MP3s, Photo Printers, and iMovie: We've Come a Long Way Baby

Today's computer system is significantly different from a one of six or seven years ago. Modern computers are able to handle more tasks than computers six years ago could, which causes people's expectations of what a computer should be able to do to change.

Twenty years ago, no one would have even thought of trying to print photos from a computer. A 4.77 MHz 8088-based IBM PC couldn't do much more than word processing and spreadsheets. That's what a computer was for back then - storing data.

Today you have both the Mac OS and Windows boasting about their ability to play back high resolution video files, burn CDs and DVDs, let you play games with graphics occasionally resembling real life, let you talk (just like on the phone, but over the Internet), and many other things that you wouldn't have thought possible when personal computers started appearing on desks in the 80s.

These new capabilities have also brought new peripherals to computers which weren't popular 15 years ago. Colour printers, for one, are something relatively new. Sure, printers have been around for ages - daisywheel and dot matrix printers were popular in the late 70s and early 80s.

Apple's first color printer was the ImageWriter II, however it would only print in color when used with a special color ribbon and software that supported color printing. Various color StyleWriters appeared in the early 90s, along with printers from Canon and HP, such as the HP DeskWriter C. In fact, both companies made printers for Apple.

Scanners are also a relatively recent tool. Within the past ten years they have gained popularity. Apple first started selling them back with the Macintosh IIci and IIsi. These units could scan any document or picture and produce a black and white image on the computer's screen. Colour scenners followed, making them practical for transferring photos to the computer.

But they were apparently not practical enough, because digital cameras came next, and, yes, Apple had their own for a little while. The QuickTake series could connect to any Macintosh and transfer photos directly to the hard drive. This still wasn't the best option, since photo quality wasn't as good as a standard 35mm camera, and the number of photos that could be stored at one time was limited.

Recent digital cameras are starting to reach 35mm camera quality [Kodak's latest design has a 14 megapixel imager. ed] and offer some nice features that non-digital cameras can't offer, such as the ability to view a photo on the back of the camera after you take it, zoom in on it, and rotate it.

With the start of "multimedia computing," stereo speaker systems and CD-ROM drives started gaining popularity, followed by DVD. Since many video files and sound files were being used, CD-R drives (CD burners) soon became an inexpensive option. Today users can make custom "mix" CDs and backup their work to CD - and even DVD on some computers. Thanks to iMovie, we can even turn our home movies into DVDs.

What's next? It's hard to say, although some think that the television and computer will eventually combine into one large entertainment center. This has already been tried (Apple did it with Mac TV [right], the Quadra/LC/Performa 630 series, and the Performa 5200 series and 64/6500 series - and I believe IBM also tried it), and it wasn't too popular. Perhaps one reason for this is that many people want to keep their computers and television sets separate. If you need to use your computer, it's distracting to have a window running a television show on your computer's desktop. Also, with large screen TVs becoming more common, many people aren't interested in watching television on a 17" or 19" monitor when they've got a 62" console in their living room.

Maybe television and computers won't have a near future together, but music and computers certainly do. Music downloading services remain popular, despite the loss of Napster. Often CDs purchased by people are immediately imported into their computers and set aside, and people are importing their LPs and 45s to their computers so they don't have to use their turntable when they want to hear one song.

With the addition of things like printers, scanners, and CD burners, the computer has gone from a "fancy typewriter" to a photo editing station and a stereo system. Computers seven years ago couldn't do any of this on a large scale, and we one can only speculate what computers will be able to do in another seven years.