Steve Jobs was 28 years old, and looking a little nervous as he began his keynote address to a group of designers gathered under a large tent in Aspen, Colorado. He fumbled with his bow tie and quickly untied his suit jacket, dropping it to the floor when he couldn’t find anywhere else to put it. It was 1983, and he was about to ask designers to help improve the look of the next wave of personal computers. But first, he was going to tell them that those computers would disrupt the way they had lived so far.
“How many of you are 36 years old… older than 36?” he asked. That was the age of the computer, he said. But even the younger people in the room, including himself, were members of the “pre-computer” television generation. A distinctly new generation, he said, was emerging: “In their lifetimes, the computer will be their primary medium.”
A fairly accurate statement at the time, considering that very few of the audience, according to Jobs’s impromptu poll, owned a personal computer or had even seen one. Jobs told the designers that they were not only will will soon use one, but it will be indispensable and ingrained in their lives.
This video of the speech is the centerpiece of an online exhibition called The Objects of Our Livespresented by Steve Jobs ArchivesAn ambitious historical project dedicated to telling the story of Apple’s legendary cofounder. When the exhibition opened earlier this month—after discovering a long-forgotten VHS tape in Jobs’ personal collection—I found it not only a fascinating reminder of the late CEO, but also relevant to our own times, when another new technology is emerging with equal parts promise and peril.
The occasion was the annual Aspen International Design Conference. The theme of that year’s event was “The Future is Not What It Used to Be,” making Jobs the perfect speaker. While much of the speech was about his vision for making products beautiful, the underlying message was straight out of a Bob Dylan tune: Something is going on and you don’t know what it is. He told his audience things that seemed absurd: that in a few years, there would be more computers on the road than cars, and that people would spend more time with those computers than they did driving them. He told them that computers would be connected to each other, and that people would use something called email, which he had to describe because it was such a strange concept at the time. He insisted that computers would become the dominant means of communication. His goal was to make all of that happen, to get to the point where “people use these things and they say, ‘Isn’t this the way things have always been?’”
Jobs’s vision seemed to resonate with his audience, earning him a standing ovation. Before leaving Aspen that week, Jobs was asked to present an item that would be placed in a time capsule to commemorate the event, to be dug up in the year 2000. Jobs removed the mouse from the Lisa Computer he had brought for the demonstration, and it was sealed in the capsule, along with an 8-track tape of the Moody Blues and a six-pack of beer.
The speech itself is like a time capsule. Jobs was right when he said that one day we will not be able to imagine what life was like before these new tools he brought into the mainstream. Those of us still alive who were, in Jobs’s terms, “born before computers” often amaze young people by describing how we worked (manual typewriters! carbon copies!), communicated with each other (public phone booths!), and entertained ourselves (three-channel television! Well-being!) before computers became our virtual assistants.
