Quotes from 1995 Steve Jobs Interview | Hacker News Reader

Quotes from 1995 Steve Jobs Interview

lukew.com

129 pointstilt38 comments

One of my fav Jobs quotes (not catchy, but practical) is:

"...there needs to be someone who is the keeper and reiterator of the vision..."

If you have your own project/startup, then that's you. Even if you just reiterate it to yourself.

It features in this video that's making the rounds at the moment http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOlqqriBvUM&feature=youtu...

The one I found most interesting is:

"Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art."

It's clear that Jobs had viewed the iPad as being a way to help change education. Though you can't program on the iPad currently, I have no doubt that it will eventually come in the future.

Jobs also shared the same belief as Alan Kay. Kay was angered that Scratch wasn't currently possible under Apple's rules and viewed the Dynabook as a way to teach children how to code. A comment like this shows that Jobs probably had this in his mind but wanted to take baby steps with what he probably viewed as the future of Apple. It could also be that he wanted to get the foundation of iOS correct before moving into something more complicated as programming.

I wonder if Jobs felt the same way in his later years. I'm guessing he did. With traditional blue collar jobs disappearing, computer science is becoming an ever-increasing necessity for the future workforce.

I'm tempted to generalize this sentence to "Learning (anything) teaches you how to think".

Computing certainly conveys a stronger worldview than, say, skateboarding, but I really think mastering any activity can be a valuable and profound lesson.

The thing about computer programming is it is unforgiving - your program works or it doesn't. You cannot talk it, fool it, force it, etc., into working. Learning programming forces a certain reality check into your learning that is absent from many other disciplines.

I think it's less about the unforgiving nature of programming and much more about the immediate and (usually) precise feedback that you get when you fail that makes it so good at teaching you how to think. I wish every skill I wanted to learn came with a compiler and a debugger.

One of the differences between computer science and other fields is that, in a sense, computer science is a meta-field: it's the study of information. You learn how to solve problems from the very foundation, empirically. In that way it's probably akin to philosophy, although I don't know enough philosophy to be sure. Basically, instead of solving problems you're solving the problem of how to solve problems.

This is what makes computer science, along with a few similar fields (mathematics comes to mind) very special.

Its the critical thinking aspect that hasn't been traditionally seen in any discipline except engineering.

> Though you can't program on the iPad currently

Ah but you can:

http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/

You should read his biography (by Walter Isaacson). The intersection between arts and technology was a huge point of focus with Jobs.

I suppose everybody interprets this comment differently. My reading of it is one of extreme ignorance of what computer science is. Computer science is part applied math, and part pure math. It is most certainly not in any way a liberal art.

Further, it is crucial to most of Jobs own technologies in a very deep way. Indeed it is crucial to all of computing. Learning to program teaches you to think, but doing math and applying math does not? This is not a comment to be proud of.

Every applied science crucially depends on mathematics in some form. Thus, I take this as ignorance on Jobs part. It fits right in line with Jobs feeling justified in taking the entire credit for technologies that he mostly copied from academia. Yes, he and Apple modified some of them, especially the early GUI days. But more recently they lifted others like Siri verbatim. But Jobs has never acknowledge the huge shoulders he stood on.

In my opinion, Jobs' primary skill was art. Not technical innovation, not science. One could argue he recognized good engineering I suppose, but software architecture is also arguably more art than science in that there are few objective measures of it that people agree on.

Be careful of decontextualized quotes. "Computer Science is a liberal art" could be interpreted a lot of ways, so here's some context:

"In my perspective ... science and computer science is a liberal art, it's something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It's not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It's something that everybody should be exposed to and everyone should have mastery of to some extent, and that's how we viewed computation and these computation devices."

So it seems like he meant "liberal art" in the sense of "subjects that are essential for everyone" (the original definition of liberal art) as opposed to "subjects that don't use math."

Source: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-...

My favorite quote: "What causes people to be poets instead of bankers? When you put that into products people can sense that. And they love it."

Is it possible to watch the actual interview somewhere?

EDIT: So it's only available in the US? That's pretty old school.

In theaters, I understand.

http://www.stevejobsthelostinterview.com/

I guess it's doing a limited theater run for awhile, in SF and Austin. I saw it last week in SF and Cringely showed up and did a Q&A afterwards, he mentioned wanting to have the interview seen in a shared setting.

Anyone know where I can watch this interview?

I'm not in the US...

It will undoubtedly be available on DVD eventually. It will probably also be online (Amazon, iTunes) and on various torrents.

Hope the DVD is released, its definitely not anywhere else - YouTube took it down for copyright issues.

"Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art."

Imagine all the hate the source of this quotation would receive on here if this didn't come from The Steve.

Well it's certainly not a science as the scientific method is nowhere to be found. The closest thing to it at most universities is the math department, which seems to end up in the arts faculty as often as not. I'd argue there's widespread acceptance that neither math nor computer science are sciences (in the sense that, say, physics or biology are), and if something isn't a science, it's either an art or its own thing.

Who did you have in mind as the source of hatred?

Where do you live? I've never heard of a college math department being part of the art department. In the USA, computer science departments are usually either closely attached to the math department, or are part of the engineering school if the college has one.

Obviously, your whole argument depends on the definition of "science" more than anything. Using the naive middle school definition of science, as in "the scientific method," perhaps math and CS don't qualify (although there is in fact a lot of experimental/observational work in CS, particularly in "real-world" applications like general-purpose encryption/compression, cache invalidation, process scheduling, etc.). However, using a broader definition of science, like the one Wikipedia gives, it's clear that math and CS easily qualify.

At Princeton University, undergraduate math degree is A.B. (Bachelor of Arts), but undergraduate CS degree can be either A.B. or B.S.E (Bachelors of Science in Engineering) depending on course of study.

The "arts" in "Bachelor of Arts" refers to liberal arts, not to arts in the modern sense, as you are implying. The liberal arts are subjects that people who were free to pursue earthly endeavors (i.e., not slaves) were expected to study in order to fully distinguish themselves from the slave class. One example of this is reading and writing, which was a skill that free people were pretty much universally expected to have, and which slaves were often blatantly forbidden to acquire.

During the middle ages, the liberal arts grew to include geometry and arithmetic, and we now think of most math, even complicated math, to fall under the heading of the liberal arts.

In contrast, a BSE would cover other things, like architecture or chemical engineering.

baddox is therefore correct in questioning whether college math would fall into faculty of arts, which they should not, since faculty of arts these days means almost without exception faculty of studies of art, not faculty of the study of liberal arts. nolanw is either going to a very peculiar college, or is wrong.

I think there's been a big misunderstanding somewhere - I interpreted nolanw's "arts faculty" to mean liberal arts, not arts in the contemporary sense. So when I read baddox's reply I assumed he disagreed with how I interpreted it - i.e. I thought baddox was claiming math does not belong in the liberal arts. Heh...very confusing. What I'm trying to say is that there's a 99.9% chance that we're all in agreement and it really hinges on what nolanw really meant by "arts faculty".

Argh, English. If this is the case, then I do apologize indeed.

My problem with Jobs quote is that it seems to imply that learning math is somehow not learning. Thus I assume he means liberal arts not as in mathematics or anything practical, but as in a pursuit that is mostly not immediately practical as one might argue about modern philosophy.

Jobs'own technologies are often based on solid computer science principles. I'm somewhat surprised that he could recognize the utility of these technologies yet not recognize the source of them.

The quote could probably use a lot more context.

I don't agree. I think the quotes listed are sufficiently universal, but not implicitly obvious, that they would be appreciated from just about any source. Unless of course that source was being hypocritical. I don't think this is a case of Jobs worship - it just seems like the sort of advice Paul Graham would have given. Good, solid advice.

Three of the traditional seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) are today considered branches of mathematics - is it really so hard to imagine computer science taking a place among these?

And only two of them are today considered humanities, which is what a lot of non-humanities people seem to be thinking when they say liberal arts.

As someone who briefly attended a liberal arts college, when I hear liberal arts I understand it to mean something that encourages dance majors to take materials science courses just as much as vice-versa.

I'm sorry but these weren't all that great. I'm glad you appreciated them, though, and I have to point out that there are definitely some typos in there but we can get the meaning anyway. They kind of seemed like repeats of quotes I'd read before but worded differently. Its too bad because I usually go all fanboy for anything Steve related.

Glad I read the comments before I posted but exactly this. I'm definitely not a Steve hater but this isn't gospel. These "quotes" you hear on a daily basis if you have ever been around a small business, startup, or worked with others.

Just keep in mind every quote needs 'sic' after the end of it, because these transcriptions are pretty bad.

'sic' means the exact opposite of that:

"Sic—generally inside square brackets, [sic], and occasionally parentheses, (sic)—when added just after a quote or reprinted text, indicates the passage appears exactly as in the original source. The usual purpose is to inform readers that any errors or apparent errors in the copied material are not from transcription—that they are reproduced exactly from the original writer or printer. A bracketed sic may also be used as a form of ridicule or as a humorous comment, typically by drawing attention to the original writer's mistakes."

Am I too much of a conspiracy theorist when I doubt that the tape was really "lost"?

When the BBC don't mind taping over their Monty Python archive and other precious troves of TV and websites, I think any kind of incompetence is possible in the TV channel industry.

In their defense, it's not usually until much after the original recording that someworks are trully recognized as valuable.

That and videtape (and storage space) were not always cheap.

yes

"Don't attribute to malice which can be explained by incompetence" - or something like that ..

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