Interpersonal Computing
When Steve Jobs predicted our predicament 30 years ago…
“We also can’t change our geographic organization very fast. As a matter of fact, even slower than the management one — we can’t be moving people around the country every week. But we can change an electronic organization — *snaps* — like that. And what’s starting to happen is as we start to link these computers together with sophisticated networks and great user interfaces, we’re starting to be able to create clusters of people working on a common task — literally in 15 minutes worth of set up. And these 15 people can work together extremely efficienctly no matter where they are geographically, and no matter who they work for hierarchically. And these organizations can live for as long as they’re needed and then vanish. And we’re finding that we can reorganize our companies electronically very rapidly. And that’s the only type of organization that can begin to keep pace with the changing business conditions.”
This isn’t a quote from last week, or last month, as we all deal with the realities of remote work in our unfortunate epidemic. This is a quote from — checks date — 30 years ago. And no less than Steve Jobs said it.
He was making the case for NeXT, the company he founded after his initial exit from Apple. While Apple made personal computers, he argued that NeXT was making “interpersonal computers” — that is, computers which were networked together in a way to allow people to collaborate.¹ Personal computers were about you interacting with the machine. Interpersonal computers were about you interacting with others via the machine.
This was a time before most people knew what the internet was — let alone were using it — of course. And while that network made the high level of Jobs’ vision possible years ago, the specifics of what he’s talking about with remote work and organizations are only now being fully realized.
The truth is that I actually saved this clip a year and a half ago, when Garry Tan shared it on Twitter.² At the time, it seemed to capture what many people were seeing taking off with regard to remote work. Fast forward to 2020 and this is no longer a trend, it’s reality.
“And I believe that this collaborative model has existed in higher education for a long time. But we’re starting to see it applied into the commercial world as well. And this is going to be the third major revolution that these desktop computers provide. Is revolutionizing human-to-human communication and group work. We call it ‘interpersonal computing’.”
Fascinating that Jobs calls out this trend for desktop computers specifically. This was, of course, long before he and Apple revolutionized computing with the iPhone. And yet the desktop (and well, laptop) machines are still key to this remote work reality even now. The tools have gotten infinitely better — Slack, Zoom, etc — but we’re still largely sitting at desks, using them during the work day. It’s just crazy how prescient this is for where we are right now.³
¹ Sort of crazy to look back at how connected the NeXT machines were to the macOS we still use today!
² I was reminded of it when Jon Erlichmen shared it yesterday, and found my old note to use it for a post about remote work. Better late than never!
³ Yes, even if he wasn’t alone with the concept — he was the master communicator of such things.
