back seems all too fitting. Circumstances being what they are, very little is available on the Internet regarding this Steve Jobs speech, writes Marcel Brown.

To cut a long story short, one of his 'oldest clients, John Celuch, who attended the speech 30 years ago, gave Brown a cassette containing a recording the entire speech plus the Q&A at the end. After hearing Jobs's speech, Brown is amazed 'to hear Steve Jobs talk about some things that were not fully realised until only a handful of years ago. This talks shows us just how incredibly ahead of his time he was'.

A lot of the things Jobs has said may seem commonplace to us now, but think back to 1983. Among the things Jobs said, Brown writes, are:

He mentions an experiment done by MIT that sounds very much like a Google Street View application.
He says Apple's strategy is to "put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you that you can learn how to use in 20 minutes'.
He states that in a few years people will be spending more time interacting with personal computers than with cars.
He confidently talks about the personal computer being a new medium of communication. Again, this is before networking was commonplace or there was any inkling of the Internet going mainstream. Yet he specifically talks about early e-mail systems and how it is re-shaping communication. He matter-of-factly states that when we have portable computers with radio links, people could be walking around anywhere and pick up their e-mail. Again, this is 1983, at least 20 years before the era of mobile computing.

Now, if your appetite is suitably whetted, you can read Brown's piece here, at the bottom of which the link to the Steve Jobs audio from 1983, enjoy!

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