image

We at E-junkie love to keep tabs of the latest technological developments and turf wars between the techie giants. However, today we have something from the past that felt like a monumental find, by sheer serendipity of course.

All of us know Apple is the brain child of Steve Jobs' vision for pioneering new heights in technology. And so he did during his lifetime.

Recently I stumbled upon this interview that Jobs did with the Playboy magazine. Yes, you read that right! David Sheff, the interviewer had a tete-e-tete when Apple was just a year old and had recently found limelight at the Super Bowl commercials. Back then Jobs was a man on a mission.

While Jobs was not the only one sprouting with technological ideas, he was certainly the first one to voice them openly. In a way he set the entreprenurial standards with his strange mix of viral marketing, innovation and PR strategy, all combined into one.

It's almost 30 years now that we are resonating on his lost words in the annals of an un-technological magazine. It's a surprise actually as to why Jobs would hand out such wisdom to a lifestyle magazine. Actually the interview was part of now converted eBook titled "The Playboy Interview: Moguls" that includes feature stories on other tech biggies like Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, David Geffen and others.

Whatever said and done, the interview had some amazing glimpses of the things to happen in the tech world. The trick here is to read between the lines and catch the message.

Here are those awesome excerpts of the interview and the decoded predictions.

1. Futuristic Impacts

"We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes. Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future."

2. All Pervasive Computer Technology

"We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference in the world. What we want to do at Apple is make computers into appliances and get them to tens of millions of people. That’s simply what we want to do."

3. Computer As A Business Tool

"The primary reasons to buy a computer for your home now are that you want to do some business work at home or you want to run educational software for yourself or your children…This will change: Computers will be essential in most homes."

4. Internet Boom And Communication Technology

"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people‐‑ as remarkable as the telephone."

5. The Expansion of Macintosh To The Cloud 

"Wait till we do it‐‑the power of a Macintosh in something the size of a book!...The developments will be in making the products more and more portable, networking them, getting out laser printers, getting out shared data bases, getting out more communications ability, maybe the merging of the telephone and the personal computer."

6. Computer As A Servant 

"Thus far, we’re pretty much using our computers as good servants. We ask them to do something, we ask them to do some operation like a spread sheet, we ask them to take our key strokes and make a letter out of them, and they do that pretty well. And you’ll see more and more perfection of that‐‑computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as guide or agent. And what that means is that it’s going to do more in terms of anticipating what we want and doing it for us, noticing connections and patterns in what we do, asking us if this is some sort of generic thing we’d like to do regularly, so that we’re going to have, as an example, the concept of triggers. We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact."

7. eStock Trading 

"Simple things like monitoring your stocks every hour or every day. When a stock gets beyond set limits, the computer will call my broker and electronically sell it and then let me know."

8. Apple In The Future

"I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers. I think Apple has a chance to be the model of a Fortune 500 company in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Anyway, one of our biggest challenges, and the one I think…I should be judged on in five to ten years, is making Apple an incredibly great ten- or 20-billion‐dollar company. Will it still have the spirit it does today?"

A man who considered himself a student in perpetuity, knew when to say the right things. In retrospect, his visionary thoughts in 1985, are absolutely baffling to read now. In fact, he almost predicted about his own presence in the same interview by saying "There may be a few years when I’m not there, but I’ll always come back."

What's your take on Jobs' insights for the industry? Leave us your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section.

For more interesting reads and daily lists, follow us on Facebook.