The plant was “as automated as any TV plant I’d seen in America,” he
wrote. As he toured the factory floors, he began to understand the mindset
that fueled this minor miracle.
A woman who attached the serial numbers to microwaves said she
treated her task as an exercise in discipline and integrity.
“They admit it’s the same simple function, hour after hour, but neither
thinks the days are dull,” observed Magaziner of the workers he watched.
One woman double-checked her work even after the inspector came
around.
“I put my spirit, my soul into this product,” she said.
The future of technology, people were realizing, was not West but East.
And inconsequential South Korea was already inching toward the global
market. The first PC had been released in America in 1981. Before long a
torrent of early mobile phones and audio players gave way to the sudden
dominance of Japanese and later South Korean corporations. By 1995,
there would be no American-owned television manufacturer left.
—
IN NOVEMBER 1983 TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD Steve Jobs arrived in South
Korea. He was greeted by smokestacks and factory workers who wore
Samsung company uniforms and lapel pins, employees who would not
hesitate to salute their chairman if he so desired.
Jobs didn’t visit South Korea out of romance or adventure—the
motivations that had brought him to Japan and India. He was on a bold and
prescient mission: to build a tablet computer, a full twenty-seven years
before the introduction of the iPad, for his start-up company, Apple
Computer.
“Steve knew the future was mobile. He was looking to build a
Dynabook,” said his colleague Jay Elliot, who accompanied him on the trip,
as well as on subsequent Samsung visits. “He needed a supplier of memory
and displays.”
Skeptics were calling the Dynabook tablet concept, created by Xerox, a
distant and fanciful idea. It resembled a prop in the movie 2001: A Space
Odyssey. It was thought to be too expensive to get to market and too small a
niche in the marketplace. A decade earlier, Xerox’s elite PARC laboratory
had developed a prototype—“a personal computer for children of all