This 72-minute interview that Robert Cringely conducted with Steve Jobs back in 1995 is just great. It’s a $4 rental on iTunes and is well worth your time.
Stephen Hackett wrote down some great notes and miscellaneous thoughts about the interview, and Garrett Murray transcribed one of the best lines from Jobs.
One of my favorite segments was towards the end. Jobs was talking about people who are able to nudge the direction of the computer industry so that in the future it will develop into something great. When asked how he knew what the right direction was, Jobs answered that “it comes down to taste”.
Part of what made the Macintosh great is that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been for computer science the people would have all been doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them a very liberal arts attitude that we wanted to pull in the best that we saw in each these other fields into this field.
Tell me that doesn’t describe so many of the people who use, write about, and develop for Apple’s platforms. We may be nerdy (in part by association), but we’re artists at heart.