The device that truly introduced personal computing to the world is 40 years old and some of them still run. The Apple II came to market in 1977. At the time, it was a breakthrough with a MOS Technology 6502 8-bit CPU and as much as 64K of RAM.
Back then the computer cost about $1300 (or a little over $5000 in today's dollars) for the model with 4KB of RAM, If you had enough money, you could max it out with 64KB. Users could opt for a "high resolution" monitor (280 pixels by 192 pixels) that was capable of displaying 8 colors -- for extra money. Data was stored on an audio cassette or, if you had enough money, on a 5¼" floppy disk (capacity 140K). The Apple II had a long run and wasn't phased out until 1993, nearly a decade after Apple introduced the Mac.
An early apple ad from Wikipedia.
Hobbyists liked the Apple II, but in 1979 something happened that caused office workers to be interested. That something was VisiCalc and business managers discovered that the primitive computer offered them some things that mainframe computers didn't: It sat on their desk, was available anytime, didn't require an IT manager's approval to run a program, and was easy to use.
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Growth was phenomenal. Wikipedia cites figures from Infinite Loop: "During the first five years of operations, revenues doubled about every four months. Between September 1977 and September 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533%."
An article by Steve Wozniak explained the Apple II's technology.
Other companies got into the personal computer business: Atari (my choice at the time), Sinclair (Timex), Radio Shack, Amiga, and Commodore. Many of these early computers have fan clubs that are still around. Apple's is undoubtedly the largest of these.
This summer I encountered a website that described the Vintage Computer Fest West. That eventually led me to Kansasfest, Apple II Forever 2017. Ken Gagne, who publishes a quarterly Apple magazine called Juiced.gs gave me permission to use some of his photographs.
KansasFest 2018 is scheduled for July 17 through 22.
Vintage Computer Fest includes many brands of older computers. If the thought of attending an event that features antique computers appeals to you, you could head for Seattle in February for the next event, Vintage Computer Festival Pacific Northwest. There are Vintage Computer Festival events in the east and southeast, too.
Had it not been for VisiCalc, some other application probably would have been invented that would have had the same effect. The spreadsheet program had uses at home and at the office, so that's possibly why it became the first "killer app", but it had a short life. Five years later, Lotus released a program called 1-2-3.
The Lotus spreadsheet took advantage of the expanded memory and larger screen of the IBM PC (and clones). VisiCalc sales dried up and the company was soon insolvent. Lotus Development purchased VisiCalc in 1985 and killed all applications that had been developed by VisiCalc's inventor, Dan Bricklin.
If you're interested in the history, you'll find a lot of interesting background information here and here.
And if you'd like more about changes in technology, New York Times veteran photographer Jim Wilson has been on the job for 40 years and has seen a lot of change. An article that recounts the changes he's seen is on the New York Times website.
On 4 June, I shared a segment called Reconsidering Evernote. Now, only 3 months later, I must reconsider reconsidering Evernote. In June, I complained about Microsoft's One Note because the synchronization feature caused the computer to be slow and suggested that the solution might be Evernote. Now I'm not so sure.
The problem I was trying to solve involved performance. OneNote is installed on all of my computers that have Microsoft Office installed and the ability to synchronize information across systems is helpful, but I found that it caused an enormous performance issue. Enormous as in "the computer is non-functional during the sync process".
Evernote doesn't have the same performance issues and, although it also doesn't have a lot of features that OneNote has, I switched to it. Because of the number of computers I need to synchronize, a paid subscription was essential, so I bought a subscription.
Until mid September, Evernote was OK. OK as in "meeting the bare minimum requirements". Formatting is weak. I could no longer track projects I'm working on by using various status markers. But I made do. Then in mid September I opened Evernote to check on the upcoming week's TechByter topics. What I saw was unreadable.
Each program has a number and a date. The columns for this information should be relatively narrow. A third column shows the topics. Evernote had made the program number and date columns extremely wide and had narrowed the one column that should be wide.
Most programs would allow the user to grab a column marker and move it, but not Evernote. A Google search confirmed that the problem was not something unique to me. People have been complaining about then for the better part of a decade! Really. So now I had an unreadable document and no way to make it readable.
I've now cautiously returned to OneNote. Automatic synchronization is enabled only on my main computer and the Surface tablet. So far, it's working OK. OK as in "I'm really glad to have OneNote's capabilities back and I still can't understand Evernote's popularity."
Evernote seems to be the preferred choice for copying and pasting chunks of text, website pages, and such into an application that makes them relatively easy to find but doesn't care much about how readable they are when they're found. OneNote is equally good about being able to find information in multiple notebooks. In fact, its search function seems to out-perform Evernote, at least the way I use it.
Since switching back to OneNote, I haven't seen the extreme performance degradation that initially drove me to Evernote. It's a problem that has been documented several times over many years, so there's probably some potential that it will return. For now, though, OneNote is a welcome relief from the needlessly jumbled approach of Evernote.
Google has increased its threat to Apple, Amazon, and Samsung with lots of new hardware this week and most of the hardware is packed with artificial intelligence.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that artificial intelligence is rapidly improving in ways that makes it more useful for users. Highlights include image recognition, improvements in the virtual assistant, and even a new feature for Maps that helps to find parking spaces.
Google launched the Pixel phone a year ago and now they're ready with version 2 -- $650 for the Pixel 2 with a 5-inch screen and $850 for the Pixel 2 XL with a 6-inch screen. There's no longer a headphone jack, but there's an adapter to allow the use of headphones. The phones will be in stores on October 19, but can be ordered now.
The Pixel 2's 12.2-megapixel rear camera attempts to recognize and blur backgrounds when it's set to "portrait" mode. There's also optical image stabilization to reduce shake and the camera always takes several shots and then merges them -- built-in, automatic high dynamic range, in other words.
There's also a camera that doesn't include a phone. The $250 Google Clip was announced, but isn't yet available. "Coming soon" is the technical term. When it arrives, users will be able to attach (clip) it to a stationary object. The camera then tries to figure out what to photograph for the user. Clip could mean that you clip the camera to something or that it creates video clips. Google goes out of its way to point out that an internet connection isn't "needed".
All this comes with a price, though. Google will have access to the images and can figure out what kinds of products you use and then you'll find more targeted advertising. That's certainly not something to be overjoyed about, but it's not entirely bad, either. When Google knows what you like, you'll see more ads that pertain to those things.
Google Home, the virtual assistant (or, depending on your point of view, "spy") that Google introduced a year ago now has two siblings: Google Home Mini is a small $50 assistant and the $400 Google Home Max is a larger virtual assistant that's designed for music fans. The Mini will be available later this month, but the Max won't be in stores until December.
If you want to completely Googleize yourself, there's the $1000 Pixelbook, a small computer with a 12-inch touchscreen. The computer can be ordered now and will be available at the end of the month.
Equifax says that another 2.5 million accounts need to be included in the list of those affected by the gigantic data breach. That pushes the total up to nearly 146 million accounts. The company's interim CEO, Paulino do Rego Barros, says that the news comes from the forensic investigation by cyber-security firm Mandiant.
The former CEO is gone. Not fired, but allowed to retire. He has forfeited has 2017 bonus, which would have been more than $3 million dollars. (Isn't that nice of him?) He could still receive tens of millions of dollars in compensation for leading the company to one of the worst data breaches in history.
When the company announced the "retirement", Equifax said it reserved the right to modify the status under which Richard Smith left the company. In other words, if the review determines that the breach was the result of Smith's actions (or non-actions) Equifax could modify "retired" to "fired". That change, if it happens, could limit his future income, but Smith will still collect about $72 million this year and expects to receive another $18 million as his stock compensation vests.
Equifax's response to the event has been abysmal with a significant delay in reporting the breach, executives selling stock before the announcement, the initial "data breach checker" that was useless, and using Twitter to provide a link to a fake phishing site instead of its own support site. Fortunately, the phishing site was a fake that had been set up by a good guy who intended to illustrate how a bad situation can be made even worse.
The news release quotes the interim CEO: "I was advised Sunday that the analysis of the number of consumers potentially impacted by the cyber-security incident has been completed, and I directed that the results be promptly released." Barros says the company's priorities are "transparency and improving support for consumers."
Another bit of good news: The review by Mandiant has determined that there is no evidence attackers were able to access databases outside the United States. Additionally, Equifax previously said that as many as 100,000 Canadian accounts might have been affected. That number has been reduced to 8000.
As for Smith, he will receive salary for his work in 2017 and he has more than $18 million in retirement benefits. Before the breach was announced, he had dumped about $19 million in stock. To the average person (me, for example) that looks a lot like insider trading, which is illegal. He still owns nearly $24 million in Equifax stock, so apparently he won't be indigent anytime soon. Smith is quoted as saying that he has been "completely dedicated to making this right."
When it comes to data breaches, nobody takes a back seat to Yahoo. The company's previously announced "biggest ever" data breach just got larger. This week the company increased the size of the breach that started with a paltry 500 million users to 3 billion.
That's 3,000,000,000 -- a 3 with 9 zeros behind it. By contrast, just 323 million people live in the United States, 36 million in Canada, 144 million in Russia. So it's clearly a breach that has worldwide implications.
Verizon bought Yahoo, but trimmed the price by $350 million. Although 2 Russians have been charged with the initial break-in, it's not clear who was responsible for the others.
Yahoo announced the 500 million account breach in August, boosted that to 1 billion later in the year, and now says it was really every account they have. Yahoo didn't even discover one breach until 3 years after it happened and that investigation took 4 years. The breach that happened in 2014 wasn't disclosed for 2 years. That's the one that initially was said to have affected 500 million accounts. But in terms of impact, the Equifax breach is probably more serious. Even though it affected far fewer accounts, the type of data exposed was more useful to crooks.
Yahoo announced the latest news on 3 October, but it turned out not to be news to most security experts who assumed that the breach had probably affected all users.
