On January 24, 1984, just a little over 30 years ago, Steve Jobs revealed the first Mac computer to the world.
When Jobs removed the computer from a bag, the machine began to speak: "Hello, I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer that you can't lift!"
The Macintosh computer of thirty years ago held one floppy drive and 128KB of RAM data and boated a nine-inch monitor. Today, the smallest Mac computer screen is found on the Macbook pro, which can be either 11 or 13 inches. The largest screen is part of the iMac and can have up to a 27-inch screen. The 11-inch Macbook pro also comes with a whopping 128GB of storage.
We know what you're probably thinking, and no, this is not an ad for Apple. But Apple's 30 years of change and growth is one company's representation of what has happened to the world of technology as an entirety.
Gone are the days of clacking away on typewriters for hours, only to later discover mistakes and typos that can be corrected only through the use of whiteout. Now, mistakes are gone forever with the click of one button. We type papers while simultaneously doing research for said papers, listening to music and checking various social media pages.
It's so easy to take all this for granted: to get irrationally annoyed when the Internet goes a bit slower than usual or Word unexpectedly quits. But the technological strides we've made in the past 30 years alone are nothing to be annoyed with-irrationally or otherwise. Most of us can still remember the sound a dial-up modem made when connecting to the internet, a connection process of a length that would today send us screaming out of the room while pulling out our hair.
This isn't to say we shouldn't expect less of our technology: after all, now that we have a way to connect to the Internet in less than a second, it's understandable that we have gotten used to speed. However, looking back on the first personal Mac computer of 30 years ago and its one-line audio recording makes this Editorial Board think that maybe Siri isn't as unresponsive as we all thought.