Apple One For Dummies

Introduction

I’m going to write something ridiculously obvious right from the start: The way we live and conduct our day-to-day ain’t quite like it used to be. I remember when you had to stay in one room to use the phone, and if you got happy feet there was always the cord to remind you of your place. If you wanted to know what was going on in politics and sports, you had to read the newspaper or wait until it was time for the local and national news programs to air. I was drawn to magazine racks in grocery stores like a cat to a mouse convention; my parents never had to wonder where I was while they shopped.

Computers were cool and all, but until the early 1980s, my only experience with one was our Pong console. Pictures were taken with a camera that you had to load with film, and then you had to have the film developed before you could see that you’d cut off the top of your subject’s head or that he was nearly out of the frame entirely. Calendars were something you hung on the wall and reminders and shopping lists were kept in clunky notebooks or planners. And music was something you could typically listen to only on fuzzy-sounding radios or on vinyl albums that emitted as much hiss as they did tunes. And don’t get me started on the heady days when we transitioned from 8-track to cassette tapes — as someone once put it, “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”

As I said, things are different now. Everything I just mentioned can now be done with a small ...