Happy Birthday Apple

Exactly 25 years ago today, Apple Computer sold their first Apple II, making them the first true personal computer manufacturer (Tandy got their TRS-80 out the door about two months later). As the Grateful Dead once said, "What a long strange trip it's been."

I can't even begin to expound on how much I and every computer fan (regardless of what platform you may be running now) owes to Apple Computer. Their relentless quest for true innovation and their neverending pursuit of end-user empowerment (both of which sometimes cost them big time) makes them an absolutely unique entry in the annals of corporate history.

For those of you who don't know, Apple either invented or pioneered the use of the following technologies (and this is just a partial list), all of which you are probably using to this day, in one form or another:

The Graphical User Interface
The mouse
Long filenames
On-the-fly speech synthesis
Built-in networking
Hot-swappable hardware
The 3" floppy
SCSI
Object-Oriented Programming
Laser printers
Desktop publishing
Multiple monitor support
The trackball
The trackpad
The digital version of the concept "multimedia" (Apple actually coined the term as well)
AOL (was originally Apple On Line, co-developed by Apple and GE)
Microsoft Office*
Windows itself**
ColorSync
First (and still the best) automatic handwriting recognition
PDAs
Desktop/digital video editing
Inkjet printers
Digital cameras
Plug and Play PCI
USB (did not invent it, but by making it standard forced market acceptance)
802.11b (again, did not invent it but did make it a standard)
Firewire (aka IEEE1394)
Filemaker
Quicktime and QuicktimeVR (panoramic photography)
USB Audio
The PowerPC processor (used in almost every cell phone and video game console out there)
and MPEG-4, to name but a few.

Strip all of the above out of your PC, and what are you left with, hmmmm?

*Originally developed with help from Apple and available on the Mac years before they were on PCs.

**Stolen code from Apple is still present in Windows, but all cases against MS on this matter were settled in the 1997 trade agreement.

Simply put, there has never been, and likely never will be, another company quite like Apple Computer. We should all be exceedingly glad they decided to "Think Different."