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Apple cofounder Steve Jobs
One of those old interviews was shared by venture capitalist Chris Dixon on his blog Friday, under the title, "It all blossomed out of this tiny little seed."
The video is part of a documentary filmed in 1985, the year Jobs was ousted from Apple to found a new computer company called NeXT.
In the film, Jobs was asked what made him start over again when he was already wealthy and acknowledged as one of the most influential people in the computer industry.
Part of it, the film says, came from his need to feel like he was "contributing to history." And Jobs said he felt that kind of inspiration when he saw a bunch of Apple II computers in a classroom for third and fourth graders.
He said:
"What hit me about it was that here was this machine that very few people designed - about four in the case of the Apple II - who gave it to some other people who didn't know how to design it but knew how to make it, to manufacture it. They could make a whole bunch of them. And then they gave it to some people that didn't know how to design it or manufacture it, but they knew how to distribute it. And then they gave it to some people that didn't know how to design or manufacture or distribute it, but knew how to write software for it.
Gradually this sort of inverse pyramid grew. It finally got into the hands of a lot of people - and it all blossomed out of this tiny little seed."
Jobs went on to describe how incredible it was to see "this germ of an idea" go on to impact so many kids and help them grow up with something that might be "very beneficial to their lives."
"That's an incredible feeling to know that you had something to do with it, and to know it can be done, to know that you can plant something in the world and it will grow, and change the world, ever so slightly," he said.
Here's the full video of the documentary (comments for this story starts at 18:24):