Steve Jobs on how Heathkits changed how he saw the world

Jobs recalls a Hewlett Packard engineer named Larry Lang moving in down the street from him when he was only 6 or 8 years old and introducing him to Heathkits.

“Heathkits were these products you would buy in kit form… They would come with detailed manuals on how to put this thing together, and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. And you’d actually build this thing.”

Jobs explains that this was formative in his development in several ways:

“It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked… But maybe more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things one saw around oneself in the universe. You see, these things were not mysteries anymore. When you looked at a television set, you would think, ‘Well I haven’t built one of those but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog, and I built two other Heathkits, so I could build a television set.’”

He continues:

“Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment… It gave one a tremendous degree of self-confidence that through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment.”

Full video: Arjun Agarwal “The Steve Jobs 95 Interview unabridged“ (Apr 1995)