How do you people know what Jobs meant by the word "steal"? And it's always kinda opposite of what the usual meaning is. Is there a Steve Jobs dictionary somewhere?
How do you people know what Jobs meant by the word "steal"?
It's easily gleaned from the context. Clearly he is distinguishing between stealing and copying, the key differentiator I believe to be some metaphorical notion of possession.
From this idea you can infer that Jobs is saying that you can take a solution designed for (or, by possession, owned by) a given historical problem and repurpose it so that it can now solve a new problem.
That's the only way the quote makes sense, and that's the only way you can read Jobs's reference to the diverse fields of study his early Macintosh people had under their belt before tackling computer science. It was all about repurposing old ideas to meet new challenges.
