Steve Jobs in Sweden, 1985 [HQ]

[Music] f [Music] glad to meet you EXC the we're traveling [Applause] spe [Applause] [Music] the uh the doors have been locked and uh all of you that don't sign up to buy computers will stay here and we will bring back the singers uh I am extraordinarily pleased to uh be able to be here with you this is one of my uh my personal uh uh one of my personal personal hopes and wishes actually is that I think that computers can radically revolutionize the educational process around the world and uh the average age at Apple as

you know is about 29 or 30 and uh we haven't been out of college so long ourselves at least most of the people at Apple haven't and uh it's very very important to us and I think that as you all know better than I Europe is sort of a doesn't exist it was just a word invented for the convenience of Americans and others and uh the fact that you're all here in this room uh as a step towards cooperating with each other uh in new ways uh pleases me very much it's uh difficult enough to

uh to get cooperation amongst competitive universities in America and uh I think that that's great um what are we trying to do here what are we trying to do the you can have many views of what a computer is my particular view is that a computer is a new medium a new medium one of the media print television radio and uh a computer will in the future be looked at I think more in this way as a delivery vehicle for software just like a book is a delivery vehicle for its own kind of software and

uh whenever we develop a new medium we generally tend to fall back into our old habits from our old media uh as an example when the television first came of age in America the first television shows were simply a camera pointed at a radio show uh and it took about 20 30 years for television to really come into a its own in the late 1950s uh we have this new medium of interactive video because of the laser disc and what is the first thing we do with it uh we put movies on it so again

we tend to fall back into our old habits um in the same way when the personal computer was invented we tended to look at it as a smaller version of a big computer so we put cobal and Fortran and these bizarre things on it um and looked at it in terms of simple economics rather than the Revolutionary nature that it really was do you know who Alexander the Great's tutor was for about 14 years you know Aristotle and I read this I became immensely jealous uh and I think I would have enjoyed that a great

deal and and uh through the miracle of the printed page I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary and maybe if there's a professor they can they can add to that but at least I can go directly to the source material and that is of course the foundation upon which our Western Civilization is built but I can't ask Aristotle a question I mean I can but I won't get an answer and so my hope is that you in in in our lifetimes we can make a tool of a new kind of an

interactive kind and when I look at the personal computer uh we're as you know living in the wake of the last Revolution which which was a new source of free energy and that was the free energy of petrochemicals right and it completely transformed society and we're products of this petrochemical revolution which is we're still living in the wake of today we are now entering another revolution of free energy uh Macintosh as you know uses less power than a few of those light bulbs and uh yet can save us a few hours a day or give

us a whole new experience and it's free intellectual energy it's crude very crude but it's getting more refined year after year after year and in our lifetimes it should get very refined and so my hope is someday when the next Aristotle is alive we can capture the underlying world view of that Aristotle in a computer and someday some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer and uh that's that's what I hope that we can do so this is a beginning um I

think that as you know right now the computer industry is in in the tank uh personal computers big computers everything and uh it's difficult it's a difficult time but I'm sure that Henry Ford had a few bad quarters back in the 1920s and the automobile had a sort of historical imperative it had the minute it was invented it a sequence of events had to happen the same is true with the personal computer uh there is a a tremendous momentum behind this and I think that this year may be a delay this year we may look

back and say well 1985 was a slow year but there is such momentum behind this that it will happen it will permeate and change forever our educational processes and My Hope again is that not too many generations of students will pass through before this happens uh it will happen within 20 years it probably will happen within 10 years but it could happen within 5 years I am going back to the United States this weekend uh and then about two weeks from today I'll be in the Soviet Union for the first time in Moscow because one

of my dreams has been to uh sell macintoshes in the Soviet Union and uh one of the highest agendum agendas on my priority is to uh is to get uh them starting to think about exactly the same thing so maybe 6 months or a year year and a half from now we can have some uh Soviet schools here at our Europe Consortium meeting but first I would like to say that I find it very interesting to meet Mr jobs arriving as he was out of the BL blue big blue and um after making about three

circles so that we were certain to notice that there was something in the [Laughter] [Applause] air and you can almost hear everybody saying there is something in the air tonight anyhow I feel somewhat I felt some somewhat like the uh Finnish prime minister prime minister Mr caran when when he was he spoke a very bad English too and and they had to pip him up heavily with language tuition before he was meeting Mr Henry Kissinger arriving from the state I don't think it was in a helicopter but it was in a it was in a

big jumbo plane anyhow they Tau kissing her the essential phrases and these were welcome nice weather and lostly how are you and kinan he learned those words and he was very happy damn it now he comes I know the language and out steps kissing her and Carin steps forward to him and all his teachers are very worried will he do it can he do it can he speak English and he says welcome oh it and then he goes into the second phrase nice weather nice weather and the third phrase and who are you well it

was great meeting you and I will startop stop making joke jokes with Steve Jobs who is such a nice fellow and uh is giving so much of his himself and his dreams we have been very happy at Lund University for this association with apple I have never been worried that by eating apple we should start thinking Apple but uh other people have been worried about that I'm not so worried either about computers some people are they feel that they will deform our minds I do not think so and I happen to think of yesterday something

that other people have thought about many times namely the the relation to the car when I came to Lun many years ago after the war a friend of mine bought a Volkswagen you could almost call it a Mac Volkswagen and and and I said what is it like having a car an idiotic machine which cannot think it just it does what you tell it to do and he says it is like the Seven Mile boots of the fairy tale no we have taals in Sweden and one of them deals with the Seven Mile boots boots

that you put on your legs and with them you could take seven miles in each step and you got a huge Distance by carrying by wearing these boots and to me that was a wonder of the car because with the car you could go seven miles without noticing it and with computers you can do a lot of things that you couldn't otherwise do and with with weapons like that or rather uh Machinery like that the only problem is in the human mind and not in the computer it's just like the boots and we are talking

here about connecting many brains and many computers in a worldwide Network work which will hopefully solve all the problems I I I'm not entirely certain that it will but it will help of course the networking reminds me of a story of the uh the U the building workers It's actually an example from the school mathematics days where the problem was was if it takes 7 days for six men to build a wall which is 100 m long how long does it Tak for 10,000 men and the answer is just less than a second and uh

that is I'm reminded of that story when people at Apple and other places tell me how we connect all the universities of the world and then if we have one really big problem we put it into the bitnet and out pops the answer even from Aristotle [Applause] now finally I've heard that Apple has been having some trouble and we have always been very generous towards industry we like to support it and and there are no strings attached your integrity will not be broken and I think you need a fresh supply of uh silicone oxide so

I would like to give you Steve from the University of Lund this uh unique piece of glass Swedish glassware it has the emblem of the University of Lund if you put the Mac in in the back I don't mind uh if you would had if you would been really hard hard up I would have sent it around for [Applause] cash and a fin word give my love to M [Music] [Applause] Gorbachev