Steve Jobs in Sweden, 1985 [HQ]

[Music]

Glad to meet you.

[Applause]

The doors have been locked and all of you that don't sign up to buy computers will stay here, and we will bring back the singers.

I am extraordinarily pleased to be able to be here with you. This is one of my personal hopes and wishes, actually. I think that computers can radically revolutionize the educational process around the world. The average age at Apple, as you know, is about 29 or 30, and we haven't been out of college so long ourselves. At least most of the people at Apple haven't. It's very, very important to us.

As you all know better than I, Europe is sort of a doesn’t exist; it was just a word invented for the convenience of Americans and others. The fact that you're all here in this room as a step towards cooperating with each other in new ways pleases me very much. It's difficult enough to get cooperation amongst competitive universities in America, and I think that that's great.

What are we trying to do here? You can have many views of what a computer is. My particular view is that a computer is a new medium. A new medium, one of the media—print, television, radio—and a computer will, in the future, be looked at, I think, more in this way as a delivery vehicle for software, just like a book is a delivery vehicle for its own kind of software.

Whenever we develop a new medium, we generally tend to fall back into our old habits from our old media. As an example, when the television first came of age in America, the first television shows were simply a camera pointed at a radio show. It took about 20 or 30 years for television to really come into its own.

In the late 1950s, we have this new medium of interactive video because of the laser disc, and what is the first thing we do with it? We put movies on it. So again, we tend to fall back into our old habits. In the same way, when the personal computer was invented, we tended to look at it as a smaller version of a big computer. So we put COBOL and Fortran and these bizarre things on it, and looked at it in terms of simple economics rather than the revolutionary nature that it really was.

Do you know who Alexander the Great's tutor was for about 14 years? You know Aristotle. I read this, and I became immensely jealous. I think I would have enjoyed that a great deal. Through the miracle of the printed page, I can at least read what Aristotle wrote without an intermediary. Maybe if there's a professor, they can add to that. But at least I can go directly to the source material, and that is, of course, the foundation upon which our Western civilization is built.

But I can't ask Aristotle a question. I mean, I can, but I won't get an answer. So my hope is that in our lifetimes, we can make a tool of a new kind, an interactive kind. When I look at the personal computer, we're, as you know, living in the wake of the last revolution, which was a new source of free energy. That was the free energy of petrochemicals, right? It completely transformed society, and we're products of this petrochemical revolution, which we’re still living in the wake of today.

We are now entering another revolution of free energy. Macintosh, as you know, uses less power than a few of those light bulbs, and yet can save us a few hours a day or give us a whole new experience. It's free intellectual energy. It's crude, very crude, but it's getting more refined year after year after year, and in our lifetimes, it should get very refined.

So my hope is someday when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying world view of that Aristotle in a computer. Someday, some student will be able to not only read the words Aristotle wrote but ask Aristotle a question and get an answer. That's what I hope that we can do.

So this is a beginning. I think that, as you know, right now, the computer industry is in the tank—personal computers, big computers, everything—and it's difficult. It's a difficult time, but I'm sure that Henry Ford had a few bad quarters back in the 1920s. The automobile had a sort of historical imperative; the minute it was invented, a sequence of events had to happen. The same is true with the personal computer.

There is a tremendous momentum behind this. I think that this year may be a delay. We may look back and say, "Well, 1985 was a slow year," but there is such momentum behind this that it will happen. It will permeate and change forever our educational processes.

My hope again is that not too many generations of students will pass through before this happens. It will happen within 20 years, it probably will happen within 10 years, but it could happen within 5 years. I am going back to the United States this weekend, and then about two weeks from today I'll be in the Soviet Union for the first time in Moscow because one of my dreams has been to sell Macintoshes in the Soviet Union.

One of the highest agendas on my priority list is to get them starting to think about exactly the same thing. So maybe six months, a year, or a year and a half from now, we can have some Soviet schools here at our Europe Consortium meeting.

But first, I would like to say that I find it very interesting to meet Mr. Jobs arriving as he was out of the blue, big blue, and after making about three circles so that we were certain to notice that there was something in the air.

[Laughter]

[Applause]

You can almost hear everybody saying there is something in the air tonight. Anyhow, I felt somewhat like the Finnish Prime Minister, Prime Minister Mr. Carin, when he spoke very bad English too, and they had to pip him up heavily with language tuition before he was meeting Mr. Henry Kissinger arriving from the state.

I don't think it was in a helicopter, but it was in a big jumbo plane. Anyhow, they taught Kissinger the essential phrases, and these were "Welcome," "Nice weather," and lastly, "How are you?" Carin learned those words and he was very happy—damn it! Now he comes, "I know the language!" And out steps Kissinger, and Carin steps forward to him, and all his teachers are very worried: "Will he do it? Can he do it? Can he speak English?"

He says, "Welcome!" and then he goes into the second phrase, "Nice weather, nice weather," and the third phrase, "And who are you?" Well, it was great meeting you, and I will stop making jokes with Steve Jobs, who is such a nice fellow and is giving so much of himself and his dreams.

We have been very happy at Lund University for this association with Apple. I have never been worried that by eating Apple we should start thinking Apple, but other people have been worried about that. I'm not so worried either about computers. Some people are; they feel that they will deform our minds. I do not think so.

I happen to think of yesterday something that other people have thought about many times, namely the relation to the car. When I came to Lund many years ago after the war, a friend of mine bought a Volkswagen. You could almost call it a Mac Volkswagen. I said, "What is it like having a car? An idiotic machine which cannot think; it just does what you tell it to do."

He says, "It is like the Seven Mile boots of the fairy tale." Now we have tales in Sweden, and one of them deals with the Seven Mile boots, boots that you put on your legs, and with them, you could take seven miles in each step. You got a huge distance by wearing these boots.

To me, that was a wonder of the car because with the car, you could go seven miles without noticing it. With computers, you can do a lot of things that you couldn't otherwise do. With weapons like that, or rather machinery like that, the only problem is in the human mind and not in the computer.

It's just like the boots, and we are talking here about connecting many brains and many computers in a worldwide network which will hopefully solve all the problems. I'm not entirely certain that it will, but it will help.

Of course, the networking reminds me of a story of the building workers. It's actually an example from the school mathematics days where the problem was: If it takes 7 days for six men to build a wall which is 100 meters long, how long does it take for 10,000 men? The answer is just less than a second.

I'm reminded of that story when people at Apple and other places tell me how we can connect all the universities of the world, and then if we have one really big problem, we put it into the bitnet and out pops the answer, even from Aristotle.

[Applause]

Now finally, I've heard that Apple has been having some trouble, and we have always been very generous towards industry. We like to support it, and there are no strings attached; your integrity will not be broken. I think you need a fresh supply of silicone oxide, so I would like to give you, Steve, from the University of Lund, this unique piece of glass, Swedish glassware.

It has the emblem of the University of Lund. If you put the Mac in the back, I don't mind. If you would have been really hard up, I would have sent it around for cash.

[Applause]

And, in a final word, give my love to M.

[Music]

[Applause]

Gorbachev.