What Happened When The Chronicle Sat Down With Steve Jobs Back in 1998

Steve Jobs was tired, and he didn’t seem thrilled to be sitting down for an interview with The Chronicle. He was at a conference for college computing administrators, and he had just finished facing tough questions from higher-education leaders who wanted reassurance that Apple Computer was getting its act together.

This was 1998, and the company was at a low, particularly in higher education. The prevailing attitude in the hotel ballroom where Mr. Jobs had just given a keynote address was not one of reverence for an executive known to be one of the best pitchmen of all time. It was deep skepticism. My assignment was to explain to readers how Apple planned to win back colleges, which were increasingly switching to Windows-based machines. Keep in mind that this was before the iPad, before the iPhone—even before the iPod. Apple mostly sold Macs, and the computers were expensive and incompatible with major software.

I was just a couple of years out of college (that’s me on the left), and this chance to sit down with Mr. Jobs was the biggest interview I’d ever been assigned. To make sure I didn’t totally mess it up, my editors sent along a more-seasoned reporter, Goldie Blumenstyk (that’s her on the right). I’m glad they did, because this is probably one of my all-time worst performances as an interviewer (which I concluded by awkwardly handing Steve Jobs my business card).

Even so, the 20 minutes The Chronicle had with Mr. Jobs is revealing about this tech-industry icon, and it serves as a reminder of how much the relationships between colleges and Silicon Valley companies have changed in the last 17 years.

“Some of the best ideas that we’ve ever had have come from higher ed ...”

Back then colleges were true leaders in tech innovation, and Apple needed them. Colleges were often the first place a student would be surrounded by networked machines, and students and their parents looked carefully at what make and model of computer campus leaders recommended.

Today Silicon Valley sets the agenda, having grown into not just a leader in technology but a kind of driver of culture. Colleges remain incubators of student and faculty tech experimentation, but campus digital services usually lag behind those offered in the private sector. Students dreaming up the next big thing are now excited to drop out of college, like Steve Jobs himself did, rather than stay on a campus to develop their innovations.

Why talk about this now? We unearthed the audio cassette during a recent office renovation—the words “Interview Jobs” scrawled sloppily across the label—and we realized we had never published the full proceedings. You can listen to the whole thing here.

A Guarded Genius

At the time we had hoped for a conversation, but what we got felt more like a deposition. Mr. Jobs was at times defensive and curt, and he often seemed impatient with our line of questioning. We knew he wasn’t going to spill any details about forthcoming products—his secrecy on that point was already legendary—but he was equally guarded on softball questions. He wouldn’t even reveal what campuses he liked to visit or who his personal heroes were.

“I’ve been to a few places in the last few months ...”

“Apple’s much bigger than me.”

Perhaps we should have guessed. A college official who knew Mr. Jobs well, Martin Ringle, the top technology official at Reed College, says that at the time Mr. Jobs “was under constant attack from the media.” After being famously kicked out of Apple in 1985, he had returned to the company just a year before, when it bought his struggling computer company NeXT. The big narrative in the press boiled down to: “Was he a one-trick pony with Apple, or was he just lucky?” Maybe he was only a mortal CEO, not a visionary genius.

“He was back, but he was very defensive at the time,” remembers Mr. Ringle.

That led to answers during our interview such as: “If your overall thrust is: Is Wintel doing pretty well in higher ed? Well, yeah, I think they’re doing pretty well in higher ed. But I think Apple is doing pretty well in higher ed, too. Is Apple as dominant as it once was? Of course not. Nobody’s saying it is. Is Apple going to play a pretty significant part of higher-ed computing? Yeah, I think it is.”

Wintel vs. Apple

Mr. Jobs was most animated when talking about the most technical details of his creations. He snapped his fingers repeatedly when describing the speed of the new USB standard Apple was adding to its computers. “You can connect up to 127 devices,” he said. He cited it as an example of the benefits of Apple’s integrated approach to designing both hardware and software, which he insisted would let the company be more innovative than any PC maker.

That message about Apple’s technical prowess was one that the company went out of its way to stress. Representatives insisted that we attend a briefing on the latest Apple technology—at the company’s headquarters, in Cupertino, Calif.—before we sat down with Mr. Jobs. We were happy to get the information (The Chronicle paid for our travel).

The Chronicle’s technology editor at the time, Lawrence Biemiller, had gotten Apple’s attention with an article he wrote a few months earlier that pointed to widespread defections from Macintoshes on campuses, and the company wanted to show our audience that it was going to bring important innovations to colleges. At the time, though, things like USB speeds felt kind of trivial, since personal computers were starting to seem like a commodity. What was the big deal about a connector cable?

For Mr. Ringle, of Reed College, the stakes were high on whether Mr. Jobs could save Apple.

“In the late 90s I was pretty much besieged by students, faculty members, alumni, and senior officers and others who were coming at me from every direction asking: Why are we still buying Macintoshes? Aren’t they over?” he remembers. “I basically staked my reputation and my position on the belief that that wasn’t true.”

By now we all know how it turned out. Apple did make a comeback. The real turnaround had begun just a few months before our 1998 interview, with the release of the iMac—an all-in-one computer that introduced personal computers to new audiences by promising better ease of use than PCs of the time. Innovations like Apple’s USB were part of a vision Mr. Jobs was too secretive to reveal at the time: making computers the hub for other, smaller computing devices, like iPods and later iPhones and iPads. Last week Apple became the most highly valued company in history.

The Full Interview

Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads a team exploring new story formats. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.