Technology that empowers you is more than just the technology. To be really successful technolog has to be packaged in an affordable way and be easy to use to accomplish tasks that are important.
I was working for Apple Canada and living in Halifax, Nova Scotia in January 1985 when Apple introduced the LaserWriter, the first laser printer to be widely used. Ignoring the first home computers, this was also the first time I was involved with the rollout of technology that had the power to fundamentally change the way we did things.
The list price was $6,995 and more important to those of us lugging it around for demonstrations, it weighed 77 pounds.
I was happy that my previous career was running a cattle farm where I spent much of the winter hauling around 100 lb+ bags of feed.
It is a measure of how technology change accelerates that the third week in December 2011, just about twenty-six years later, I bought a Brother HL-2270DW laser printer for $99.98. It only weighed 15.4 pounds.
The original Apple LaserWriter printed eight pages per minute of 300 DPI text and graphics using a 12 Mhz Motorola 68000 chip.
The Brother printer that I bought in 2011 printed at 27 pages per minute at up to 2400 X 600 DPI. It had a 200 Mhz processor. The Brother printer comes with Ethernet and wireless connectivity. The Apple LaserWriter only had LocalTalk, a very slow but revolutionary network for 1985.
The original LaserWriter were heavy and expensive. Few of them made it into home offices in the early days. The most recent Brother Laser that I purchased was only $85. (Read More)
Our technological infirmity 