Video of 75-Minute 1995 Interview with Steve Jobs

Last month, following the death of Steve Jobs, Computerworld published a transcript of a lengthy 1995 interview with Steve Jobs conducted as part of an oral history program for the Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation.

The complete, unabridged video of that 75-minute interview has now been posted, offering an interesting look at Jobs before his return to Apple.

In the interview, Jobs touches on his childhood, education, and the future of the Internet, while also sharing thoughts on his time with Apple, NeXT, and Pixar. The interview also includes an interesting take on death being the "greatest invention of life", a theme Jobs addressed in discussing the nature of start-up companies challenging the status quo to innovate and push technology further.

I've always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I'm sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn't work very well because it didn't make room for the young. It didn't know how the world was fifty years ago. It didn't know how the world was twenty years ago. It saw it as it is today, without any preconceptions, and dreamed how it could be based on that. We're not satisfied based on the accomplishment of the last thirty years. We're dissatisfied because the current state didn't live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.

Jobs would of course revisit that theme ten years later in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, but that time from a more personal perspective following his cancer diagnosis.