Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement speech, and the Steve Jobs Archive has marked the occasion by uploading an HD version of the speech, publishing notes Jobs emailed to himself, and sharing details about the leadup to the speech. You can see everything on a page on the Steve Jobs Archive’s website and watch the HD video on YouTube.
The website’s page about the speech is a little saccharine, but there’s no denying that the address has been very influential – LeBron James used the speech to help inspire the Cleveland Cavaliers during their championship NBA Finals run in 2016, for example – so I found it pretty cool to read some of the history of it all.
I particularly liked reading Jobs’ emailed notes with various outlines, themes, and drafts he was trying out. The website also has the interesting detail that Jobs “read his text verbatim” – given the confidence he had in his many famous presentations for Apple, I figured he might have ad-libbed parts of it. It’s all worth checking out, if you have a few minutes.
Jobs’ friends and family launched The Steve Jobs Archive in 2022 as a place to share things like photos, documents, and stories of the Apple co-founder.