Apple's late CEO, Steve Jobs
His scripted address touches on a project at MIT that would eventually come to fruition as Google Streetview and explains that computers are set to be a new addition to our work and home environments. He reveals that he sees Apple's job as making sure these objects are great rather than looking "like garbage," but that they will become so important that we'll have to use them regardless of how ugly they are -- statements which echo some of Jobs's better-known speeches.
However, in the Q&A that follows, he starts to describe what, to all intents and purposes is the iPad. He says: "Apple's strategy is really simple. What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes. That's what we want to do and we want to do it this decade," says Jobs. "And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don't have to hook up to anything and you're in communication with all of these larger databases and other computers." It could be argued that he's thinking about notebook computers, but time and again in the conversation he comes back to the notion of computers that will fit in your pocket that most people will be able to afford.
In the same Q&A he also foresees the world wide web and the use of computers as communication tools, bringing people together through shared interests. In the same session he also touches on a new concept for selling and distributing software that sounds not unlike the current App Store.
To put his visionary statements from this speech into context: in 1983, Apple had yet to launch the Macintosh computer, Microsoft was still two years away from launching Windows, the mobile phone was celebrating its fifth birthday and Sir Tim Berners-Lee was seven years away from his first demonstration of the world wide web.