naji1234
1 HN recommender · recommended in 6 months, 2012–2026
23:00 · 2.8M views · Dec 12, 2011
Rare footage of Steve Jobs giving a 22 minute presentation about Apple in 1980, donated to the Computer History Museum. In it he explains the company name and the bicycle-for-the-mind idea for computers.
HN commenters cite it as proof that Jobs was a polished speaker from the start and quote its analogies about computers and people.
6 comments from Hacker News
The thing that amazes me about Jobs is how he could present in such a way that it seemed so off-the-cuff and at the same time so polished. Anyone who has had to do presentations like these can learn a lot from watching him at work. In the NeXT video, for example, he's very good at tying everything together into a cohesive whole, and speaking to his audience in terms they'll understand. He uses practically no filler words ("uh", "um", "basically", etc.). Here's another presentation he did in 1980 that shows he had these skills almost from the very beginning: this video
This is great that you can do that. An experimental environment must be of the same size. Ideally, absolutely the same physically, to keep the same physical layout as on prod – bloat, etc – though, sometimes it's not allowed. Another problem here is that for each experiment, you might need a new environment. Plus, in larger teams, many people might want to do this work at the same time – so you end up combining efforts, synchronizing them, sharing environments. It slows you down. Or increases your cloud spending a lot. This is a kind of problem Steve Jobs described in his famous 1980 speech [1] about Apple: if we give each person their own computer, something special happens compared to the case when 10 persons share a single computer. Here it is the same: if we can give each engineer their own full-size DB copy for experiments, something special happens. They start moving much, much faster. SQL quality improves. DB changes (DDL, massive DML) stop failing. Finally, engineers start learning SQL, it's an eye-opener – they now can see how it works on large volumes (because they didn't have good environments for experiments before!) This is what we (Postgres.ai) have learned over the last couple of years developing Database Lab Engine [2]. It's an open-source tool for superfast cloning of Postgres databases of any size, based on copy-on-write provided by ZFS or LVM. On a single machine, you can have dozens of full-size clones up and running, conduct a lot of experiments at the sa
"Am I an affective programmer?" Does my code make people feel good? Does it automate some user task? Does it make some user task easier? Does it amplify users' powers? Does it create value, by my definition of "valuable"? Of course, these are outcomes/benefits, not the technical role of programming within an organization. But apt if you see yourself, fellow programmers and company members as "users" also. > I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. [LINK] this video > ... There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. [LINK]
What makes you think people understand URI bars? Often times they become fairly unintelligible as the number of resources go up. Even if we slugify titles into the URI, there are almost always other path hierarchies and parameters to handle paging, sorting states, or otherwise. The user has already clicked through, he can easily see the title in the tab; the rest of the URI is probably meaningless or not worth understanding for the 99%. 99% of the time, it is probably even a waste for the other 1%; it's not that URIs are going away. I'm not even sure what you mean by a "Web 3.0" revolution. The following is the future? * Youtube link off my Youtube homepage: this video * Twitter status link: [LINK] -- though I'd wager a majority of users simply hit retweet and never see the resource URI * Facebook photo off my wall: [LINK]
It reminds me of this Steve Jobs Clip: this video He said, so many years ago, that there will become a time where computing power is so prevalent that we will stop using the person to make the computers job easier and start using the computer to make the humans job of interfacing with it easier. But in this context, it would mean the other side of increase productivity is decreased time to do the same work. These are the same thing.