I can’t communicate to you how awesome this is unless you use it. … carrying around these computers with tons of data in them is byzantine by comparison.

— Steve Jobs, WWDC 1997.

If you want to hear a bit of subject matter that Steve Jobs will reignite tomorrow, listen to his closing remarks at WWDC over fourteen years ago; a boisterous account of his networked life in which personal data is redundant and ubiquitous.

His story starts at 14 minutes, 10 seconds. For those who prefer not to watch the consummate showman, I’ve transcribed the most important words below:

I just wanna focus on something that is very close to my heart, which is living in a high-speed networked world (to get your job done every day).

How many of you manage your own storage on your computers? How many of you backup your computers, as an example? How many of you had a crash in the last three years, four years? Right, okay.

Let me describe the world I live in.

About eight years ago, we had high-speed networking connected to our (now obsolete) Next hardware running NextStep at the time. And because we were using NFS, we were able to take all of our personal data—our home directories we call them—off of our local machines and put them on a server. And the software made that completely transparent. And because the server had a lot of RAM on it, in some cases it was actually faster to get stuff from the server than it was to get stuff off your local hard disk because in some cases it would be cached in the RAM of the server if it was in popular use.

But what was really remarkable was that the organization could hire a professional person to backup that server every night. And could afford to spend a little bit more on that server so maybe it had redundant disk drives, redundant power supplies.

In the last seven years, you know how many times I have lost any personal data?

Zero.

Do you know how many times I’ve backed up my computer?

Zero.