A friend pointed me to this wonderful
interview with Steve Jobs from 1995. It was recorded while he was at NeXT, probably one of the humbler periods in his life. Great observations about computing, business, and life. I particularly loved his criticism of process as killer: doing it the way we did it before because "that's the way things are done". He also points out that business isn't rocket science, but few people expend the energy to really think about things. A variant on the quote that 'thinking is hard work which is why so few people engage in it', attributed to people ranging from Henry Ford to Immanuel Kant.
My start in technology was in the days of timesharing, programming in APL. Every time I hear cloud computing discussed with such awe, I always chuckle, since it's timesharing by another name and timesharing is as old as the hill. The interviewer even mentions that APL was his first computer language and it didn't change the way he thought. Methinks he might not have 'got' APL if he didn't change the way he thought!
This interview is well worth a look. It's an hour long, and the entirety was never aired.
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