"All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm 50," a 39-year-old Steve Jobs said resolutely in a rediscovered 1994 interview. "The Apple 2 is obsolete now, Apple 1's were obsolete many years ago, the Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years," referring to Apple's first two lines of personal computers.
The video, found by the YouTube channel EverySteveJobsVideo on Tuesday, comes from a 1994 interview conducted by the Silicon Valley Historical Association. At the time, NeXT Computer, which he founded after being ousted from Apple in the mid-1980s, turned its first profit. The Historical Associated recently turned the 20 minute interview into an hour-long documentary called "Steve Jobs: Visionary Entrepreneur."
Surprisingly, the now-beloved mind behind the iPhone and iPad expected to be forgotten by history. "It's sort of like sediment of rocks. You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher," Jobs says. "But no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment. They'll stand on it. It'll be appreciated by that rare geologist."
Jobs was right about technology's fast pace, but the Apple co-founder was clearly unaware at the time of that some of his best ideas were ahead of him. Today, Jobs is considered one of the greatest minds of our time. His biography was Amazon's best selling book of 2011, and not one but two films about his life have been or will be released this year.
History may one day forget Steve Jobs. But clearly not anytime soon.
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