I thoroughly enjoyed this Steve Jobs interview from 1992 in NeXTWORLD (via Computer Ads from the Past). The introduction describes him as “by turns evangelical, combative, and reflective”—which is to say, Steve.

A few choice passages (the interviewer is Dan Ruby):

Why is custom apps such a potent idea?

Getting applications written is the number one problem in corporate American information technology. And even though we’re downsizing to client-server computing and the apps are on the desktop, the bottleneck is still getting them written.

This is even more true when customers want to use computers for operational productivity as opposed to management productivity. You can’t buy shrinkwrapped software to do stock trading or run your hospital or do order processing. You’ve got to write custom apps. Now, in the past, these operational applications were written in COBOL or some more modern language on a mainframe or minicomputer. Starting in the very late ‘80s, some companies started downsizing to client-server computing. They could buy a Sun and spend like two years writing a good app, or as good as you could write on a Sun. Now, we roll in and say, look, you can write that custom app five to ten times faster on a NeXT.

I wonder if Steve would be bullish on AI vibe coding as a way to accelerate and democratize app creation, or if it’d be anathema to him because of the slop potential.

Steve also takes swipes at Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Taligent, and even Apple:

How about Apple? And not as a competitor, but from your unique perspective. How are they doing?

Well, I think that anybody who’s managing to survive and grow a little bit in this environment is doing well, so I would say Apple’s doing okay. I think that Apple wants to be the consumer-products company for computers. As an example, PowerBooks are very good iMacintoshes but the Quadras are terrible. So it’s obvious that Apple is putting its best people on the low end of their line, and their high end is withering. Look, they basically sold Taligent. They took Pink, which was an internal Apple technology, and basically threw it out.

Well, they spun it off into a new company.

Right, which is not what you do with your company jewels. So from my point of view, Apple was at a fork in the road for a long time, and they finally chose a path of becoming the Sony of computers. That’s probably an excellent choice for Apple, but it means that there are going to be a certain number of people at the high end of Apple’s market that are over time going to feel disenfranchised.

This was seven years after Steve was ousted from Apple, and five years before he returned with the NeXT acquisition. He was right about Apple’s laser focus on the consumer (which became only more true with him back at the helm) and the effective abandonment of its highest-end customers.

Also “PowerBooks,” “Quadras,” and “Macintoshes”? I’m cringing from the rampant pluralization (as is everyone in Apple Product Marketing).

Lastly, I presume “iMacintoshes” is one hell of a transcription error. Either that, or Steve was already contemplating new Apple product names.

Steve even tackles politics, specifically Ross Perot’s presidential candidacy:

I think he’s got a real chance and I’m helping him every way I can. […] I think Ross would be an excellent president.

Why?

Leadership. He chooses very good people around him, and he is able to distill out of his troops and himself a clear vision. Then he’s able to articulate that vision well to a large number of people.

What’s wrong with our country is that we haven’t put the energy or resources into developing our collective values. We have to take some time and ask, “What are the ten most important things that we want to do as owners of this country?” and then go figure out how to do them.

For as long as I can remember, the only real leader that was able to communicate a vision was John F. Kennedy. I remember watching him on TV when I was six, seven, eight years old. When he said let’s put a man on the moon and bring him back in this decade, that was a vision that a scientist, an historian, and a gas station attendant could understand, each in his own way.

People change, but I imagine Steve would be a lot less enthusiastic about Donald Trump.