[Hawkeye_a]

Over the past couple of weeks, especially after the introduction of the iPad, it became apparent to me that the vast majority of computer users are extremely uneducated about Apple. (Disclosure: I am an Apple fanboy. In defense, i (or anyone) can jump platforms at a whim, with the competition pricing their products so cheaply these days. I just choose the platform i think is the best (and also because i appreciate the inventive genius of the people behind the products))

When reading any news site from Cnet to Arcs about Apple, the comments sections are almost always filled with ignorant remarks from your average Windows/Linux user. And the general themes seems to be :
-Apple makes toys
-Apple is not a technology company
-Apple is a marketing company
-Apple only steals it's ideas

It's even more annoying that most of the technology/paradigms they use in their 'me-too' products first came out of this company.... somethings as fundamental as(to the best of my knowledge):
-drag-n-drop, trash, folders
-menu bar, title bar
-TFT displays, trackballs,plastic moulded cases
-an office suite of applications
-video playback on computers(Quicktime),audio synthesis, voice recognition, voice synthesis
-hand writing recognition
-widescreen lcd laptops, backlit keyboards
-built-in webcams
-multi-touch paradigms(pinch-to-zoom, etc)
-GPU accelerated vector based graphics
-PDAs
etc.

And during the iPad keynote, Steve mentioned the significance of the PowerBook100, TFT LCD display, moving the keyboard up, palm rests, etc... i didnt even know that Apple pioneered that design.

Anyway, i thought i'd make a suggestion to this community(MacNN) that it would be nice to have a section of the site to compile the history into a sort-of timeline of hardware and software in the computer industry....sortof like a snapshot of what computers were like at the time Apple introduced revolutionary products. As an example...a snapshot of what PCs looked like when the AppleII went on sale, or when the Mac went on sale, or when the PowerBook100 went on sale, etc... and captions with all the new 'technologies' unique to the products.

A lot of the information i find regarding the history of personal computers and this industry have been fragments from many sources, books, Wiki, Apple-history, TV Documentaries, etc.... it would be nice to have something like a 'wiki' on this site(community contributions, etc) that chronicle Apple's products and contributions.

This is just a suggestion, i havent thought it out completely, but maybe some of you have better ideas to achieve this ? And maybe MacNN can host it ?

Cheers

[Big Mac]

It sounds like a good idea, Hawkeye, but I don't know if the Forums are a place for it. Seems like it would call for its own website.

[Eug]

Yeah, it deserves its own website.

Hopefully you have a lot of time on your hands, because this would be a LOT of work.

[MacinTommy]

I think this is an awesome idea also but as Eug said, it would be a ton of work and definitely would need a website dedicated to the information.

After going to the National Infantry Museum I thought it would be awesome to have an offical museum dedicated to Apple history (obviously with room to expand). Have a "Keynote Theater" showing the highlights of past Stevsie keynotes. Have a walkthrough of every computer ever made by Apple and a section "side projects" (AppleTV, Newton..etc)... a section dedicated to the iPod, iPhone... I mean the possibilites are endless. Another walkthrough section that would be cool would be the history of apple through their commercials.
This is cool idea in theory now we would just need someone to fund it.

[Hawkeye_a]

I was thinking of it being similar to a Wiki space on the MacNN site.... community maintained from community(MacNN registered users) knowledge. I guess adopt Wiki's principle for this specific subset. That way contributions and info can be tagged with whoever made the contribution and corrections, etc.

I guess a tab at the top of the page which links to a section of this site.

I think the mods and developers of this site have more experience than me in web-programming and there already is a database of registered users who can start making contributions.....

Cheers

[besson3c]

Is your goal here to inform people that are interested in learning stuff and are not looking to argue with somebody about the subject matter, or is it to help strengthen arguments that put the Mac in a good light?

While I agree with you that Apple has invented lots of cool stuff over the years, I don't think the facts really matter to people who are interested in those sorts of arguments. People are ignorant. We are ignorant about Windows and Linux, and these users are ignorant about the Mac. I'm a relatively hardcore Mac and Linux/Unix guy, but I couldn't find my way around a Windows registry or setup a Windows AD or something.

However, I really do think that the more experienced and knowledgeable about computers you become, the less religious and zealous you become at the same time. Good sys admins, programmers, etc. are lazy - they just want what works and makes things easy for them both in the short and long term. The more you understand about computers, the more capable you are of understanding things at a much lower level, and the much less difference a UI really makes to your comfort level.

For whatever reason the bulk of these arguments seem to come from people that are not experienced and knowledgeable, and are therefore probably a poor audience for this since they are probably far more invested in being right and holding to their viewpoints than they are learning.


I don't think anything I just wrote made any sense, but there you have it

[besson3c]

Let me attack what I was trying to say from a different vantage point.

Look at the PWL here. The bulk of it does not consist of people having a genuine interest in learning, from understanding different perspectives, or from having genuine civil, productive discourse. The most ideological people in there could not even state the opposing argument without putting spin on it, because they frankly don't even know what it is, they are so heavily invested in being right about everything.

The same goes with pointless computer-based arguments.