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Steve Jobs in 1994: The Rolling Stone Interview

 

The story of Apple CEO Steve Jobs is one of the most familiar in American business — shaggy Bob-Dylan-loving kid starts a computer company in a Silicon Valley garage and changes the world. But like any compelling story, it has its dark moments. Before the iPad or the iPhone, Jobs, then the head of the short-lived NeXT Computer, sat down with Rolling Stone‘s Jeff Goodell. It was 1994, Jobs had long ago been booted from Apple, the internet was still the province of geeks and academics, and the personal computer revolution looked like it might be over. But even at one of the low points in his career, Jobs still had confidence in the limitless potential of personal computing. Read on to get Jobs’ prescient take on PDAs and object-oriented software, as well as his relationship with Bill Gates and why he wanted the internet in his den, but not living room. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 56 on October 5th, 2011.

 

Like other Phenomena of the ’80s, Steve Jobs was supposed to be long gone by now. After the spectacular rise of Apple, which went from a garage start-up to a $1.4 billion company in just eight years, the Entrepreneur of the Decade (as one magazine anointed him in 1989) tried to do it all again with a new company called NeXT. He was going to build the next generation of the personal computer, a machine so beautiful, so powerful, so insanely great, it would put Apple to shame. It didn’t happen. After eight long years of struggle and after running through some $250 million, NeXT closed down its hardware division last year and laid off more than 200 employees. It seemed only a matter of time until the whole thing collapsed and Jobs disappeared into hyperspace.

But it turns out that Jobs isn’t as far gone as some techno-pundits thought. There are big changes coming in software development — and Jobs, of all people, is trying to lead the way. This time the Holy Grail is object-oriented programming; some have compared the effect it will have on the production of software to the effect the industrial revolution had on manufactured goods. “In my 20 years in this industry, I have never seen a revolution as profound as this,” says Jobs, with characteristic understatement. “You can build software literally five to 10 times faster, and that software is much more reliable, much easier to maintain and much more powerful.”

This article appeared in the June 16, 1994 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive.

Of course, this being Silicon Valley, there is always a new revolution to hype. And to hear it coming from Jobs — Mr. Revolution himself — is bound to raise some eyebrows. “Steve is a little like the boy who cried wolf,” says Robert Cringely, a columnist at Info World, a PC industry newsweekly. “He has cried revolution one too many times. People still listen to him, but now they’re more skeptical.” And even if object-oriented software does take off, Jobs may very well end up a minor figure rather than the flag-waving leader of the pack he clearly sees himself as.

Whatever role Jobs ends up playing, there is no question evolutionary forces will soon reshape the software industry. Since the Macintosh changed the world 10 years ago with its brilliant point-and-click interface, all the big leaps in computer evolution have been on the hardware side. Machines have gotten smaller, faster and cheaper. Software, by contrast, has gotten bigger, more complicated and much more expensive to produce. Writing a new spreadsheet or word-processing program these days is a tedious process, like building a skyscraper out of toothpicks. Object-oriented programming will change that. To put it simply, it will allow gigantic, complex programs to be assembled like Tinkertoys. Instead of starting from the ground up every time, layering in one line of code after another, programmers will be able to use preassembled chunks to build 80 percent of a program, thus saving an enormous amount of time and money. Because these objects will work with a wide range of interfaces and applications, they will also eliminate many of the compatibility problems that plague traditional software.

For now, the beneficiary of all this is corporate America, which needs powerful custom software to help manage huge databases on its networks. Because of the massive hardware requirements for object-oriented software, it will be years before it becomes practical for small businesses and individual users (decent performance out of NeXT’s software on a 486/Pentium processor, for example, requires 24 megs of RAM and 200 megs on a hard drive). Still, in the long run, object-oriented software will vastly simplify the task of writing programs, eventually making it accessible even to folks without degrees from MIT.

No one disputes the fact that NeXT has a leg up on this new technology. Unlike most of its competitors, whose object-oriented software is still in the prototype stage, NEXTSTEP (NeXT’s operating system software) has been out in the real world for several years. It’s been road-tested, revised, refined, and it is, by all accounts, a solid piece of work. Converts include McCaw Cellular, Swiss Bank and Chrysler Financial. But as the overwhelming success of Microsoft has shown, the company with the best product doesn’t always win. For NeXT to succeed, it will have to go up against two powerhouses: Taligent, the new partnership of Apple and IBM, and Bill Gates and his $4 billion-a-year Microsoft steamroller. “Right now, it’s a horse race between those three companies,” says Esther Dyson, a Silicon Valley marketing guru. A recent $10 million deal with Sun Microsystems — the workstation company that was once NeXT’s arch rival — has breathed new life into NeXT, but it is only one step in a very long journey. Still, few dare count NeXT out.

Today, Jobs, 39, seems eager to distance himself from his reputation as the Wunderkind of the ’80s. He wears small, round John Lennon-style glasses now, and his boyish face is hidden behind a shaggy, Left Bank-poet beard. During our interview at the NeXT offices in Redwood City, Calif., just 20 miles north of his old Apple fiefdom, he took particular joy in bashing his old rival Bill Gates but avoided discussing other heavyweights by name. Trademark Jobsian phrases like “insanely great” or “the next big thing” were nowhere to be found. Friends say the Sturm und Drang of the past few years has humbled Jobs ever so slightly; he is a devoted family man now, and on weekends, he can often be seen Rollerblading with his wife and two kids through the streets of Palo Alto.

“Remember, this is a guy who never believed any of the rules applied to him,” one colleague says. “Now, I think he’s finally realized that he’s mortal, just like the rest of us.”

It’s been 10 years since the Macintosh was introduced. When you look around at the technological landscape today, what’s most surprising to you?
People say sometimes, “You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world.” I don’t feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was pioneered at Xerox PARC [the company’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at Stanford] in the mid-’70s. And here we are, just about the mid-’90s, and it’s kind of commonplace now. But it’s about a 10-to-20-year lag. That’s a long time.

The reason for that is, it seems to take a very unique combination of technology, talent, business and marketing and luck to make significant change in our industry. It hasn’t happened that often.

The other interesting thing is that, in general, business tends to be the fueling agent for these changes. It’s simply because they have a lot of money. They’re willing to pay money for things that will save them money or give them new capabilities. And that’s a hard one sometimes, because a lot of the people who are the most creative in this business aren’t doing it because they want to help corporate America.

A perfect example is the PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] stuff, like Apple’s Newton. I’m not real optimistic about it, and I’ll tell you why. Most of the people who developed these PDAs developed them because they thought individuals were going to buy them and give them to their families. My friends started General Magic [a new company that hopes to challenge the Newton]. They think your kids are going to have these, your grandmother’s going to have one, and you’re going to all send messages. Well, at $1,500 a pop with a cellular modem in them, I don’t think too many people are going to buy three or four for their family. The people who are going to buy them in the first five years are mobile professionals.

And the problem is, the psychology of the people who develop these things is just not going to enable them to put on suits and hop on planes and go to Federal Express and pitch their product.

To make step-function changes, revolutionary changes, it takes that combination of technical acumen and business and marketing — and a culture that can somehow match up the reason you developed your product and the reason people will want to buy it. I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.


 

Is that the period you’re emerging from now?
I hope so. I’ve been there before, and I’ve recently been there again.

As you know, most of what I’ve done in my career has been software. The Apple II wasn’t much software, but the Mac was just software in a cool box. We had to build the box because the software wouldn’t run on any other box, but nonetheless, it was mainly software. I was involved in PostScript and the formation of Adobe, and that was all software. And what we’ve done with NEXTSTEP is really all software. We tried to sell it in a really cool box, but we learned a very important lesson. When you ask people to go outside of the mainstream, they take a risk. So there has to be some important reward for taking that risk or else they won’t take it

What we learned was that the reward can’t be one and a half times better or twice as good. That’s not enough. The reward has to be like three or four or five times better to take the risk to jump out of the mainstream.

The problem is, in hardware you can’t build a computer that’s twice as good as anyone else’s anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You’re lucky if you can do one that’s one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it’s only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software. As a matter of fact, I think that the leap that we’ve made is at least five years ahead of anybody.

Let’s talk about the evolution of the PC. About 30 percent of American homes have computers. Businesses are wired. Video-game machines are rapidly becoming as powerful as PCs and in the near future will be able to do everything that traditional desktop computers can do. Is the PC revolution over?
No. Well, I don’t know exactly what you mean by your question, but I think that the PC revolution is far from over. What happened with the Mac was — well, first I should tell you my theory about Microsoft. Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus’ success in the spreadsheet — basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn’t change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It’s amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn’t deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out They produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself.

So now, the original genes of the Macintosh have populated the earth. Ninety percent in the form of Windows, but nevertheless, there are tens of millions of computers that work like that. And that’s great. The question is, what’s next? And what’s going to keep driving this PC revolution?

If you look at the goal of the ’80s, it was really individual productivity. And that could be answered with shrink-wrapped applications [off-the-shelf software]. If you look at the goal of the ’90s — well, if you look at the personal computer, it’s going from being a tool of computation to a tool of communication. It’s going from individual productivity to organizational productivity and also operational productivity. What I mean by that is, the market for mainframe and minicomputers is still as large as the PC market And people don’t buy those things to run shrink-wrapped spreadsheets and word processors on. They buy them to run applications that automate the heart of their company. And they don’t buy these applications shrink-wrapped. You can’t go buy an application to run your hospital, to do derivatives commodities trading or to run your phone network. They don’t exist. Or if they do, you have to customize them so much that they’re really custom apps by the time you get through with them.

These custom applications really used to just be in the back office — in accounting, manufacturing. But as business is getting much more sophisticated and consumers are expecting more and more, these custom apps have invaded the front office. Now, when a company has a new product, it consists of only three things: an idea, a sales channel and a custom app to implement the product. The company doesn’t implement the product by hand anymore or service it by hand. Without the custom app, it doesn’t have the new product or service. I’ll give you an example. MCI’s Friends and Family is the most successful business promotion done in the last decade — measured in dollars and cents. AT&T did not respond to that for 18 months. It cost them billions of dollars. Why didn’t they? They’re obviously smart guys. They didn’t because they couldn’t create a custom app to run a new billing system.

So how does this connect with the next generation of the PC?
I believe the next generation of the PC is going to be driven by much more advanced software, and it’s going to be driven by custom software for business. Business has focused on shrink-wrapped software on the PCs, and that’s why PCs haven’t really touched the heart of the business. And now they want to bring them into the heart of the business, and everyone is going to have to run custom apps alongside their shrink-wrapped apps because that’s how the enterprise is going to get their competitive advantage in things.

For example, McCaw Cellular, the largest cellular provider in the world, runs the whole front end of their business on NEXTSTEP now. They’re giving PCs with custom apps to the phone dealers so that when you buy a cellular phone, it used to take you a day and a half to get you up on the network. Now it takes five minutes. The phone dealer just runs these custom apps, they’re networked back to a server in Seattle, and in a minute and a half, with no human intervention, your phone works on the entire McCaw network.

In addition to that, the applications business right now — if you look at even the shrink-wrap business — is contracting dramatically. It now takes 100 to 200 people one to two years just to do a major revision to a word processor or spreadsheet. And so, all the really creative people who like to work in small teams of three, four, five people, they’ve all been squeezed out of that business. As you may know, Windows is the worst development environment ever made. And Microsoft doesn’t have any interest in making it better, because the fact that its really hard to develop apps in Windows plays to Microsoft’s advantage. You can’t have small teams of programmers writing word processors and spreadsheets — it might upset their competitive advantage. And they can afford to have 200 people working on a project, no problem.

With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do. Literally can blow it away. Corporate America has a need that is so huge and can save them so much money, or make them so much money, or cost them so much money if they miss it, that they are going to fuel the object revolution.

That may be so. But when people think of Steve Jobs, they think of the man whose mission was to bring technology to the masses — not to corporate America.
Well, life is always a little more complicated than it appears to be.

What drove the success of the Apple II for many years and let consumers have the benefit of that product was Visi-Calc selling into corporate America. Corporate America was buying Apple IIs and running Visi-Calc on them like crazy so that we could get our volumes up and our prices down and sell that as a consumer product on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays while selling it to business on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We were giving away Macintoshes to higher ed while we were selling them for a nice profit to corporate America. So it takes both.

What’s going to fuel the object revolution is not the consumer. The consumer is not going to see the benefits until after business sees them and we begin to get this stuff into volume. Because unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better. They’re not sitting around thinking that they have a giant problem that needs to be solved — whereas corporations are. The PC market has done less and less to serve their growing needs. They have a giant need, and they know it. We don’t have to spend money educating them about the problem — they know they have a problem. There’s a giant vacuum sucking us in there, and there’s a lot of money in there to fuel the development of this object industry. And everyone will benefit from that

I visited Xerox PARC in 1979, when I was at Apple. That visit’s been written about — it was a very important visit. I remember being shown their rudimentary graphical-user interface. It was incomplete, some of it wasn’t even right, but the germ of the idea was there. And within 10 minutes, it was so obvious that every computer would work this way someday. You knew it with every bone in your body. Now, you could argue about the number of years it would take, you could argue about who the winners and losers in terms of companies in the industry might be, but I don’t think rational people could argue that every computer would work this way someday.

I feel the same way about objects, with every bone in my body. All software will be written using this object technology someday. No question about it. You can argue about how many years it’s going to take, you can argue who the winners and losers are going to be in terms of the companies in this industry, but I don’t think a rational person can argue that all software will not be built this way.


 

Would you explain, in simple terms, exactly what object-oriented software is?
Objects are like people. They’re living, breathing things that have knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of abstraction, like we’re doing right here.

Here’s an example: If I’m your laundry object, you can give me your dirty clothes and send me a message that says, “Can you get my clothes laundered, please.” I happen to know where the best laundry place in San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and say, “Here are your clean clothes.”

You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can’t even hail a taxi. You can’t pay for one, you don’t have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew how to do all of that. And you didn’t have to know any of it. All that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a very high level of abstraction. That’s what objects are. They encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high level.

You brought up Microsoft earlier. How do you feel about the fact that Bill Gates has essentially achieved dominance in the software industry with what amounts to your vision of how personal computers should work?
I don’t really know what that all means. If you say, well, how do you feel about Bill Gates getting rich off some of the ideas that we had … well, you know, the goal is not to be the richest man in the cemetery. It’s not my goal anyway.

The thing I don’t think is good is that I don’t believe Microsoft has transformed itself into an agent for improving things, an agent for coming up with the next revolution. The Japanese, for example, used to be accused of just copying — and indeed, in the beginning, that’s just what they did. But they got quite a bit more sophisticated and started to innovate — look at automobiles, they certainly innovated quite a bit there. I can’t say the same thing about Microsoft.

And I become very concerned, because I see Microsoft competing very fiercely and putting a lot of companies out of business — some deservedly so and others not deservedly so. And I see a lot of innovation leaving this industry. What I believe very strongly is that the industry absolutely needs an alternative to Microsoft. And it needs an alternative to Microsoft in the applications area — which I hope will be Lotus. And we also need an alternative to Microsoft in the systems-software area. And the only hope we have for that, in my opinion, is NeXT.

Microsoft, of course, is working on their own object-oriented operating system —
They were working on the Mac for 10 years, too. I’m sure they’re working on it

Microsoft’s greatest asset is Windows. Their greatest liability is Windows. Windows is so nonobject-oriented that it’s going to be impossible for them to go back and become object-oriented without throwing Windows away, and they can’t do that for years. So they’re going to try to patch things on top, and it’s not going to work.

You’ve called Microsoft the IBM of the ’90s. What exactly do you mean by that?
They’re the mainstream. And a lot of people who don’t want to think about it too much are just going to buy their product. They have a market dominance now that is so great that it’s actually hurting the industry. I don’t like to get into discussions about whether they accomplished that fairly or not That’s for others to decide. I just observe it and say it’s not healthy for the country.

What do you think of the federal antitrust investigation?
I don’t have enough data to know. And again, the issue is not whether they accomplished what they did within the rule book or by breaking some of the rules. I’m not qualified to say. But I don’t think it matters. I don’t think that’s the real issue. The real issue is, America is leading the world in software technology right now, and that is such a valuable asset for this country that anything that potentially threatens that leadership needs to be examined. I think the Microsoft monopoly of both sectors of the software industry — both the system and the applications software and the potential third sector that they want to monopolize, which is the consumer set-top-box sector — is going to pose the greatest threat to Americas dominance in the software industry of anything I have ever seen and could ever think of. I personally believe that it would be in the best interest of the country to break Microsoft up into three companies — a systems-software company, an applications-software company and a consumer-software company.

Hearing you talk like this makes me flash back to the old Apple days, when Apple cast itself in the role of the rebel against the establishment. Except now, instead of IBM, the great evil is Microsoft. And instead of Apple that will save us, it’s NeXT. Do you see parallels here, too?
Yeah, I do. Forget about me. That’s not important. What’s important is, I see tremendous parallels between the solidity and dominance that IBM had and the shackles that that was imposing on our industry and what Microsoft is doing today…. I think we came closer than we think to losing some of our computer industry in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and I think the gradual dissolution of IBM has been the healthiest thing that’s happened in this industry in the last 10 years.

What’s your personal relationship with Bill Gates like?
I think Bill Gates is a good guy. We’re not best friends, but we talk maybe once a month.

A lot has been made of the rivalry between you two. The two golden boys of the computer revolution —
I think Bill and I have very different value systems. I like Bill very much, and I certainly admire his accomplishments, but the companies we built were very different from each other.

A lot of people believe that given the stranglehold Microsoft has on the software business, in the long run, the best NeXT can hope for is that it will be a niche product.
Apple’s a niche product, the Mac was a niche product And yet look at what it did. Apple’s, what, a $9 billion company. It was $2 billion when I left They’re doing OK. Would I be happy if we had a 10 percent market share of the system-software business? I’d be happy now. I’d be very happy. Then I’d go work like crazy to get 20.

You mentioned the Apple earlier. When you look at the company you founded now, what do you think?
I don’t want to talk about Apple.


What about the PowerPC?
It works fine. It’s a Pentium. The PowerPC and the Pentium are equivalent, plus or minus 10 or 20 percent, depending on which day you measure them. They’re the same thing. So Apple has a Pentium. That’s good. Is it three or four or five times better? No. Will it ever be? No. But it beats being behind. Which was where the Motorola 68000 architecture was unfortunately being relegated. It keeps them at least equal, but it’s not a compelling advantage.

 

You can’t open the paper these days without reading about the Internet and the information superhighway. Where is this all going?
The Internet is nothing new. It has been happening for 10 years. Finally, now, the wave is cresting on the general computer user. And I love it. I think the den is far more interesting than the living room. Putting the Internet into people’s houses is going to be really what the information superhighway is all about, not digital convergence in the set-top box. All that’s going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie. I’m not very excited about that. I’m not excited about home shopping. I’m very excited about having the Internet in my den.

Phone companies, cable companies and Hollywood are jumping all over each other trying to get a piece of the action. Who do you think will be the winners and losers, say, five years down the road?
I’ve talked to some of these guys in the phone and cable business, and believe me, they have no idea what they’re doing here. And the people who are talking the loudest know the least

Who are you referring to –John Malone?
I don’t want to name names. Let me just say that, in general, they have no idea how difficult this is going to be and how long it is going to take. None of these guys understands computer science. They don’t understand that that’s a little computer that they’re going to have in the set-top box, and in order to run that computer, they’re going to have to come up with some very sophisticated software.

Let’s talk more about the Internet. Every month, it’s growing by leaps and bounds. How is this new communications web going to affect the way we live in the future?
I don’t think it’s too good to talk about these kinds of things. You can open up any book and hear all about this kind of garbage.

I’m interested in bearing your ideas.
I don’t think of the world that way. I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then whatever happens is… you can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.

Nevertheless, you’ve often talked about how technology can empower people, how it can change their lives. Do you still have as much faith in technology today as you did when you started out 20 years ago?
Oh, sure. It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.

Explain that.
Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them. It’s not the tools that you have faith in — tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I’m still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.

It’s been 10 years since the PC revolution started. Rational people can debate about whether technology has made the world a better place –
The world’s clearly a better place. Individuals can now do things that only large groups of people with lots of money could do before. What that means is, we have much more opportunity for people to get to the marketplace — not just the marketplace of commerce but the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of publications, the marketplace of public policy. You name it. We’ve given individuals and small groups equally powerful tools to what the largest, most heavily funded organizations in the world have. And that trend is going to continue. You can buy for under $10,000 today a computer that is just as powerful, basically, as one anyone in the world can get their hands on.

The second thing that we’ve done is the communications side of it. By creating this electronic web, we have flattened out again the difference between the lone voice and the very large organized voice. We have allowed people who are not part of an organization to communicate and pool their interests and thoughts and energies together and start to act as if they were a virtual organization.

So I think this technology has been extremely rewarding. And I don’t think it’s anywhere near over.

When you were talking about Bill Gates, you said that the goal is not to be the richest guy in the cemetery. What is the goal?
I don’t know how to answer you. In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment — however you define it. But these are private things. I don’t want to talk about this kind of stuff.

Why?
I think, especially when one is somewhat in the public eye, it’s very important to keep a private life.

Are you uncomfortable with your status as a celebrity in Silicon Valley?
I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It’s not me. Because otherwise, you go crazy. You read some negative article some idiot writes about you — you just can’t take it too personally. But then that teaches you not to take the really great ones too personally either. People like symbols, and they write about symbols.

I talked to some of the original Mac designers the other day, and they mentioned the 10-year-annniversary celebration of the Mac a few months ago. You didn’t want to participate in that. Has it been a burden, the pressure to repeat the phenomenal success of the Mac? Some people have compared you to Orson Welles, who at 25 did his best work, and it’s all downhill from there.
I’m very flattered by that, actually. I wonder what game show I’m going to be on. Guess I’m going to have to start eating a lot of pie. [Laughs.] I don’t know. The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life that you once had — and that produced about 10 million children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You’ll still smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you open the window, the cool air will hit your face, and you’ll smell that romance in the air. And you’ll see your children around, and you feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it.

But now, your life has moved on. You get up every morning, and you might remember that romance, but then the whole day is in front of you to do something wonderful with.

But I also think that what we’re now may turn out in the end to be more profound. Because the Macintosh was the agent of change to bring computers to the rest of us with its graphical-user interface. That was very important. But now the industry is up against a really big closed door. Objects are going to unlock that door. On the other side is a world so rich from this well of software that will spring up that the true promise of many of the things we started, even with the Apple II, will finally start to be realized.

After that … who knows? Maybe there’s another locked door behind this door, too; I don’t know. But someone else is going to have to figure out how to unlock that one.

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自行车棚效应:我们为什么在小事上纠结,却对大事视而不见?   https://limboy.me/posts/bike-shedding Benz-Patent   https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/milestones/benz-patent-motor-car/ 豐田博物館   https://toyota-automobile-museum.jp/tw/ 值得一去的汽车博物馆 一人公司   https://github.com/cyfyifanchen/one-person-company one-person-company, 一人公司 AI 工具系列 wujiaxian   https://wujiaxian.com/ 可能吧创始人的个人Blog,介绍自己的方式,很值得学习 日本京都10大設計熱點!「建築大師貝聿銘操刀美術館,皆川明設計旅館、選物店,還有全球最美的藍瓶咖啡店舖!」   https://www.elle.com/tw/life/style/g33846398/2020-kyoto-10-hotspots/ 京都真是非常美 Henry L. Stimson   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_L._Stimson?useskin=vector While Kyoto may have satisfied the military criteria for a useful target, Stimson objected, declaring in a meeting if the Interim Committee on June 1, 1945, "...there was one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto." 人性的努力保护了京都 Brooke Astor, 105, Aristocrat of the People, Dies   https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/obituaries/14astor.html 值得尊敬...

产品随想 | 周刊 第127期:晨光只开一刻钟,但比千年松,并无甚不同

Cherry Studio   https://github.com/CherryHQ/cherry-studio Cherry Studio is a desktop client that supports for multiple LLM providers. Support deepseek-r1 Aalto Repository beta   https://repo.aalto.fi/ Images, sounds and videos from Aalto University 这个系列,价值极高 Nokia Design Archive   https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/ 芬兰这个国家很了不起 对话影石刘靖康:两代未出现划时代的产品,就会沦为平庸的品牌   https://www.geekpark.net/news/308996 还挺喜欢这个创始人的,有一种海盗的内涵 从哈佛、明星创业者到酷家乐副总裁,苏奇的传奇   https://app.modaiyun.com/mdy/article/3FO4K4W0M259 WHO关于猫狗咬伤、抓伤的处理建议 动物咬伤: https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/animal-bites 狂犬病: https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rabies 关于狂犬病的10个事实: https://www.who.int/zh/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/rabies INDIGO 新年直播(2025)   https://www.youtube.com/live/ZIgPvSDGAfY 对2024年AI发展的回顾部分特别好 Artab   https://github.com/get-artab/artab Get Inspired by the World's Greatest Artworks Every Time You Open a New Tab. Extension Available for Chrome, Edge, and...

MongoDB学习笔记

这是我阅读《MongoDB权威指南》的学习笔记,前七章侧重在开发者角度谈MongoDB,后面才是运维管理者角度 一. 理论部分 入门 文档:多个键及其关联的值有序地放置在一起便是文档 集合:一组文档 虽然子集合没有特别的地方,但还是很有用,很多MongoDB工具中都包含子集合 GridFS是一种存储大文件的协议,使用子集合来存储文件的元数据,这样就与内容块分开了 MongoDB的Web控制台通过子集合的方式将数据组织在DBTOP部分 绝大多数驱动程序都提供语法糖,为访问指定集合的子集合提供方便。例如:在数据库shell里面,db.blog代表blog集合,db.blog.posts代表blog.posts集合 在MongoDB中使用子集合来组织数据是很好的方法,在此强烈推荐 数据类型 JSON表现力也有限制,因为只有null,布尔,数字,字符串,数组和对象几种类型, MongoDB保留JSON键值对基础上,增添了其他一些数据类型 使用GridFS存储文件有如下原因: 会直接利用业已建立的复制或分片机制,所以对于文件存储来说故障恢复和扩展都很容易 可以避免用户上传内容的文件系统出现的某些问题 不产生磁盘碎片,因为MongoDB分配数据文件空间以2GB为一块 开发者角度到此为止,下一篇是运维角度的学习

无处不在的监控: Hacking Team:WP8 监控代码分析

原文来自乌云,备份 地址 0x00 背景 最近Hacking Team被黑客入侵,近400GB的资料泄漏,在安全界炒的沸沸扬扬.其中泄漏的资料包括:源代码,0day,资料入侵项目相关信息,相关的账户密码,数据及音像资料,办公文档,邮件及图片。 Hacking Team在意大利米兰注册了一家软件公司,主要销售入侵及监视功能的软件。其远程控制系统可以监测互联网用户的通讯,解密用户的加密,文件及电子邮件,记录各种通信信息,也可以远程激活用户的麦克风及摄像头。其产品在几十个国家使用 在源代码中有各个操作系统平台的远程控制软件源码, RCS(Remote Control System) 。经过我们的分析,发现其监控内容不可谓不详尽。 Android,blackberry,ios,windows,window phone,symbian 均有与之对应的监控代码。 在源码中,rcs为前缀的源码文件是其远控功能,包括代理 控制 监控数据库 隐藏ip 等,而针对特定平台架构的是以core前缀命名。其中和相关window phone监控代码在 core-winphone-master.zip 文件中。其主要用于实时手机系统的系统状态信息如(电池状态,设备信息,GPS地址位置),联系人,短信记录,日历日程安排,照片;同时还能录音,截取手机屏幕,开启摄像头,话筒等功能,由此可见监控信息的详细程度令人害怕。 0x01 WP8监控源码分析 core-winphone-master\MornellaWp8\MornellaWp8 下是其主要核心代码,主要文件如下: 通过观察源码流程图可以看出,整个监控项目源码的逻辑还是比较复杂的,但是深入之后,发现其还是设计的比较巧妙 0x01-1 程序框架分析 1.项目主要分为3大块 Modules,Events,Actions ,主要的功能Modules核心监控代码在此处,Event等待监控事件的到来并调用对应的监控模块,Action主要负责一些行为的启动和停止 程序启动流程如下: main->mornellaStart->BTC_Init->CoreProc->Core->Task setLoadLibraryExW 分支主要负责加载一些API函数的地址,...

产品爱好者周刊 第26期:PRISM, XKeyscore, Trust No One

  Products Gitea - Git with a cup of tea   https://gitea.io/en-us/ A painless self-hosted Git service. 自建Git服务,避免GitHub隐私侵犯 https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu LuLu is the free macOS firewall 监视Mac的出站流量,且阻断 OverSight   https://github.com/objective-see/OverSight OverSight monitors a mac's mic and webcam, alerting the user when the internal mic is activated, or whenever a process accesses the webcam. 监视是否有应用调用Mac的麦克风、摄像头 Mozilla Hubs   https://github.com/mozilla/hubs The client-side code for Mozilla Hubs, an online 3D collaboration platform that works for desktop, mobile, and VR platforms. 开源的多人虚拟空间,Mozilla打造,企业级VR诉求 数字移民   https://shuziyimin.org 关于内容源、工具的推荐,适合刚接入国际的新人 SimpleLogin   https://simplelogin.io/ 匿名邮箱工具,转发用,Michael Bazzell推荐 Telegram 群组、频道、机器人 - 汇总分享   https://congcong0806.github.io/2018/04/24/Telegram/#机器人-bot https://archive.ph/iJMBj 献给那些将来到Telegram的朋友 Design Patrick Wardle   https://www.instagram.com/patrickwardle/?hl=en 他的IG,摄影也精彩,审美...

ifconfig参数备忘

       主要指标说明: eth0/lo:网络接口名 Link encap:网络类型

产品随想 | 读《中国是部金融史》:第三章至第五章

  第三章 犯我货币者,虽强必诛(汉高祖一汉武帝) 刘邦大概没有想到,他的土地政策奠定了此后两千年的社会结构:皇帝是社会最高层,具有至高无上的权力;皇帝之下是三公九即等封建官僚,拿皇帝的钱,逐级管理小农;最底层是万千小农,他们对帝国纳税,用自己的血汗钱养活帝王与封建官僚。此后,中国封建社会结构始终没有摆脱“皇权一封建官僚一小农”这个三位一体的窠臼。 既然消灭了异姓王,正常思维应该是仿效秦始皇强化郡县制,但是这位平民皇帝选择了…条谁也想不到的道路,他分封自己的兄弟子侄为王,并与诸王约定,此后非我子孙称王,天下人都可以杀了他(非刘氏而王者,天下共击之)。刘邦亲眼目睹了秦帝困的分崩离析,危急时刻无人愿意支撑起破败的帝国。华竟,官僚靠薪水吃饭, 就算贪污的本事很大,也没有理由维护别人的一姓天下。 如果没有血浓于水的同姓诸侯王,汉帝国将来同样无法应对真正的危机。事实证明,分封刘氏诸王是对的,如果没有刘邦留下来的同姓诸侯,恐怕汉朝早就得跟着皇后吕雉姓“吕”了。 人们习惯于将刘邦的皇后吕雉称呼为“吕后〞,这是中国古代历史上第一位临朝称制的太后,另外两位要等到盛唐和晚清才能在本书中出镜,三位女强人都是中国货币史上浓墨重彩的人物。 然而,从吕雉开始,仅仅不到一个世纪, 破败的汉帝国就一跃变为当时世界上最强盛的国家,直接把打遍天下无敌手的匈奴骑兵赶到了西欧,让罗马帝国受尽了欺凌。吕后末年,西汉单个农业劳动力的原粮产量已经突破了三干四百斤,这不但是西欧一干五百年后的劳动生产率,也远高于1973年中四的劳动生产率(二千二百四十斤)。应该说,中西文明争霸就是从汉帝国驱赶匈奴开始的,在第一轮交锋中,西欧完败。 ──原来西汉能超过1978年,厉害 吕雉坚决执行了一项前无古人(后有来者)的税收政策—“十五而税一”,换算一下,吕雉时代庶人个人收入所得税税率为 6.6%,而且,没有累进税率。 《二年律令》彻底改变了中国历史的发展轨迹,秦人以军功授田,刘邦以服兵役为代价授田,只有到了吕雉才真正实现了全困范用的“均田“。这是中国历史上第一次以法律形式明确了土地私有制度,每一个最普通的庶人都获得了土地,整个社会实现了孟子的“百亩之田、五亩之宅”理想。这是无数先贤追求的大同世界梦想一“耕者有其田”,请注意,我没有说这是“耕者有其田"的雏形,而是实实在在的“耕者有其田"。 ──对汉朝,充满敬...

常用建筑素材站点

高大上的建筑竞赛效果图中的素材是如何收集的回答,感谢知乎 Vincent Ku 以下是之前搜寻过的素材网站,应该这些够用了 http:// skalgubbar.se/ http:// skalgubbrasil.tumblr.com / http://www. immediateentourage.com/ http://www. gobotree.com/ http://www. mrcutout.com/ http://www. cutoutlife.com/ http://www. nonscandinavia.com/ http://www. escalalatina.com/ http://www. mayang.com/textures/ind ex.htm http://www. textures.com/ ===== 感谢知友 @SJTUboy 补充 http:// maps.stamen.com/# watercolor/12/37.7706/-122.3782 http:// maps.stamen.com/m2i/# toner-background/2000:2000/10/31.1674/121.6063 作者:Vincent Ku 链接:https://www.zhihu.com/question/31584353/answer/73642305 来源:知乎 著作权归作者所有。商业转载请联系作者获得授权,非商业转载请注明出处。

The Little MongoDB Book

The Little MongoDB Book 基础 在一个MongoDB实例中可以有若干数据库或一个都没有,不过这里的数据库都是高层次容器,用来储存其他的所有数据 一个数据库可以有若干集合或者一个都没有, 集合由若干文档组成,也可以为空 文档由一个或更多的域组成 索引的意义 游标和以上概念不同,很重要但是常常被忽略,有一点很重要,每当向MongoDB索要数据时,总是返回一个游标 小结一下,MongoDB由数据库组成,数据库由集合组成,集合由文档组成。域组成了文档,集合可以被索引,从而提高了查找和排序的性能。最后,从MongoDB读取数据的时候是通过游标进行的,除非需要,游标不会真正去作读的操作 读到后面觉得实战意义不是很大,就跳过了

产品随想 | 周刊 第126期:Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world

FolderPaint   https://github.com/MichaelTr7/FolderPaint Folder colour changing application for macOS. 乔布斯说:“对于我和苹果公司的许多人来说,索尼的盛田昭夫是最大的灵感来源之一。我希望我们今天的所想所为能让他会心一笑。” 乔布斯甚至从索尼挖走了一位顶级设计师。哈特穆特·艾斯林格被苹果挖走前,已在 100 多种索尼产品的创造中发挥了重要作用。 供职于索尼时,艾斯林格所在的设计工作室与管理办公室和工厂车间享有同等地位。他说,这样有助于促进公司生产和设计团队之间在一定程度上达成团结,这正是乔布斯试图重建的团结。 艾斯林格指出:“乔布斯有能力洞察事物的好坏,却不知道如何实现以及如何通过组织去构建。因此,我们向苹果提出的第一个建议是,赋予设计师一定的话语权。” 斯卡利表示,乔布斯和盛田之间的深厚友谊和相互敬重可以归结为对于设计的共同热忱。 “他们以非常积极的方式产生了共鸣”,斯卡利说,“两位来自不同文化背景的创始人共聚一堂,这是非常难能可贵的。他们讨论设计原则,却从不谈及商业模式。” “Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.” City Lights Bookstore   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Lights_Bookstore?useskin=vector 旧金山的城市之光独立书店 Vesuvio Cafe   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesuvio_Cafe?useskin=vector 好奇怪,这家Cafe居然没有太多的介绍 “One of the things that I was fortunate of was to see and understand the context of San Francisco through the eyes of Steve Jobs,” Mr. Ive said. “He kn...