In 1995, during the making of his TV series Triumph of the Nerds about the birth of the PC, Bob Cringely did a memorable hour-long interview with Steve Jobs.
It was 10 years since Jobs had left Apple following a bruising struggle with John Sculley, the CEO he had brought into the company. At the time of the interview Jobs was running NeXT, the niche computer company he had founded after leaving Apple.
During the interview, Jobs was at his charismatic best — witty, outspoken, visionary. In the end, only a part of the interview was used in the series and the rest was thought lost. But recently a VHS copy was found in the series director’s garage. Now, cleaned up with modern technology, and put into context by Cringely, the entire interview will be screened in Landmark Theatres.
In the interview Jobs talks about his pioneering days with Steve Wozniak, when they built a Blue Box and phoned the Pope; how they — “two guys who didn’t know much” — assembled the first Apple computer and went on to found the Apple company. “I was worth around a million dollars when I was 23, over 10 million dollars when I was 24 and over 100 million dollars when I was 25 — and it wasn’t really important!” Jobs recalls the visits he made to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and how it inspired the making of the Macintosh, the world’s first modern PC, when he was “on a mission from God to save Apple.” He talks frankly and sadly about his enforced departure from Apple and explains what he is doing at NeXT (which he would soon sell to Apple and whose software would then be at the heart of the first iMac’s operating system). Finally in spell-binding terms, he offers his vision of a digital future — a world of wonderful products created by artists and poets.
It is an interview that reveals the burning passion of Steve Jobs, a passion that would go on to give us the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. As a tribute to an amazing man, Landmark is proud to be screening Steve Jobs — the Lost Interview.
