Dime for your Thoughts?

Here we are in 2009, twenty five years after the first Macintosh hit the market for purchase. It seems unimaginable in the life we live today to be without a computer. Not only do we use computers, but digital media players, digital cameras and a slew of other devices. All of which can interface with the computer. Email, forums, bill paying, reading news, reading books, watching videos, social interaction etc have become a daily occurrence for us. Thanks to Blackberrys, iPhones and other PDAs we have our “mini-computers” always with us. To keep in touch, keep our appointments strait and so on.

There once was a time when there were no personal computers, no PDAs! How did they live? Somebody once said, “What would anyone do with a personal computer?” Well, 25 years later you have an answer.
It started with the Apple II; the first personal computer on the market. The Apple II was the child of the Apple I, which was the Apple prototype personal computer developed by Steve Jobs in his garage. The processor speed was a mere 1mhz, a fraction of what is available today.

In 1983 Apple made another giant leap introducing the first GUI (graphical user interface) computer. The computer was named Lisa. Instead of using text, Lisa used pictures known as icons and folders to load files. It made it much easier for users to identify with rather than having to learn how to enter complex lines to pull up files. It was easy just click on the folder. Lisa also boasted a 5 mhz processor. At a hefty price of nearly $10,000.00 was too much; it was a commercial bust.

Next came the Macintosh. The Mac was priced much lower and had a built-in monitor along with a built-in 3.5″ disk drive and mouse. The Mac also used GUI. The Mac turned out to be a huge success helped by the commercial ran during Superbowl XVIII. The commercial showed of what was to come referring to the GUI which still wasn’t well known yet. It mirror the geopolitical climate of the time with the US and Soviet Union in the midst of a cold war.The Mac’s price tag was a 1/4 of Lisa’s and the MAC had an 8mhz processor along with 128k of RAM.

While the Mac had came along and made a splash, their competitor Microsoft  was getting into the GUI race too. At the same Time Steve Jobs was in a battle with Apple management and soon after left the company in 1985. During his absence, the company would struggle. Before leaving, Jobs developed the first laser printer and Adobe developed the first desktop publisher. In 1987 Apple introduced the Apple II, which had twice the processor speed as its predecessor at 16mhz. The Mac II also had a color video card. In 1989 Apple introduced its first laptop, the Macintosh portable. The laptop was a flop. It was hardly portable and with a huge price tag of $6500.00 was considered a joke.

The 90s began the dark days for Apple. The innovative giant saw flop after flop and with the emergence of Microsoft Windows, failed to compete. Apple didn’t run popular Microsoft software and third party developers went with the more compatible IBM systems other computer manufactures switched to. Apple Introduced a new laptop in 1991 called the Power Book 100. The Power Book was seen as lackluster, but was received fairly well. It had a 16mhz processor, the same as the Macintosh portable, but no floppy drive. The Quadra 700, Apple’s first tower model offered a vast improvement in speed for the time at 25mhz. Along with the speed came a $6000.00 price tag. 1993 brought the first Mac to have a color monitor. The new color Mac took the same shape as the original Mac. The color Mac had a 16 mhz processor.

1996 brought the return of Steve Jobs and the beginning of the new Apple revolution.
Jobs was about to introduce what he had envisioned for Apple nearly 20 years earlier when he began working on the Apple I. When he returned to Apple, Jobs had to pull the company from the grave. It had dropped to 3% of market share. The first big thing was the introduction of the iMac. The iMac was a cool design with all-in-one unit. The iMac offered a jump in processor speed at 233 MHz. The iMac was a huge success. In 1999 Apple introduced the Power Macintosh G3, also with a futuristic design and 300 MHz processor. Apple introduced the iBook in 1999 with a candy color look and 300 MHz processor. The three new offerings were huge successes. It brought Apple out of the dark age, but it was just a small sample of what was yet to come. Jobs had envisioned computers being part of everyday life, playing music, video and pictures. That vision had already partly become a reality, but soon Apple would move on innovative products that would interface with computers.

As the new millennium came Apple branched out to digital music players developing the Apple iPod. Apple was not the first company to invent to digital music player, but they saw players on the market as clumsy, oversized and ugly. Apple would use the same futuristic design concept as the iMac and they would reduce the size allowing the owner to put the player in their pocket. The other huge jump was the capacity. The iPod had 5 and 10 GB of memory. The software was simple and the device responded quickly to commands. The iPod was released October 2001 and was a huge success surpassing everyone’s expectations. Apple also introduced a new Power Book that year which had a 400 MHz processor.

In 2002 Apple had another huge jump in technology with the introduction of iMac G4 and the Power Macintosh G5. The new iMac was redesigned again and came with a flat screen monitor. It had an 800MHz processor. The Power Macintosh came with a high price tag and plenty of punch. It sold for $2599.00 and had 1.6 GHz processor.  The G5 was the first Apple model to use the aluminum case. Apple also introduced the Generation 2 iPod which had up to 20 gigabytes of memory.

2004 brought the iPod mini and the iPod photo. The iPod mini was a fraction of the size, but had much less memory at 4 GB. The iPod Photo was the first digital music player to display photos. It supported JPG, BMP,GIF, TIFF and PNG formats. The iPod Photo had  30 and 60 GB models.

2005 brought  yet another movement in technology. Apple offered three new players that year.  The Nano was like the mini, but Apple dubbed the device as nearly indestructible; dropping it out of cars and running it over after it had been dropped. The Nano had 4GB of Memory. The other big introduction was the iPod Video, which was capable of playing video, viewing pictures, playing video games and playing music. The iPods carry a large price tag and Apple was being undercut by cheaper brands. Apple introduced the iPod shuffle to counter this. The shuffle only had 1 GB of memory, but it was priced much less than the other models.

2007 was one of the biggest years for Apple in innovation. The iPod had been a huge success and there were more great devices to come. The iPod got better, as it did every year. The original iPod was 80 or 160 GB of memory. The Nano now could do all the same functions that the regular iPod could, but much smaller. The new addition to the family was the iPod touch. The iPod Touch had even more functionality. The screen was GUI and also used other applications. The iPod touch was a lot like a PDA. The device had email, Safari web browser, maps and much more. The iPod touch led to another huge seller for Apple; the iPhone. The iPhone was much better than other PDA phones. It had a better browser than the BlackBerry. Apple also introduced the Mac Pro to replace the Power Mac. The Mac Pro offers 2.8GHz processor speed and 8 core processor and two optical drives. Apple wasn’t done yet! in 2008 they introduced the Air Mac; the thinnest laptop at less than 1 inch. It has a 2.8GHz processor and retails for $2000.00. Apple still offers the iMac. Today’s version has a 2.4 GHz processor. Apple has been viewed as not versatile enough. It didn’t run Microsoft applications and it isn’t compatible with anything. Today’s Apple is more compatible and can even run Window’s office with a much more stable system than Windows. Apple continues to make their product better implementing a new software similar to system restore, but Apple’s program allows you to select specific files. It’s amazing how far we’ve come since those days of the first MAC. There were people who there was no use for a GUI system, just like those people that said there was no use for a personal computer. Apple has been at the front of the technology push since those days of the Apple one and they are now at the front of the line today with the cell phone and digital media device technology today. Happy Birthday Mac

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.