More about tools. From Bloomberg Businessweek‘s “Steve Jobs: The Beginning, 1955-1985“:

“In the late 1970s, computer makers were popping up much the way car companies did in Detroit at the turn of the 20th century. Osborne, Commodore, and RadioShack were all selling what were becoming known as ‘personal computers.’ Like the Apple I, they were made for hobbyists. They were hard to use and didn’t really do much. The Altair, the earliest, pretty much just lit up little lights once you laboriously connected a bunch of switches on the logic board.

Jobs wanted the next computer to be something different—an appliance, something anyone could use. That was the Apple II, which came out a year after the Apple I. He hammered at his message as the company grew: Computers should be tools. Trip Hawkins, one of Apple’s first 50 employees, remembers Jobs obsessing over an article he’d read in a science magazine about the locomotive efficiency of animal species. ‘The most efficient species was the condor, which could fly for miles on only a few calories,’ Hawkins says. ‘Humans were way down the list. But then if you put a man on a bicycle, he was instantly twice as efficient as the condor.’ The computer, Jobs said, was a ‘bicycle for the mind.'”

••••••••••

Trick riding, 1899: