The issue of TIME with the date of January 3, 1983 (but it had been on newsstands for a week, from December 26) had a historical cover. For the first time the American weekly as “person of the year” had chosen an object: the personal computer. Indeed, on that occasion the title of the award was changed, “Machine of the Year”.
As has been authoritatively noted, that recognition did not come at the dawn of the era of personal computers: there were already several models on the market. But it is clear that that moment was the end of dawn: in two years, sales had quadrupled and from then on the growth would have been unstoppable.
That cover rightly caused a sensation and only many years later did it become clear that things could have turned out differently. That maybe that title was going to go to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who was very angry. At the time, the candidates we were talking about were US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. But the magazine, to justify the choice of the PC, wrote: “There are moments when the most significant force of a year is not a person but a process, and when there is a general recognition by the whole society that this new process will change the course of all other processes. That’s why, after weighing the events around the world, TIME decided that 1982 was the year of the computer ”.
And Steve Jobs? Here is what Walter Isaacson, who in 1982 was a young editor of the magazine, and who will then write a monumental biography of the co-founder of Apple, says: “As the end of 1982 approached Steve Jobs was increasingly convinced that it would be him” of the Year ”by TIME. At the newspaper headquarters where I was a young editor, the rumor was that director Ray Cave was waiting for the last minute to choose between Jobs and the first “Machine of the Year” “. That rumor turned out to be unreliable. “We never considered Jobs,” Cave will tell Isaacson.
The fact is that no one had warned Jobs, who in the meantime had opened the doors of Apple to TIME correspondent in San Francisco Michael Moritz thinking he was working on the cover story. In Isaacson’s book, Jobs recalls that that issue of TIME arrived in the mail and when he unwrapped the package, waiting to see his face on the cover, he was stunned seeing instead “this kind of computer sculpture” and then read the article about him and it was so terrible that he cried. O screamed. In English it says “cried”.
Jobs became convinced he had been shot by Moritz: “He was jealous of me and wrote a bad article and his bosses in New York must have read and thought: we can’t make this Man of the Year type.” In reality, even Moritz was disappointed by how his portrait of Jobs had been reworked in the editorial office by adding elements of gossip on the ugly story of the denied paternity of Lisa, the daughter had four years earlier by Jobs with Chrisann Brennan.
Moritz almost immediately stopped being a journalist to join the Sequoia venture capital fund through which he invested in Google, YouTube and PayPal, among others.
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