
We all know Steve Jobs was a visionary, a man with unlimited creativity and unbridled enthusiasm for the company he founded and the innovations he implemented during his time at Apple.
And now, the website Life, Liberty and Technology has unearthed a rare audio recording of a speech made by Jobs on June 15, 1983.
In this nearly three-decade-old recording, Jobs is heard speaking to the International Design Conference in Aspen. It's about twenty minutes of a prepared talk, followed by more than a half-hour of audience Q&A.
But what makes this a pretty remarkable find is that Jobs talks about his vision for the future, which includes his early concepts of e-mail, the internet, laptops, and tablets - things we now take for granted.
Remember, the groundbreaking Macintosh computer (and the "1984" commercial that introduced it during the Super Bowl) was still months away, so the fact Jobs made there predictions before modern home computing is incredible.
He also talked about getting computers down from the $10,000 price at the time, to models using a "book design" that could be had for under $1,000. He also foreshadows the same kind of voice recognition software used in the iPhone's Siri feature, though the young Jobs admits, "This stuff is hard."
As well, he suggests the software industry, then in its infancy, would adopt a model where people could sample programs before using their credit cards to buy them over phone lines - which sounds a lot like the model behind the App Store and iTunes.
You can read a summary of the lecture here, as well as stream or download the full 54-minute audio clip. Photos of the talk are posted on this Flickr account.
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