August 11 - Happy Birthday, Steve Wozniak

 Posted on August 11, 2021

This is an update of my post published on August 11, 2010:

Born on this day in 1950, little Stevie probably was the apple of his mother's eye, but he grew up to be the apple of everyone's eye! With Steve Jobs, Wozniak worked in basements and garages to invent a little thing called the first Apple computer.

Which means that Woz was a huge part of the microcomputer revolution.

This California boy left the University of California, Berkeley, to design most of the hardware and to write most of the software for the Apple I and Apple II computers (which were released in 1976 and 1977). When their company went public in 1980, both Woz and Jobs became multimillionaires.

Apple I computer

Apple II

Wozniak later returned to the university and finished up his degree (under a false name, so that he wouldn't attract too much attention).

I owned some very early Apples!

I bought my first computer, an Apple II, in the late 1970s. It was incredibly primitive by today's standards and had an incredibly small memory – again, according to today's whiz-machines. But I was definitely the only one on the block who had a home computer – maybe the only one in the whole town! – and my house was very much the focus of much interest and early computer game play. That so-simple computer also helped me revolutionize my work as an editor at an educational publishing company! It was an exciting time!

That first Apple II computer cost around $3000, even thought I didn't buy a monitor (we hooked it up to a large [27-inch?] TV). The computer only had a memory of 64 K, which is about one six-hundred-millionth of the memory on a good hard drive from Apple Computer today! Yikes-y!

I first bought an Apple II (above).
Then, over the years, I bought an Apple II plus,
an Apple IIe, and an Apple IIgs (below).

Then I bought several PCs that were made by Dell
and were compatible with IBM microcomputers.

But the past decade or two, I came back to Apple.
I now own an iPhone, a Mac Mini, and a Mac Laptop!

Learn how computers work.

You might want to start here or here.

Also on this date:

Anniversary of the Opening of the Mall of America

Presidential Joke Day 

  

Birthday of David Atchison, President of the U.S. for a day

Anniversary of the start of the Mayan Calendar

Ingersoll Day

Independence Day in Chad

King Hussein Ascension Day in Jordan

Birthday of Warren Brown, Gentleman Farmer

Flag Day in Pakistan

Global Kinetic Sand Day

Teej Festival

(Date varies)

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

• August holidays
• August birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in August

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• September holidays
• September birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in September

January 9 - iPhone Makes Its Debut

Posted on January 9, 2018

On this date in 2007, Apple's Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world.

The unveiling occurred at the Macworld convention in San Francisco. 

It was pretty much, "Hey! We just reinvented the cell phone!"

And Jobs was right! Because mobile phones haven't been the same since!

The phone first went on sale in the United States in June of that year - and customers waited in long lines to buy it. People were so excited about the new phone, some reporters called it the Jesus Phone. In November of 2007, the iPhone became available in the UK, France, and Germany. By 2015 it was available in over 130 countries. (There are around 195 countries in the world.)

People agree that the iPhone was revolutionary. These days, the app industry is bigger than Hollywood, and social media, released from the confines of computers, is way more used, way more often, by way more people. Plus, mobile-phone-based services like Uber are huge.

Of course, when one company pushes the technological boundary, other companies are quick to follow. Although iPhones and Apple products are very popular, with about 1 billion active devices worldwide, Android phones and other devices are even more popular; there are about twice as many active Android devices!

Thanks to Apple and to other tech companies, we can now walk around with computers / telephones / cameras / GPS devices in our pockets. We can check e-mail, Google anything, use social media, send messages, take photos and videos, listen to music, find our way to places in our own cities and in foreign countries, practice another language, play games, keep track of appointments and classes, check the weather, take notes, watch TV shows, shop, read newspaper articles, and much more. Oh! And we can make phone calls! 

Little kids will inevitably want to use tablets and phones,
because they see older kids and adults using them.
But...supervision of internet and app use is a very good thing!

Also on this date:

Connecticut Celebrates Statehood

National Cassoulet Day  

National Static Electricity Day

Balloon Ascension Day

Anniversary of Columbus spotting mermaids (supposedly!)

 




Martyrs' Day in Panama

Birthday of President Richard Nixon

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest pages on:

• January holidays
• January birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in January

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• February holidays
• February birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in February
  
  

June 5, 2012 - Apple II Day

On this date in 1977, the first highly successful “personal computer” (a microcomputer meant for a home) went on sale for the first time: the Apple II. Incredibly expensive, large in physical size, and small in memory size and computing power, compared to computers these days, the Apple II was still AMAZING at the time!

It was a computer that didn't cost ten thousand dollars and that didn't fill a room. A computer that just an average person could afford and house and learn to use.

(An average person like me! I loved my Apple II, and later my Apple II-GS and Apple IIe!)

There was a ton of excitement, at the time, with all sorts of new kinds of products available to home computer users for the first time. We marveled at the concept of word processors, spreadsheets, spell checkers, and publishing programs. We were excited to be able to own paint programs and graphics tablets. We learned BASIC and other programming languages, and we had massive numbers of “floppy disks” (I used 5-1/4-inch disks for years, and finally switched to 3-1/2-inch disks. Now, of course, we use CDs and DVDs.)

Explore some more...

Learn some BASIC programming here. 

For more on Apple computers, and computers in general, see this earlier post. 

Also on this date:

Constitution Day in Denmark 

Birthday of the inventor of the hologram, Dennis Gabor 

August 11, 2010

Happy Birthday, Steve Wozniak

Born on this day in 1950, little Stevie probably was the apple of his mother's eye, but he grew up to be the apple of everyone's eye! With Steve Jobs, Wozniak worked in basements and garages to invent a little thing called the first Apple computer.

Which means that Woz was a huge part of the microcomputer revolution.

This California boy left the University of California, Berkeley, to design most of the hardware and to write most of the software for the Apple I and Apple II computers (which were released in 1976 and 1977). When their company went public in 1980, both Woz and Jobs became multimillionaires.

Wozniak later returned to the university and finished up his degree (under a false name, so that he wouldn't attract too much attention).

I owned a very early Apple!

I bought my first computer, an Apple II, in the late 1970s. It was incredibly primitive by today's standards and had an incredibly small memory – again, according to today's whiz-machines. But I was definitely the only one on the block who had a home computer – maybe the only one in the whole town! – and my house was very much the focus of much interest and early computer game play. That so-simple computer also helped me revolutionize my work as an editor at an educational publishing company! It was an exciting time!

That first Apple II computer cost around $3000, even thought I didn't buy a monitor (we hooked it up to a large [27-inch?] TV). The computer only had a memory of 64 K, which is about one six-hundred-millionth of the memory on a good hard drive from Apple Computer today! Yikes-y!

Learn how computers work.

You might want to start here or here.