edited transcript with gpt4o from this video Steve Jobs: The Objects Of Our Life (1983). headings are added by me for readability

How many of you are 36 years or older? Yeah, all of you were born pre-computer. The computer’s 36 years old, and I think there’s going to be a little slice in the timeline of history when we look back—a pretty meaningful slice right there.

A lot of you are products of the television generation. I’m pretty much a product of the television generation, but I’m also starting to be a product of the computer generation. And the kids growing up now are definitely products of the computer generation. In their lifetimes, the computer will become the predominant medium of communication, just as television took over from radio, and radio took over from the book.

I’ll talk about anything you want to talk about today. I have about 15 or 20 minutes of stuff I want to cover really quickly, and then whatever you want to talk about, we can discuss. How’s that?

How many of you own an Apple, or just any personal computer? Uh-oh. How many of you have used one or seen one? Anything like that? Good, okay.

What is a computer? Computers can do simple things very fast so that it feels like magic. Takes a high level instruction and translates it to many simple instructions

Let’s start off with: what is a computer? A computer is really simple; it’s just a machine, but it’s a new type of machine. The gears and pistons have been replaced with electrons.

How many of you have ever seen an electron? That’s the problem with computers—you can’t get your hands on the actual things that are moving around. You can’t see them, so they tend to be very intimidating. In a very small space, there are billions of electrons running around, and we can’t really grasp what they look like.

Computers are very adaptive machines. We can move the electrons around to different places depending on the current state of affairs or the results of the last time we moved them. If you were here last night and heard about the brain and how it’s very adaptive, a computer is, in the same way, very adaptive.

Second thing: computers are new. They were invented 36 years ago in 1947. The first degree in computer science offered by a university was a master’s degree at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1968. That means the oldest person with a degree in computer science is 39 years old. The average age of professionals at Apple is under 30. So, it’s a field dominated by fairly young people.

Third, computers are really dumb. They are exceptionally simple, but they’re really fast. The raw instructions we feed these little microprocessors—even the instructions for giant Cray-1 supercomputers—are the most trivial things. They are things like: “Get some data from here,” “Fetch a number from there,” “Add two numbers together,” “Test to see if it’s bigger than zero,” and “Put it over there.” It’s the most mundane thing you could imagine.

But the key thing is that computers can execute these instructions extremely fast. Let’s say I could move 100 times faster than anyone in here. In the blink of an eye, I could run outside, grab a bouquet of fresh spring flowers, run back in, and snap my fingers. You’d all think I was a magician, but I’d just be doing a series of really simple actions—running out, grabbing the flowers, running back, snapping my fingers. The only difference is, I’d be doing them so fast that it would seem magical.

It’s exactly the same with a computer. It can grab numbers, add them together, and throw them around at a rate of about a million instructions per second. So, we tend to think something magical is going on, but really it’s just a series of simple instructions executed at incredible speed.

What we do is take these very simple instructions and, by building collections of them, create higher-level instructions. Instead of saying, “Turn right. Left foot. Right foot. Extend hand. Grab flowers. Run back,” we can say, “Could you go get some flowers? Could you pour a cup of coffee?”

We have started in the last 20 years to deal with computers in higher and higher levels of abstraction. But ultimately these levels of abstraction get translated down into these stupid instructions that run really fast.

History of computers, Apple exists because of fractional horsepower computing

Let’s look at the brief history of computers. The best way to understand it is probably through an analogy.

Take the electric motor. It was first invented in the late 1800s, and in the beginning, it was only possible to build very large ones. This meant that it could only be cost-justified for very large applications, and therefore, electric motors did not proliferate quickly.