Steve Jobs, Aspen 1983 ================ I'm not a natural... artist. I can create simple drawings, cut them out, and paste them into documents. This allows me to combine images and text before sending them electronically. Anyone in Aspen can then access their mail and see the drawing by dialing a phone number. We're at the beginning of a revolution. The personal computer is a new medium, and society and computers are truly converging for the first time in the 1980s. In the next 15 years, this initial phase of widespread tool adoption will be complete. During this time, we have a real opportunity to do this well, or to do it poorly. Many of us at Apple are dedicated to doing it well. I want to discuss one final concept before we open the floor to questions. What is a computer program? It's a strange concept. Like an electron, you can't see or touch it. Computer programs have no physical form; they are simply ideas expressed on paper. They are archetypal. Let's compare computer programming to television programming. If you watch tapes of JFK's funeral, you'll likely experience similar emotions to those you felt when you watched it live. Through television programming, we are adept at capturing and recreating experiences. It's expensive and somewhat limited, but we can do it effectively. You can truly feel the excitement of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. Computer programming does something different. It captures the underlying principles of an experience, not the experience itself. These principles enable countless different experiences that adhere to those rules. A perfect example is a video game. It follows the laws of gravity and angular momentum, creating, for instance, a simple Pong game. The ball always obeys these laws. No two Pong games are ever identical, yet every game follows these fundamental principles. Another example is a program called "Hamurabi." Seven-year-olds play this game where they become King Hamurabi of Sumeria for ten years. The game presents scenarios: "King Hamurabi, in year one, you have 1,000 bushels of wheat, 100 people, and 100 acres of land. Land trades at 24 bushels an acre. Do you want to buy or sell land? How much do you want to plant or feed?" If you don't plant enough, people starve. If you plant a lot, people from neighboring villages will come to your prosperous village. It's a crude macroeconomic model, but these children will play for hours, learning. We need to develop better and more sophisticated models, but this is an interactive learning experience none of us had growing up. Again, thousands of individual experiences, all based on one set of underlying principles. In school, I had a few great teachers and many mediocre ones. Books were my salvation. I could read Aristotle or Plato directly, without an intermediary. A book is phenomenal; it goes straight from the source to the reader. The problem is, you can't ask Aristotle a question. Looking ahead 50 to 100 years, if we can create machines that capture an underlying spirit, set of principles, or way of looking at the world, then when the next Aristotle arrives, perhaps they will carry one of these machines. After they're gone, we could potentially ask the machine, "What would Aristotle have said about this?" We might not get the right answer, but we might. That's incredibly exciting and one of the reasons I do what I do. Now, what would you like to discuss?show more
