Steve Jobs and Caputo's Corner

I guess I'll have no way of really knowing if Steve Jobs was a Caputo's Corner reader in the 9 and a half months we have been live until his untimely death last week.  As I mentioned in the quick hit last week, we lost truly one of the pioneers of invention.  He and Steve Wozniak started Apple Computer in 1977 with...well...what would look today to be a piece of wood with some buttons on it.



From thedailymail.co.uk


Nobody really knew that this antique would be the first in a long line of spectacular computer products that have really revolutionized the way we live out lives.  Caputo's Corner has always referred to himself as a PC guy (sorry, Steve), but we here at the blog have been very much in tune with Apple products over the years.  Today's retrospective takes a look at some of the Apple lines that have influenced us over the years. 

Apple IIc



From old-computers.com

 "Open Apple-Control-Reset."  That was 1980s Apple's equivalent of Control-Alt-Delete.  Caputo's Corner's first computer was in fact an Apple IIc.  This was one of the first portable computers, as the processor was located in the keyboard itself.  A cable connected it to the iconic green and heavily pixelated monitor.  There was no programming in the computer itself, oh no.  This thing did not work unless you had those big old bulky 5 and 1/4 inch floppy disks that carried a whopping 720 kB of memory space (some disks could carry over a megabyte...unheard of!).  This was even before 3 and 1/2 inch disks became the norm.  We didn't really use this computer for anything productive, mostly just to play games (my favorite of which was Space Quarks...we broke many an "F" key firing that thing), but it did have some business capabilities such as word processing and very basic spreadsheets, which really were useless unless you had one of those old dot-matrix printers.  Al Gore had not invented the internet so the Apple IIc had no online capabilities, as did its successor, our first classroom computer: the IIgs.

Apple IIgs



From obsolutecomputermuseum.org

 I'll never forget when I was in 4th grade we were taking what I believe was a spelling test with Mrs. Dockeray (one teacher from elementary school who used to scare the living daylights out of me).  I finished it earlier than anybody else and I asked her if I could play on the computer and my favorite game of the day: Number Munchers (gotta love the "troggles")!  I thought she said yes I could, so I went back to the computer and away I went.  About 2 minutes later..."NICHOLAS...GET BACK IN YOUR SEAT...NOW!!!"  "But...but...you said I could!" "I SAID NO SUCH THING!"  So while I go back to my seat mortified I can't help but reminisce about that computer: the IIgs, which had the most spectacular innovation for computers of the late 80s and early 90s: COLOR!  Yes, blogosphere, the IIgs made that colorful Apple logo finally mean something, nevermind the higher processing power and RAM (all of 1 megabyte).  Number Munchers was not of course the only game you could play, and the whole reason we had that computer was so that we could play educational games on it.  Unfortunately, it was the only computer in the room, and it had to be shared among 30 kids.  I'll never forget when I was given the very important responsibility of "computer keeper," I just had to make sure the cart that carried the thing was closed...very important...

iPod nano

From Newtonshead.com

So we fast forward a few years (through Apple's dark years between the end of the II series and the beginning of the i-series), skip the original iPod (since I never owned one), and go right to the original 4GB iPod nano.  We go from 1 MB of memory being just a MASSIVE amount of storage space to 4 GB of music in your pocket.  I don't even think Steve Jobs himself could have imagined this type of digital revolution.  1000 songs all on a piece of electronics 2 inches by 4 inches.  The battery life on it (like many of Apple's portable devices) was not very good, but it is a durable piece of equipment.  It in fact is still in use.  When I got my next Apple device, I gave it to my brother in Illinois, who as far as I know is still using it.  The iPod came in very handy for long road trips where you could just plug it into the audio jack (can you imagine a time when cars only had tape decks?) and be on your way.  The iPod nano was also revolutionary in that it used Flash memory to store the music instead of a hard drive like the original iPod did.  Fewer moving parts meant longer battery life.  I could maybe get 8 hours of playback on that thing...I would imagine that Joe gets less since it's several years old now...not quite the 14 that they were advertising.

iPhone 4



From techradar.com

 When the iPhone originally came out, it was probably Steve Jobs' real crowning achievement.  He took celluar commuication and combined it with the iPod (already revolutionary for its day and age) into one handy dandy "device."  At trivia, Rick the emcee doesn't call them phones, he called them "devices."  They really are devices that can also make and receive phone calls.  I wonder what Alexander Graham Bell would have thought that his invention could be held in the palm of your hand, play music instantly, surf the internet, take and receive pictures, and do a million and one other things all at the same time?  Bell probably would have looked at you with 4 heads because Al Gore had not yet invented the internet.  Probably the only mistake Apple made when initially selling the iPhone was the exclusivity contract with AT&T.  One of our first pieces ever at Caputo's Corner dealt with Apple ending its exclusivity with AT&T and allowing Verizon customers access to the device.  AT&T gave Apple a lot of money for exclusivity, hoping that the draw of the iPhone would attract more customers to AT&T.  It worked for a while, and I still use AT&T service because of the family plan we are on, but Verizon has always had better phone and data coverage, and it was a very smart business move on Apple's part to open up the iPhone to the Verizon market. 

There is a look at some of the ways that Steve Jobs' innovations have shaped the life and times of Caputo's Corner.  Can't wait for iPhone 5GS, iPad 3, and iEverythingElse.