Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine Page #4

And we saw the Sony disc facility

in Atsugi, Japan.

He had a lot of affection for Sony

because the Walkman was a machine

that he just thought

was the bee's knees.

You really feel the music

with a Sony Walkman

The Sony Walkman is

a tiny stereo cassette player

with truly incredible sound.

You really feel the music

You really feel it

I think it was the first product

in human history

that went over a billion units.

That he liked.

One of things that Steve thought

was important,

and Jerry Manock facilitated it,

was this is

where all the signatures are.

And they're all the people,

the original group,

that actually signed the machine.

There's Steve Jobs right in the middle.

My name is over here.

Why did you do that?

Because the people that worked

on it consider themselves,

and I certainly consider them, artists.

These are the people that

under different circumstances

would be painters and poets, but,

because of the time that we live in,

this new medium has appeared

in which to express oneself

to one's fellow species.

And that's a medium of computing.

We would sit

in the temples in Kyoto,

just taking off our shoes at the door

and sitting.

Did he take from that any

kind of aesthetic vision, do you think?

I think certainly.

A simplicity.

Just feeling that inner calm

that's so available

at some places in Japan.

He was a very much a person

who was comfortable in silence.

Steve ruled by a kind of a chaos.

And it's easy to make chaos,

and if you're comfortable with it,

you can use it as a tool.

And he used a vast number

of really irritating tools

to get other people involved

in his schemes.

He's seducing you, he's vilifying you

and he's ignoring you.

You're in one of those three states.

When you get a core group of,

you know, ten great people,

it becomes self-policing

as to who they let into that group.

So, I consider the most important job

of someone like myself is recruiting.

Steve Jobs brought us all together

in a place that had no rules.

He's a maniac. He's a maniacal genius.

His job is to stir up everything.

Most places in life

are continuously telling you

that your dreams aren't possible

or practical.

You don't want to hear that

when you're under 30.

What you want to do is race after them.

You ask yourself, why are you doing it?

I'm certainly not doing it

for Steve Jobs.

I'm doing it for what I think is

a much greater good than that.

Everybody just wanted to work, not

because it was work that had to be done,

but it was because it was something

that we really believed in.

Here is how we see personal computers.

Here is how we want the world to be.

And here's how we're going to change it.

We have a vision

of what we want it to be.

We want to convert people.

We want to make converts.

I felt my job at Macintosh

was to make the division

work smoothly enough

that we could actually get this thing

from really a mess of kids

playing around with a bunch

of hardware and software

into something that would be

a commercial product.

And that's what I did.

I got that machine finished.

It is now 1984.

IBM became the apparent visible threat.

IBM wants it all,

and is aiming its guns

on its last obstacle

to industry control. Apple.

Will Big Blue dominate

the entire computer industry?

The entire information age?

Was George Orwell right?

Today, we celebrate

the first glorious anniversary

over the information

purification directives.

That ad was again

a juxtaposition with IBM.

- That's what it was about.

- Yeah.

The people in the audience

were mindless IBM users.

Yes. You know,

for Steve it was great

because he had this bad guy/good guy,

and he loved playing that role.

We shall prevail!

Looking back, behind the scenes,

it's easy to see the irony in the ad.

Today, Apple is Goliath.

Rolling. Rolling.

But even in 1984,

when Apple cast itself

as the counterculture company,

working at Apple was a lot tougher

than IBM.

I think if you talk to a lot of

people on the Mac team,

they will tell you it was the hardest

they've ever worked in their life.

Some of them will tell you

it was, you know,

the happiest they've ever been

in their life,

but I think all of them will tell you

that it is certainly one of the most

intense and cherished experiences

they will ever have in their life.

- Mm-hmm. Yeah, they did.

- So...

You know...

Some of those things are

not sustainable for some people.

I ended up

changing my entire life.

I lost my wife in that process.

I lost my children in that process.

I lost...

The whole structure of my life

was just changed forever

by going and working on the Mac.

Because the work

became so intense?

The work was intense.

The commitment needed to do it

was intense.

I would go into work

on a Tuesday morning

and half the people would hate me,

and I'd come back on Wednesday morning,

and half the people would hate me,

but it was the other half.

There were an awful lot

of prima donnas in that outfit,

so I was always in conflict.

Here's the piece you wrote.

You want to read it?

"Steve's passing did come

as a bit of a shock for me."

"For a bit more than three years,

1982 to 1985,

we were together a lot of the time."

"We made a dozen trips to Japan

together. We were close."

"After that,

I only saw him a few times."

"I haven't seen him in many years."

"He was an extraordinary person in many

ways and quite normal in others."

"The outpouring of feelings

from people all over the world

was a bit of a surprise to me at first,

and then it seemed natural."

"He was for them

a combination of James Dean,

Princess Diana and John Lennon

and maybe Santa Claus."

"What is in that bag of goodies?"

"The iPod, the iPhone

and the iPad are so personal."

"They are warm in your hand.

They sing to you when you're alone."

"They are caressed."

"In those three years together,

I packed in a decade or two

of experience."

"Steve packed in a couple of centuries

in his 56 years."

"He did everything he wanted,

and all on his own terms."

"It was a life well and fully lived,

even if it was a bit expensive

for those of us who were close."

You do have friends, you know?

Even if they're bizarre people.

Yes. He is.

He's one of those mythic characters.

Yeah, and they're not that much fun

on the ground most of the time,

but there are those moments

when suddenly...

They're the only person

who could've ever done it.

Right.

- Yeah, and they change us.

- Right.

Without death,

there would be very little progress.

I'm sure that life evolved

without death at first

and found that without death,

life didn't work very well.

Because it didn't make room

for the young

who didn't know how the world was,

you know, 50 years ago,

but who saw it as it is today

without any preconceptions

and dreamed how it could be

based on that.

The minute that you understand

that you can poke life,

you can change it, you can mold it,

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