Had he lived, today would have marked the 60th birthday of Steve Jobs, who was born February 24, 1955.
While most of the tributes to Jobs will no doubt highlight later events in his life — the unveiling of the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone or the iPad — I instead wanted to mark the occasion with one of the lesser-known Jobs videos: his first television interview, recorded around the time the Apple II was making waves.
If you never thought you’d see the day when Jobs would geek out over seeing himself on a television screen, check out the video after the jump.
The video is notable for more than just the chance to see the usually collected and prepared Apple co-founder get nervous about an interview. It’s also the start of the Steve Jobs cult of personality. In Apple’s early days, marketing guru Regis McKenna came up with the idea of using Jobs himself as the person through which to market computers to the masses.
Apple had previously relied on celebrities like Dick Cavett, but Jobs was a charismatic, attractive individual who could speak the language of engineers, but also communicate to the general public why they would want to invest in something as terrifyingly alien as a personal computer.
Jobs might have worried about the role early on, but there’s no doubt that this was the start of something that would become his true genius: an ability not just to help invent great products, but also to tell us why we should care about them.
It’s a tribute to him that so many millions of people today do.
Tim Cook also took to Twitter to commemorate his former boss:
Remembering Steve, who would have turned 60 today. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” pic.twitter.com/0YD0gZ7jvm
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) February 24, 2015
Happy birthday, Steve.