Robert Hampton

Today is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the first Apple Macintosh. There’s a picture of it over to the right. Fans of Apple’s modern designs will probably not be too inspired by the… beigeness of it all. This product predates Jony Ive‘s arrival at Apple by nearly a decade, and Apple’s computers would remain stubbornly in the “beige box category” until the late 1990s.

The computing masses at the time didn’t quite know what to make of it. Instead of a black screen with a flashing cursor, users were presented with something called a desktop, and a strange device called a mouse. Instead of typing commands, you could move a pointer on the screen and click on icons to tell the computer what to do.

It wasn’t, as is often misreported, the first computer to use a graphical user interface or a mouse – Xerox had a product at least two years earlier. Apple themselves had already tried it a year earlier with the Lisa, which failed because of its astonishingly high price point ($10,000!). It was certainly the first to be successfully marketed and sold to consumers.

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It’s hard to imagine now, but when this blog was founded, I had to write the entries by creating a series of punched cards, which were then sent by first class post to a laboratory in Cambridge, where a man in a white coat would feed them one-by-one into a mainframe computer to create each blog post.

OK, that’s obviously not true. But technology has moved on in leaps and bounds in the last decade, often in new and unpredictable ways. In 2003 there were no YouTube videos to embed, no tweets to RT, and if you poked someone in public, you could expect a slap in the face in return. Google was a search engine company rather than an… everything company.

As for me, in 2003 I was still using RISC OS, the operating system designed by Acorn Computers for their ARM-based systems. Acorn had shut up shop in 1998, but the OS was still being developed by an independent company and I had fun playing with the latest versions as they were released. I was also still using it to do web design work (still haven’t found an app as good as Draw for quick pictures and diagrams). So when my machine started developing hardware faults, I was alarmed.

When computers develop hardware problems, my usual attitude is something approaching blind panic. I never did a backup (I meant to, but never get round to it), and I never paid attention when the hard drive started playing up last year (I meant to, but never got round to it). Procrastination 1, Rob 0.

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A while back I took the decision to move my main e-mail off my domain host’s account and onto Apple’s iCloud. My main rationale for this was that I wanted to be able to access my e-mail anywhere, and using the iCloud account, which works with my iPhone out of the box (with push notifications to boot), seemed easier than messing about with my domain host’s IMAP settings. Also, Apple’s shiny, lovely, strokable technology did hypnotise me slightly.

Recently, however, Macworld discovered something about Apple’s e-mail service, which has given me pause for thought:-

Apple’s iCloud email service deletes all emails that contain the phrase “barely legal teen” it was revealed today.

Macworld has tested this by sending two test emails from a personal iCloud account. The message read “My friend’s son is already allowed to drive his high-powered car. It’s ridiculous. He’s a barely legal teenage driver? What on earth is John thinking.”

The second email amended the phrase “a barely legal” to “barely a legal”. This second email was delivered fine, whereas the first is still undelivered.

Ars Technica followed this up and Apple confirmed that it was an over-zealous spam filter. Which is fair enough, but I don’t like the idea that the e-mail is just silently deleted (in the test above, it didn’t even make it into a Junk folder).

Before anyone jumps in: no, I do not routinely send or receive e-mails containing the phrase “barely legal teen”. But I wonder what other phrases are being trapped in this way, and how many e-mails are being lost because of it?

It’s a reminder of the control you lose when you entrust your e-mail or other important data to “The Cloud”. We’re told that this is the future of computing, but to get there we’re having to rely an awful lot on a few large corporations, who may not often have the best interests of users at heart.

In summary, I’m going back to my web host’s e-mail service. Or carrier pigeons. Maybe carrier pigeons.

Last night I got home, plugged my iPhone into my computer, and got this message:

Yes, after a summer of feverish anticipation, iOS 5 has finally made it out of Apple HQ and onto the flash drives of eager users everywhere.

Well, almost. The first time I tried to download it, the download aborted after about 50 megabytes (although I think that might have been my dodgy wi-fi). It worked the second time, but that proved to be the easy step, as every attempt to install it was met with this message:

I wasn’t the only one. Error 3200 was trending on Twitter for much of Wednesday evening. It didn’t help that the “More Information” button linked to an Apple support page which didn’t even mention error 3200 (although it has now been belatedly added).

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Oddly enough, I heard the news of the death of technology giant Steve Jobs this morning not through a computer or iAnything, but via that most old-fashioned of sources – the 7am news on BBC Radio 4. However, I immediately fired up the Twitter app on my iPhone, where everyone from Barack Obama to Wil Wheaton was weighing in with a tribute.

It’s impossible to overstate Jobs’ contribution to the world of technology, but his finest hour must surely be his masterminding of the turnaround in Apple’s fortunes. When Jobs returned to the company in 1996, it was near bankruptcy, seemingly defenceless against the rise of PCs and Windows. Many analysts believed that a return to profitability was impossible, and with a lesser person at the helm, they would probably have been correct. Without Jobs, Apple would have gone the way of Acorn, Commodore, Atari and countless other names from the early years of home computing.

With Apple’s co-founder back in charge, the company not only came back from the brink, but went on to incredible success with a new line of products. It’s true the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player and the iPhone wasn’t the first mobile phone, but Apple’s take on the concepts (with the influence of Jobs tangible in every detail of the designs) resulted in products that were genuine game-changers.

And now he’s gone, leaving some enormous shoes to fill. Apple, and the world in general will feel his loss for a very, very long time.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

There are all sorts of rumours swirling around about the new product to be unveiled by Apple tomorrow. It’s an iPhone 4S! It’s an iPhone 5! It’ll have a super-HD camera! Maybe it won’t! It’ll make you cups of tea! It’ll provide better sex than your partner!

I am refusing to get swept up in the excitement. I’m just enjoying my final days of having the latest and best model, before I am rendered hopelessly out of date by whatever is announced tomorrow.

I look forward to the time when tablet computing truly comes of age. Nothing would please me more than to be able to sit in Starbucks, drinking coffee and tapping away at my Wi-fi enabled tablet, pretending I’m really sitting in Ten Forward on the Enterprise-D drinking Raktajino while preparing a duty roster for Commander Riker on a PADD.

So does the iPad bring us one step closer to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision? Maybe. But I wish we were getting the full blown MacOS rather than the iPhone OS, with its dependence on the locked-down App store which means that Apple, and Apple alone, decide which apps you can and can’t run on it. It also looks a bit underspecced and underpowered for what it is. A netbook or a cheap laptop still might be a better bet for lots of people.

I remain to be convinced that this the quantum leap forward for computing that the pre-launch hype promised us. But it’s Apple, and the brand name and lovely design will surely mean that 100 billion are sold within the first 20 minutes.

Now, speaking of Star Trek technology: when do we get a working Holodeck?

I can’t fault the Apple online store for their service. Ordered at 9.20am Tuesday, delivered at lunchtime Wednesday.

Yes, I have joined the white earphones club. Now I can listen to music and informative podcasts on the train or in the gym, or anywhere I want.

I’m not actually going to do that, of course. My nice shiny new iPod might get stolen or damaged, and that would never do.

In fact I think I’ll just keep it in its box. Can’t be too careful.

I’ve been pondering Macs again. The Mac Mini is available starting at £499, which is affordable enough, even when I consider the additional cost of some software (I would probably need to splash out 70 quid or so for the Mac version of MS Office, for example).

I’ve considered switching to Macs before. The first time I seriously thought about it was around the time Windows Vista was released. I was looking to replace my creaking PC and MacOS X looked preferable to Vista, which was getting a slating in the press. After careful consideration I eventually chickened out and went for a Dell PC, like a spineless corporate sheep.

So why did I reject the Mac? For the explanation, we have to go back to early 1993, when your humble webmaster was 10 years old. Having finally convinced my parents that my creaking Commodore 64 was not going to cut it, we set out to acquire a new computer. The one I settled on was the Acorn, because “that’s the one they use in schools”.

And so, I came home from the shop clutching an A3010 (the cheapest and nastiest of all Acorn’s models, fact fans), complete with 1 megabyte of RAM, floppy disc drive and a bundled copy of Zool (never got past level 2).

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Only had time for a brief look round during my lunch hour, but… It really is great.

And look! We’re getting an Apple store! Truly, I can now believe that Liverpool is a major player.

More crap mobile phone pictures, “after the jump”, as they say.

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