Apple

Imagining the Future

November 16, 2011, 09:19 PM

I’ve been slowly getting through Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. One tidbit I was struck by:

…he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid- to late eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.

That was Steve Jobs in September 1982 at a retreat with the Macintosh team. He had imagined the laptop one-and-a-half years before shipping the first Mac, and seven years before the Macintosh Portable saw the light of day.