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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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乔布斯经典照片集 坐在麗莎電腦旁。他說:「毕加索曾說:「好的藝術家懂得模仿,佛大的藝術家善於偷取。」因此,窃取偉大的點子沒有什麼好羞耻的。 與蓋茲在電話中達成協議:「比爾,謝謝你支持蘋果。因為你的支持,世界將變得更美好。」 1997年蘋果在波士頓舉行的麥金塔世界大會,蓋茲透過衛星連線在巨大的螢幕上出現。質伯斯說:「我真是笨死了,竟然讓蓋兹以這種方式現身。他讓我看起來好沙小。」 ──时刻自省 前言 The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. 只有那些瘋狂到以為自己可以改變世界的人, 才能改變這個世界。 這麼些年來,賈伯斯說起話來的認真與專注態度,著實打動不少人。我們一直保持連絡,即使在他被逐出蘋果之後,我們還有來往。每次他有新產品要推出時,像 NeXT 電腦或皮克斯 (Pixar)的電影,他就會來找我。他常帶我去曼哈頓下城一家壽司店用餐,講起他的產品,渾身散發出光和熱,眉飛色舞的說這是他登峰造極之作。我喜歡這個人。 ──对自己产品深深的爱 他的堅持教我疑惑。人人都知道賈伯斯不道餘力捍衛隱私, 而且我不知道他是否看過我寫的任何一本傳記。我還是不敢立刻答應,只說或許再等等。然而到了 2009年,我接到他太太蘿琳. 鮑威爾打來的電話。她直截了當說:「如果你還想為史帝夫寫傳,最好趕快動筆。」這是他第二次因病向公司請長假。我坦言他早在2004 年得知自己罹患胰臟癌的時候就曾主動邀我寫傳,但我當時對他罹癌的事一無所知。蘿琳解釋說,他們盡量保密,因此當時根本沒幾個人知道。他是在動手術的前夕打電話給我的。 ──和Make Something Wonderful对照起来看 他還說,自從他回到蘋果重新掌權,這十二年來是他創造新產品的高峰期,但他還有更重要的目標,也就是效法惠普的惠立和普克(David Packard),締造一家創新動力無限的公司,進而超越惠普。 ──苹果公司才是乔布斯最得意的产品 他說:「我一直認為,自己是個偏向人文的孩子,但我也喜歡電子的東西。後來,我讀到寶麗來(Polaroid)創辦人蘭德 (Edwin Land)曾說過,一個人能站在人文和科學的交會口,兼容贯通,才是真正的人才。在那當下,我决定要當這樣的人。」他似乎在暗示我,這可以做為傳...

零碎思考 | 關於LLM的閱讀筆記

  通向AGI之路:大型语言模型(LLM)技术精要   https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/597586623 拆解追溯 GPT-3.5 各项能力的起源   https://yaofu.notion.site/GPT-3-5-360081d91ec245f29029d37b54573756 清晰明瞭 A Closer Look at Large Language Models Emergent Abilities   https://yaofu.notion.site/A-Closer-Look-at-Large-Language-Models-Emergent-Abilities-493876b55df5479d80686f68a1abd72f 試圖說明LLM的涌現能力] 如何利用GPT-4打造高效智能信息收集神器   https://lpcv.org/fwc/a/MzU0MDk3NTUxMA==/2247483868/1 學習思路 GPT-4编码教程,如何用AI构建和宣传我的Midjourney网站增强插件   https://op7418.zhubai.love/posts/2254193381183922176 AUTOMATIC1111 GUI: A Beginner’s Guide   https://stable-diffusion-art.com/automatic1111/ 其實就是AI界的雲渲染,挺有意思的 Midjourney还是Stable Diffusion: 你应该选哪个?   https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/617157677 看到作者下方的“註冊會計師”,中國太卷了 树莓派4B刷OpenWrt做路由器的经验+踩坑   https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/451788328 關注其中的坑點 doc.openwrt.cc   https://doc.openwrt.cc/

产品随想 | 周刊 第63期:中国城市化的历史思考

Products 李志 · BB   https://github.com/turkyden/lizhi-app 开箱即用,一个珍藏了李志音乐作品集的在线播放器 作者的描述很有意思:我们不能失去信仰~ Watt Toolkit 🧰 (原名 Steam++)   https://github.com/BeyondDimension/SteamTools 「Watt Toolkit」是一个开源跨平台的多功能游戏工具箱,此工具的大部分功能都是需要您下载安装 Steam 才能使用。 语雀为什么没被钉钉吃掉,跟支付宝又是什么关系?   https://www.xiaoyuzhoufm.com/episode/62ed2b1d226f5c1fa0d58357 乱翻书播客推荐 Behind the Curtain   https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/behind-the-curtain/ 我们正在结合我们一直在收集的关于公司游说、国会股票交易和拟议立法的数据,以便让您跟踪华盛顿特区幕后发生的事情您可以使用此工具查看哪些法案正在被国会审议了哪些上市公司正在就这些法案进行游说,以及哪些国会议员交易了这些公司的股票。 民主非常需要这样的信息透明 脑洞大开,给自行车装上倒车雷达和行车记录仪   https://sspai.com/post/73521 佳明-骑行雷达尾灯 Varia RCT 715,非常喜欢,但真的好贵.....3K+ RMB Health 体检报告出现高尿酸,你该如何在饮食方面控制风险?   https://sspai.com/post/73031 Citizenship Consciousness & Privacy 张鸣:中国城市化的历史思考 2019 09 04   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRcPssCkXeI 内核论点是:城市化最重要的有私有产权的商人 这个创作者也值得关注 Run 日本移居指南   https://guoyu.mirror.xyz/bPaDKAcrhJGUbaXu9BWDcdD-F46gBFATTvf_qwZ9Bso 添加加Run模块,润 A Programmer's Guid...

产品随想 | 周刊 第115期:2024.5.16 Great libraries build communities

Loop   https://github.com/MrKai77/Loop Loop is a macOS app that simplifies window management for you! 我的电视 my-tv   https://github.com/lizongying/my-tv 我的电视 电视直播软件,安装即可使用 When we think about this technology, we need to put human dignity, human well-being—human jobs—in the center of consideration. ————Fei-Fei Li Author Talks: Dr. Fei-Fei Li sees ‘worlds’ of possibilities in a multidisciplinary approach to AI   https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/author-talks-dr-fei-fei-li-sees-worlds-of-possibilities-in-a-multidisciplinary-approach-to-ai Randy Ubillos   https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Randy_Ubillos Randall Hayes "Randy" Ubillos is the original software engineer behind Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro. 影响全球视频制作的男人, Reminders MenuBar   https://github.com/DamascenoRafael/reminders-menubar Simple macOS menu bar application to view and interact with reminders. Developed with SwiftUI and using Apple Reminders as a source. Bad libraries build colle...

关于建筑实习的经验贴

慢慢整理实习的帖子,如果近期太阳能竞赛不占用太多时间的话,可以开始准备实习了 一.  给自己的问题   1. 你的设计风格是什么   2. 实习的目的 二. 事务所推荐   1. 墨臣,住宅(商业地产)做的很棒,项目管理做的比较好,但是相对来说公建项目比较少       如果希望接触多种类型项目的话考虑一下,多多了解这个事务所,赖军   2. 标准营造,张珂,重视方案设计的惊喜把控,重视图解,还有手工模型   3. 大舍,不浮夸,有自己的设计理念,效率高,唯一不加班公司 三. 学院派建筑师   1. 何镜堂事务所,缺点是周期长,待遇不高,风格单一,设计类型单一   2.  直向(新史家小学,方法上典型霍尔的风格,董功是霍尔弟子)       TAO迹(腾冲的那个博物馆不错)       山水秀(祝晓峰的风格很小清新,朱家角的房子)       业余       家琨(在符合本时代的建筑材料的运用上很有造诣,再生砖,鹿野苑....)       非常(张永和,作品说不出来有多好,但是又总觉得很精妙,二分宅) 四. 设计院   1. 商业建筑设计公司实习推荐  CCDI,DC,UA   2.  大连院,东北院,华东院,中建北京院   3. 不推荐同济院,因为挂靠的小公司很多,鱼龙混杂 五. 先锋派建筑师   1. UNStudio,项目比扎哈的脚踏实地而且思考深度高很多   2. BIG,设计的起源都是一个平淡朴实但是又很精妙的理由   3. 蓝天组   4. 国内事务所推荐  李虎(霍尔的合伙人)的open,侯梁(貌似的是玛雅,不知道用rhino和       GH),徐东昕,徐甜甜的DNA,徐卫国(感觉这老爷子在国内参数化设计界可以呼风唤       雨了)   5. 不推...

产品随想 | 周刊 第86期:Next Generation of AI

  gerev   https://github.com/GerevAI/gerev AI-powered enterprise search engine 聚合了Confluence,Slack,Jira等非常多的平台,还是很不错的 假如有个定位在C端的产品,能让用户自己来定义来源,就更好了,maybe是alist的思路(精准搜索已经被everything承接了) Dalai   https://github.com/cocktailpeanut/dalai Run LLaMA and Alpaca on your computer. 对计算机硬件的要求,并不高 Chatbox   https://github.com/Bin-Huang/chatbox Your Ultimate Copilot on the Desktop. Chatbox is a desktop app for GPT-4 / GPT-3.5 (OpenAI API) that supports Windows, Mac & Linux. Tune-A-Video   https://github.com/showlab/Tune-A-Video Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation Given a video-text pair as input, our method, Tune-A-Video, fine-tunes a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model for text-to-video generation. Diffusion的本质是模仿和乐高式的重新拼接 Jensen Huang — NVIDIA's CEO on the Next Generation of AI and MLOps   https://wandb.ai/wandb_fc/gradient-dissent/reports/Jensen-Huang-NVIDIA-s-CEO-on-the-Next-Generation-of-AI-and-MLOps--Vmlldz...

一些建筑类书刊

这是我在知乎上的一个回答,之前看到一个说法,就是越厉害的人不仅仅是吸收知识,即输入,同时也会最大化的输出,输出的方式我认为有很多,写书,写博客等等,我选择的输出方式是在知乎,豆瓣留下自己的足迹,博客是我的大本营,在这里mark一下我在知乎一个关于建筑书籍的回答

产品随想 | 周刊 第99期:Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

MIST   https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist A Mac utility that automatically downloads macOS Firmwares / Installers. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Google策略是搜索来驱动世界信息 而字节是推荐来驱动世界信息,某个意义上来说,字节是Google的继承者 Reflecting on 18 years at Google   https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 Google的吐槽,哈哈哈 The Little Kernel Embedded Operating System   https://github.com/littlekernel/lk The LK kernel is an SMP-aware kernel designed for small systems ported to a variety of platforms and cpu architectures. 在软件行业越久,就越对操作系统这颗皇冠,感到着迷 ArchiveOS   https://archiveos.org/ 致敬那些存在过的操作系统们 Travis Geiselbrecht   https://tkgeisel.com/ 世界级的操作系统工程师 每一个项目都赫赫有名 一生都在做操作系统 Hiddify-Next   https://github.com/hiddify/hiddify-next A multi-platform auto-client based on Sing-box that serves as a universal proxy tool-chain. This app offers a wide range of capabilities, which are listed below. It also supports a large number ...

Markdown学习笔记

学习帖来自简书,这是我的笔记, 献给作者的Markdown新手指南 # 一级标题    #数量决定标题层级 - 文本    列表格式

認知香港-梁啟智推薦書目

///// 推 薦 書 單 在 這 邊 ///// 1.《香港簡史》,高馬可,2021,蜂鳥。 2.《香港人之香港史 1841-1945》,蔡榮芳,2000,牛津大學出版社。 3.《穿梭太平洋︰金山夢、華人出洋與香港的形成》,冼玉儀,2019,中華書局。 4.《被遺忘的六日戰爭:1899年新界鄉民與英軍之戰》,夏思義 ,2014,中華書局。 5.《香港六七暴動始末》,程翔,2018,牛津大學。 6.《地下陣線:中共在香港的歷史》,陸恭蕙,2011,香港大學出版社。 7.《香港80年代民主運動口述歷史》,馬嶽 ,2012,香港城市大學。 8.《我是記者:六四印記:六四30》,2019,香港記者協會-人民不會忘記基金。 9.《胸懷祖國 : 香港「愛國左派」運動,趙永佳,呂大樂,容世誠,2014,牛津大學出版社。 10.《勾結共謀的殖民權力》,羅永生,2015 ,牛津大學出版社。 11.《殖民無間道》,羅永生,2017,牛津大學出版社。 12.《中國香港 : 文化與政治的視野》,強世功,2008,牛津大學出版社。 13.《中國天朝主義與香港》,陳冠中,2012,牛津大學出版社。 14.《變局下的徘徊 : 從戰後到後九七香港教會社關史論 》,邢福增,2018,印象文字。 15.《回歸人心——極權臨近的香港文化經濟學》,許寶強,2018,牛津大學出版社。 16.《香港, 鬱躁的家邦 : 本土觀點的香港源流史》,徐承恩,2019,左岸文化。 17.《彭定康英文自傳》,彭定康。 18.《許家屯香港回憶錄(上.下)》,許家屯,1993,聯經出版公司。 19.《大江東去——司徒華回憶錄》,司徒華,2011,牛津大學出版社。 20.《拱心石下——從政十八年》,吳靄儀,2018,牛津/啟思。 21.《相遇》,周保松,2008,牛津大學出版社。 22.《受苦與反抗:陳健民.獄中書簡》,陳健民,2022,聯經出版公司。 23.《破解香港風威權法治:傘後與反送中以來的民主運動》,黎恩灝,2021,新銳文創。 24.《特區選舉:制度與投票行為》,蔡子強,馬嶽,陳雋文,2021,香港城市大學。 25.《二十道陰影下的自由:香港新聞審查日常》,區家麟,2017,中文大學出版社。 26.《香港第一課》,梁啟智,2019,春山。 27.《管治香港:英國解密檔案的啟示》,李彭廣,...