# Key transcript excerpts — Steve Jobs, 1983 Aspen talk

Source: machine transcript from the X repost video supplied by the reader. This is not an official transcript.

## Computer as the next medium

> “In their lifetimes, the computer will become the predominant medium of communication just as the television took over from the radio, took over from even the book.”

Timestamp in captured transcript: about 48–56 seconds.

## Electronic mail and portable computers

> “If you compare the telephone to what we’re seeing now in electronic mail, where we link a bunch of computers together, and we can send messages to an electronic mailbox which people can then receive at their leisure…”

> “One of these days when we have portable computers with radio links, they can be walking around Aspen and retrieve it.”

Timestamp: about 652–703 seconds.

## Asking Aristotle a question

> “The problem was you can’t ask Aristotle a question… as we look towards the next 50 to 100 years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit or an underlying set of principles… maybe someday after the person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said?’”

Timestamp: about 1221–1288 seconds.

## A book-sized computer with a radio link

> “What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you… We really want to do it with a radio link in it.”

Timestamp: about 1523–1541 seconds.

## Software distribution over phone lines

> “Where we’ll be going is transmitting this stuff electronically over the phone lines… If you want to buy it, just type in your Visa number and you got it.”

Timestamp: about 2414–2445 seconds.

## Voice recognition / language understanding

> “Voice recognition is… going to be the better part of the decade away… understanding language is much harder than understanding voice… boy, this stuff’s hard.”

Timestamp: about 3236–3281 seconds.