A Very Rare Video of Steve Jobs Telling the History of Apple
This very rare video was recorded in the 1980s. It shows Steve Jobs talking about the origin of Apple. It's fascinating to see how he hints at the Next Big Thing, back when the Macintosh was still a secret project in development.
Context & Ripple Effects
The tape lands two weeks after Brain Pickings surfaced the circa-1986 PBS documentary on Jobs' NeXT years, making this the second piece of 1980s Jobs footage to surface in under a month. Both sit in a lineage that goes back at least to the 2009 roundup of his greatest Macworld keynotes, which established archival Jobs video as recurring editorial material rather than one-off curiosities.
What distinguishes this recording is its timing: Jobs narrates Apple's origin while the Macintosh was still an unannounced project, so the video doubles as a record of how he framed the company's story publicly before the product existed — exactly the kind of primary source that becomes scarcer, and more contested, as the people in it stop giving new interviews.
First-order effects
- Historians and biographers of Apple gain a dated primary source: Jobs' own mid-1980s account of the company's founding, recorded while the Macintosh launch narrative was still being shaped behind closed doors.
- Gizmodo gets a traffic-driving exclusive in a genre — recovered Jobs footage — where outlets compete on access to private archives rather than new reporting.
Second-order effects
- Other holders of 1980s-era computing footage — museums, former employees, broadcasters — face fresh incentive to digitize and license their tapes while demand for Jobs material is at a peak, feeding the same pipeline Gizmodo and Brain Pickings are drawing from.
- Each surfacing raises the bar for the next: 'rare' claims now get scrutinized against a growing public corpus of Jobs appearances, pushing outlets toward stronger provenance checks before publishing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Jobs-era primary-source video consolidates into a canon — a fixed set of authenticated recordings that future writing about Apple's founding will cite, with authenticity and chain-of-custody becoming the differentiator between credible and dubious finds.
The trend: As archival footage of Steve Jobs surfaces at an accelerating pace, privately held 1980s recordings are being converted into a public, citable historical record of Apple's founding era.