Thursday, October 06, 2011

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish - Steve Jobs Commencement Address at Stanford 2005

This speech is well worth listening to.  I suspect it will be taught in business schools in the future and perhaps we will have a culture that is a little more innovative and a lot less money hungry.  Jobs wasn't so much interested in taking the proscribed "path to success" rather he let life toss challenges at him and find his own path. Enjoy!

2 comments:

JLubeJack said...

Great speech on many levels. Like many geniuses, Jobs' remarkable achievements are only now coming to be appreciated. Much to learn from this man… Thanks for posting Hardy

Anonymous said...

Rest In Peace Steve.

Back in February 1979 I bought my first computer. It it cost me $1200 and was an Apple ][. It was serial number 16284. It did not have built in floating point basic, rather it had Integer Basic instead burned into 3 of its 4 EPROMS which were already installed. The remaining 2 empty sockets were for expansion EPROMS. By the way, those memory chips were 2k. That's 2 Kilobytes. The concept of MB (Megabyte) was still years away. You had to load floating point basic ("Applesoft") using a tape recorder. The video screen was your TV set with an RF Modulator hooked to the rabbit ear antenna. And the computer arrived as a simple unit with 16k Kilobytes of ram chips, expandable to 48k. To its merits, the all-in-one computer had expansion ports where a computer user could easily plug in up to 8 expansion upgrade PC cards. My Apple computer was fully packed (and over heated many times), having a "high speed" 9600 baud serial telephone/printer interface, a dual 5-inch floppy disk interface (that was an extra $500!), a Z-80 CP/M card (similar to PC DOS of today), a few other odds and ends, and a very unique 5 Megabyte Hard Drive interface. My hard drive unit was a left over from my micro code programming work to create the first software for one of the very first private market hard drive systems for an Apple computer. The hard drive company went bankrupt and I got paid zip, nada, zilch, zero for my contracted work. But I got to keep my very own 5 megabyte hard drive system in 1981! Was the only kid in most cities with his own computer and a working external hard drive! And it weighed only 30 pounds...

Have many other stories of what I did with my first Apple ][ computer, but that will take a bit longer to write it all. Finally stopped using the old ][ level unit in 1996, after having dragged around similar models (Apple ///, and Franklin Ace 1000s) from Pennsylvania, Texas, Germany, and back to Texas. The original first unit had stopped working sometime in the 80's.

To me, those 17 years from 1979 to 1996 was one of the most interesting times of my computer life. And I still have a couple of the Apple compatible units (the Franklin's) even today. Sadly, they just gather dust in the garage or storage unit. Never bought another Apple product again after that.

richard h.
fort worth, texas, usa