Reading List: The Patience of Jobs

Perhaps the most amusing and unscripted nugget to emerge from the Apple aura is the reissue of a 1985 interview with a 29-year-old Steve Jobs. In, um, Playboy magazine. It’s refreshing to revisit the early incarnation of Apple (back when it still carried the word “computer” in its title), and see Jobs speculate on a yet undefined “nationwide communications network.”  Here’s a snippet:

PLAYBOY: What’s the difference between the people who have insanely great ideas and the people who pull off those insanely great ideas?

JOBS: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PC jr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

The rise, fall, and firebird return of Jobs is a remarkable and very American story.  Even if you may not want him on your commercial flight, its a lively read.