Steve Jobs Ponders His Legacy In Never-Before-Seen 1994 Video

Never before seen? Uploaded on Oct 6, 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw

Steve Jobs had such a way with words. I personally love this quote:

"This is not a field where one paints a painting which will be looked at for centuries...This is a field where one does his work and in ten years it is obsolete."

I loved the metaphor:

"It's sort of like a sentiment of rocks. You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. No one will see it, but they will stand on it."

I think this is so true. Tech is about building on what others have done. Picking up where on person left off. It's a never ending cycle.

I also like the line "it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist". In 100 years when historians are looking back on the tech boom that we are currently living in, it'll be very interesting to see what goes down in history books as the most influential invention, device, software etc that really started this revolution.

That's different. This new posting is a different clip (although seemingly from the same interview).

It begins with "The following clip has never been publicly shown before." It's less than 2 minutes, and you'll probably enjoy it. Buying the full interview (Production Date: January 2013; Playing Time: 60 Minutes) would support Silicon Valley Historical Association:

http://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/#!steve-jobs-film/c1x...

Interesting that he was able to maintain such passion for his work while having such a realistic view of the ephemerality of it.

Steve Jobs might not be right about this. Apple's latest and greatest operating systems still implement quite a bit of functionality from Unix, which is much more than 10 years old. They still implement and use ASCII, JPG, TCP/IP, etc.

Most mathematical papers, paintings, and churches don't inspire awe 200 years later. The vast majority are lost to time. Only the most original, revolutionary, or useful cultural artifacts last a long time. I think software is probably not very different. We're still using Unix and TCP/IP today, and probably will be for many decades to come. Angry Birds, maybe not so much.