Way back in the year 1983, Apple's late CEO Steve Jobs delivered a speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado; and, going by a recently-discovered rare recording of that speech, he forecast the inception of the iPad!

The audio related to Job's full speech at the conference has been posted by Marcel Brown to his Life, Liberty and Technology site; and it completely reinforces the `visionary' title which has often been used to describe his farsightedness in the technology arena.

Predicting the emergence of the tablet market nearly three decades back, Jobs said - during the course of an extended Q&A session at the mentioned 1983 conference - that future technological advancements will witness the creation of a device which will unfold "an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you" --- the iPad, which the device actually turned out to be, 27 years after Jobs' prediction!

The audio also has Jobs mentioning that there will be a "radio link" in the "book computer," so as to allow the device to communicate without any need of a connection with anything else.

Jobs also said in his 1983 speech that, in the coming years, consumers' interactions with personal computers will surpass their interactions with their cars, Brown said about Jobs' predictions: "He confidently talks about the personal computer being a new medium of communication. Again, this is before networking was commonplace or there was any inkling of the Internet going mainstream."