Apple Computer Turns 30: Do We Still Need “Computer Money”
Apple computer turns 30 this week. The Toney computer company has redefined chic through the years. The only problem was not many of you were buying their computers. Apple computer has about 4% of the world’s computer market.
In my old life seeing anything about Apple would give me a warm feeling. You see I’m one of those original Apple zealots. I started using a Mac in 1986, bought one in 1987. And yes, I still have it and it still works. Maybe even in a pinch I could submit my column with it.
However, with the iPod craze I don’t get such a warm feeling anymore. What the Apple anniversary remind me of is how old I am. You loyal scribe is now 47 years old and it would seem everywhere I turn people are younger.
You see back in the day I had great academic debates with computer enthusiasts about the Mac versus the PC. It used to be great fun. The PC’s at the time where cheap but you needed your Ph.D to know how to work one. The Mac was easy to use, but nobody had enough money to buy one. How I ever came up with $6000 for my first Mac, I’ll never know. It’s a good thing it lasted through all these years.
Today the debate is over. Microsoft won that war a long time ago. Macs are priced the same as PC’s and the difference between them admittedly isn’t what it once was. But from what I can see all of these people younger than me don’t care anymore. To them, it’s just a box to get work done.
It makes me feel a bit like a relic. Yesterday I visited the hospital to see a specialist. He walks into the room and I almost asked for his “age of majority” card. Do they have those things anymore? Then I go to the dentist in Wallaceburg. There are so many smiling young faces I felt like signing an autograph as the resident old guy.
Occasionally I will let these computer savvy young people know a thing or two. I will say things like back in the day I loaded my computer off a cassette tape player. Well, I might as well have been from lower Gongo-land. Young people look at me as if I’m from another time. It’s like their PC has always been there best friend. They don’t know the gnashing of teeth many computer users had getting to this point.
In the old days of computing you had something called “computer time” and “computer money”. I never could understand that. At the University of Guelph in the late 1970′s students had so much time on computers and once they were on them they had so much money to spend. In essence computer time was paid for by computer money. But nobody knew what that meant. Computers were big bulky terminals. They connected to a big mainframe across the road which was housed somewhat like a bomb shelter.
Things changed a few years later when I started working on my first Mac. It didn’t even have a hard drive. Interestingly, I used the first version of Excel spreadsheet, only available on a Mac at that time to download data over a wire into the mainframe, still housed across the road. Back in those days Macs didn’t talk to IBM mainframes very easily. As far as I know your loyal scribe with the help of my sidekick Dr. A.K. Enamul Haque were the first students to do it. Then we had to run across the road to get the hard copy.
Oh, how things have changed. Apple’s financial health is better than those bad old days. It made record revenue of nearly $14 billion for its fiscal 2005 and is fortified with more than $8 billion in cash. Now Apple dominates the digital music market. If you have an iPod and 99 cents you can buy the latest hit single and download it from a Mac or a PC. When I was running across the road to get my hardcopy back in the day any thought of that would be right out of science fiction.
Should I get a badge of honour from some of these young people for helping to pioneer some of these computer bytes? No matter how many times I think so, in the end I think not. I need to get over it. Apple at 30 is what it is. I hope they never forget those of us who helped them get there.