My Job, Apparently

Ironically, in spite of my handle TechBoy that I use here, I seem to rarely talk about tech. I suppose that is because I talk tech just about everywhere else. I started this blog to sort of balance that out and give the other half of my brain some exercise. According to this blog posting, however, that isn't good enough, so I feel inclined to inject a little tech related musings today. Maybe I'll throw in a little more tech once in while, just to keep some people from nagging me.

I would imagine that the biggest and most prevalent tech news is the release of the iPad last Saturday. However, rather than talk about how awesome it is and go on about all the apps, I thought I'd set the Wayback Machine and take the iPad back to some of my early techie days and speculate what reactions I'd have.

"But Mr. Peabody, this isn't the Wayback Machine!"

"Shut up Sherman or I'll make you pick up my poo again."

The year is about 1995. I've had a Macintosh IIci for about 3 years and traded it in for a refurbished PowerBook 180c color laptop which had a screen an inch or two smaller in each dimension than the iPad. The World Wide Web was pretty new and you could only make your own website by learning how to hand-code HTML. The first WYSIWYG editor for HTML was coming out, called Adobe PageMill. It seemed nice, but really mangled the code so that going back in and customizing by hand usually took longer than if you had just built it that way in the first place.

The laptops of the time really give you a good comparison...

PowerBook 180c: 7.1 lbs

iPad: 1.5 lbs

PowerBook 180c: 2.25" thick

iPad: 13.4 mm thick

PowerBook 180c: 8.4" diagonal screen

iPad: 9.7 inch diagonal screen

PowerBook 180c: $4,110 (new)

iPad: $499 (new)

So there are a few figures to give you an idea of how far we've come. No wireless or broadband internet yet either. 300 baud (yeah, I know you have no idea what that means) telephone modem.

My friends and I were geeky enough, but if you had arrived from the future and handed us the iPad, with a transdimensional link to the current day internet....I don't think we would have bothered leaving for college. I think the only reason we spent any time away from our Commodore 64s and TRS-80s was because you couldn't do a lot with them, and the games sucked. However, we managed to loose a lot of time to them anyway. Does anyone remember "light pens"?! Now we just have fingers, but we thought it was way cool to be able to draw on a television screen. Yes, television screen. You would hook up your computer to your television. Ok, I reset the Wayback for high school...that wasn't 1995.

To be honest, I'm not sure how things would have been different with the iPad. My friends and I generally just were excited to play with new technology. I'm not sure we would have seen it as life changing, although seeing what technology could do, we might have been more inspired to invent things that would use it. That, and we would have bought a shit-load of Apple stock and be billionaires!

The iPad is really a device for today, with it's social networks and need for immediacy. We gobble content as fast as we can download or browse to it, although there is a lot more garbage content now with an emphasis on entertainment and time-killing rather than education.

"The new Apple Store is great isn't it?!"

"Yeah, but it sucks that they make you buy the spacesuit just to see the new iMonolith."

PS: Here's some crappy Atari games from the time too.