Communications of the ACM
This Unheard Steve Jobs Tape is Part of an Amazing Trove of Tech History
Charles Mann made professional audio recordings of dozens of Boston Computer Society meetings and other computer-related events in the 1980s and early 1990s; three include remarks by Apple's Steve Jobs.
Credit: Ann E. Yow-Dyson/Getty Images
"The Macintosh architecture is going to peak next year sometime. And that means that there's enough cracks in the wall already, and enough limitations to the architecture, that the Mac's pretty much going to be everything it's ever going to be sometime next year."
A tech CEO is onstage helpfully explaining that the Mac's expiration date is imminent. More important, he's about to introduce us to a new computer designed for the next decade. I am in a distant seat among his audience of more than 2,000 at Boston's Symphony Hall, where the anticipation in the air is thick enough to induce a contact high.
After all, we are among the lucky few who will hear about the NeXT computer directly from Steve Jobs himself.
What we were witnessing on the evening of November 30, 1988 wasn't the NeXT launch event. That had happened seven weeks earlier at San Francisco's Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, before 3,000 invited developers, educators, and reporters. Jobs was now giving a second performance of the same basic presentation at the monthly general meeting of the Boston Computer Society. It was open to all members, and therefore a much more public affair than the exclusive San Francisco version.
From Fast Company
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