[asveikau]

I don't think it was all that unconventional to think computer networking was going to be big in the mid 1980s. Especially for someone like Jobs who was watching the industry and based in Silicon Valley where it would have been more obvious. (Note that he talks about IBM wiring up large companies.) Look at this google ngram for "information age" - already in full swing by 1982. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=information+ag... -- Note also some pop culture of the time, like War Games where Matthew Broderick orders plane tickets via modem (among other things), or Ghostbusters where Egon declares "print is dead". Even Back to the Future II depicts 2015 having video conferencing and peer to peer payment. (Still waiting on hoverboards...)

Jobs' observations seem spot on and they are, but I think this was already in the consciousnesses for the industry at that time. It only seems out there compared to what "regular people" outside the niche would have said. Or possibly to those of us who are too young to remember the kind of attitudes you'd hear in the 80s. (I barely remember this, but it was definitely there...)

Your pg quotes are also notable for what they got wrong. I read that as a "web browser as dumb terminal" view - not unconventional for its time. As we've seen, first with JavaScript and then with mobile apps instead of the browser, complexity in the client and running code locally is still a good thing. For many tasks the web has lost.

[drzaiusapelord]

Unfortunately, Jobs as visionary is a meme that sticks. Of course, by '85 the idea of a nationwide or world-wide network was common amongst nerds. Heck, around that time I was a kid with a modem then dialing into BBS's. We were already in the baby steps of it all. Universities certainly were ahead of the consumer market with ARPANET and NSFNET, I think at 1.5mbps. Not sure if compuserv was up yet, but it was certainly around that time.

The story of the birth of the internet is an interesting one that had little to no involvement from guys like Jobs, who were fixated on the new desktop market and were shockingly short-sighted in regards to networking. When did we even have an integrated by default modem in the 80s? The desktop guys talked a big game regarding the future, but knew their bread was buttered by hardware and software sales and this whole dial-up thing wasn't profitable for them. In fact, it was kinda a threat. I spent a lot more time playing things like Tradewars (or other doors games) or MUDs, for free, than buying the AAA titles of the time, which I found boring because they couldn't do online multiplayer.

[asveikau]

I do give Jobs some credit for being able to articulate these ideas pretty well. I am guessing he was surrounding himself with smart people and it isn't totally his. But he does well with it, in this interview and others from the time period.

But we shouldn't elevate it to something it's not. The cynical view, and to an extent a correct one, is that this is 1980s conventional wisdom mixed with a guy trying to sell computers.