Technology that empowers you is more than just cool stuff. To be really successful, technology has to be affordable, easy to use, and capable of accomplishing important tasks which were previously difficult to do.
I was working for Apple Canada and living in Halifax, Nova Scotia in January 1985 when Apple introduced the LaserWriter, the first laser printer to be widely used. Ignoring the first home computers, this was the first time I was involved with the rollout of technology that had the power to fundamentally change the way we did things.
The list price was $6,995 and more important to those of us lugging it around for demonstrations, it weighed 77 pounds. Networking, called AppleTalk, which came with it reduce the per user price to something reasonable.
I was happy that my previous career was running a cattle farm where I spent much of the winter hauling around 100 lb+ bags of feed.
It is a measure of how technology accelerates that in December 2011, just about twenty-six years later, I bought a Brother HL-2270DW laser printer for $99.98. It only weighed 15.4 pounds.
The original Apple LaserWriter printed eight pages per minute of 300 DPI text and graphics using a 12 Mhz Motorola 68000 chip.
The Brother printer that I bought in 2011 printed at 27 pages per minute at up to 2400 X 600 DPI. It had a 200 Mhz processor. The Brother printer came with Ethernet and wireless connectivity. The Apple LaserWriter only had LocalTalk, a very slow but revolutionary network for 1985.
The original LaserWriters were heavy and expensive. Few of them made it into home offices in the early days. The most recent Brother Laser 2360DW that I purchased was only $85. The printing resolution is the same bit it now prints at 32 PPM and has wireless, Ethernet and USB connectivity.
Even more important to the success than the hardware of the original LaserWriters was the software that had been developed to work with them. As is still the case today, great hardware is only as good as the software that runs on it. Pagemaker and Illustrator allowed people to create documents that had never been created on the desktop by office workers. What was a revolution in 1985 is an often-unappreciated part of today's office life.
I still remember doing a demonstration for educators in Fredericton, New Brunswick in the fall of 1985. I was about five minutes into the demonstration of a pre-release version of Adobe Illustrator. There were twenty or so people in the room. When I glanced around the room about half already had their mouths open. That is what happens when disruptive technology gets in front of people who are smart enough to recognize it and see the future.
The LaserWriter and desktop publishing were not the last disruptive technology that I got to witness in my technology career which will hit four decades next year. It has been an amazing ride. I suspect there is lots more to come.
This list of technology that has changed lives is longer my short list. Here in no particular order other than how it has stuck in my mind is my list.
- The graphical interface as epitomized by the original Macintosh was a revolution to those of us who started out with green screens and arrow keys. It was what drew me to Apple. It was revolutionary and we are still seeing its continued impact.
- One piece of software that has had as much or more impact than a lot of fancy software that has disappeared is the spreadsheet. Lotus 123, Microsoft Mulitplan, and eventually Excel changed the way that we look at numbers. We felt like the Macintosh was a real computer when Microsoft released Multiplan for the 128K Mac. It ran on 3.5-inch floppy disks.
- The ever-increasing size and speed of computer storage is also a revolution but it happened over time. The first 5 meg Profiles that I carried around were worth $3,500 US. I recently paid $87.99 for a SanDisk 500GB Extreme Portable SSD.
- The writable CD-ROM and even the DVD had huge but transitory impacts on us all. Everything is in the cloud now.
- Wi-Fi was a gamble at first and sometimes a pain to get working. Apple's first Airport Wi-Fi was not cheap in 1999. Wi-Fi is everywhere now, plus it is inexpensive and easy to use.
- Even more important than WiFi is the Internet. As company, Apple, got on the Internet seriously around 1993. The Internet is a huge part of our lives today. Just as important as the physical connection is what we can do on the Internet which has gone well beyond exchanging messages. The original iMac set a standard for making it easy to get on the Internet.
- Digital cameras were another technology that changed lives. We used our first digital cameras, the Apple Quicktake, on a digital scavenger hunt at the Mountain Lake Lodge in Virginia around 1993. Little did we know how big digital photography would become. With digital photographs came iPhoto, editing photos and storing them on the web. Even now Google photos are part of my life every day.
I could also add fiber to the home, FTTH, but I do that for a living and today far too few people are enable to take advantage of it like I do.
It would be easy to add Smartphones. However, in a way, they are a bunch of revolutionary technologies crammed into a small form factor. I like the individual technologies better than Smartphones. Perhaps one of my favorite examples of revolutionary technologies crammed into something small, light, and inexpensive is the Chromebook.
The summer of 2021 with tax I paid $416.33 for an ASUS Chromebook Flip C433 2 in 1 Laptop, 14" Touchscreen FHD NanoEdge Display, Intel Core m3-8100Y Processor, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC Storage, Backlit Keyboard, Silver. It has a built-in camera and WiFi. It wakes instantly (faster than my MacBook Pro) and the battery never lets me down.
I once sold an Apple IIe with a 5 meg Corvus hard drive for over $19,000. That included a dot matrix printer and a daisywheel printer. It was before the day of LaserWriter. My $416 Chromebook easily prints to either my color HP Laser Printer, my color Epson Ink Jet or my monochrome Brother LaserWriter. All of the printers plus the Chromebook computer did not cost $1,000. That is empowering, transforming technology.
