Neil Koenig, former BBC Senior Producer and ideaXme board advisor tells us of his illuminating conversation with Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs.
Sony Walkman TCD-D100 DAT
In Paris in September 1998, my colleague Peter Day and I met Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to record an interview for a BBC documentary. But before we could get started, Jobs pointed to our audio recorder and said “what’s that?”. He was fascinated, asked to examine it, and was impressed by the sound he heard through the headphones.
I was surprised. Why would one of the inventors of the personal computer industry be interested in our humble machine? But Jobs seemed to think it was cool, and in hindsight perhaps the device, a Sony TCD-D100 DAT Walkman, did have a certain elegance. Housed in a sleek, silver metal case, it was slightly smaller than a paperback book. It was also lighter than other machines used by broadcasters at the time, such as the Uher recorder (the latter was so heavy that the joke went that if you carried it by its shoulder strap you’d risk becoming lopsided and developing “Uher’s droop”).
More importantly, the TCD-D100 used DAT, “Digital Audio Tape”. First launched in the 1980s, DAT’s digital recording capability was claimed to offer superior quality to that of analogue devices, such as compact cassette recorders.
The iPod and DAT Machine
The recent news of the iPod’s demise reminded me of our meeting with Jobs, three years before the iPod was launched in 2001 – although it would be fanciful to suggest that this encounter might have played any role in Jobs’s thinking about ways to revolutionise access to music. Our little Sony DAT recorder and the iPod had different designs, were aimed at different markets and used different technologies. In any case, many accounts say it took Apple years to develop a portable music player, and to create the online music store (iTunes) that would be vital to the iPod’s success. So perhaps Jobs’s interest in our Sony recorder was no more than an example of his enthusiasm for the possibilities of technology.
Still, the iPod and the DAT machine were similar in one sense: they both disrupted the markets for consumer and professional electronics, as analogue audio was ditched in favour of digital recording.
BBC Radio 4’s In Business Series
But the iPod not only revolutionised the music industry, it also created a demand for speech-based audio. In a kind of postscript to this tale, Peter Day, who was the host of BBC Radio 4’s “In Business” series, achieved early success in what is now called podcasting. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded his shows every week, resulting in him topping the BBC’s podcast charts, and The Mail on Sunday calling him “the podfather”.
Steve Jobs Saw Further And More Clearly
The heydays of the iPod and the DAT recorder each lasted around twenty years. This might seem a long time, if you believe that technology changes fast – but somewhat surprisingly, Steve Jobs told us he did not share this view: “things change fairly slowly, because ultimately, things are software based in our business, and software changes fairly slowly.” Perhaps it was this kind of insight that helped Jobs to see further and more clearly than many others.
You can find Neil Koenig’s ideaXme interviews here. His biography here.
Connect with Neil:
Twitter @neilkoenig
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