A PC Pioneer Passes On

Ed Roberts died today in Georgia at the age of 68. The development of the personal computer was too collaborative for any one person to deserve the honor of being the father of the industry…but as I think about it, I can’t think of anyone with a better claim on the title than Roberts. He may not have invented the PC, but he surely invented the PC industry.

Roberts cofounded MITS in Albuquerque in 1969 and served as its president. The company made rocket kits at first, and then calculators, and was struggling when Roberts made the decision to launch the Altair 8800, the first PC to gain any traction. When it appeared on the front cover of Popular Electronics magazine’s January 1975 issue, a couple of young geeks got so excited by the issue they picked up at Harvard Square’s Out of Town News that they wrote a version of the BASIC programming language for it even though they didn’t have an Altair. They relocated to Albuquerque and ended up founding a company to write software for the system. The geeks were Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and they called their company Micro-Soft.

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There’s Room for a Third Device

The debate about Apple products never ends, but it always involves distinct phases. Consider the iPad. People began expressing heated opinions about it before anyone knew anything. Then they continue to do so once they know something but not everything.

For the iPad, the best phase begins on Saturday, when all of us who weren’t among the first reviewers to get their hands on the thing get the opportunity to express opinions based on extended real-world use. The “Why the iPad Will Fail” stories will dwindle away, because it’s pointless to speculate once the darn thing is in the market. It’ll be a huge hit or a modest success or a flop, and nobody’s take will matter except the aggregate opinion of people who buy gadgets.

But I wanna get something off my chest during the remaining time we have to talk about the iPad without much in the way of cold, hard facts. Here’s something I don’t get: The single most common argument made by folks who think the iPad will fail is that people don’t want a “third device” to supplement their PC and their phone. One more device, the theory goes, is clearly one too many.

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Your Move, Amazon

One of the many interesting questions raised by the iPad is this: What’s Amazon gonna do? I hope that it’ll shortly unveil a clever new Kindle of some sort–clever new products are always more interesting than price reductions–but lowering the cost of the current model to $149 also sounds like it would be a rational response…

iPads Arriving Early

At least some of the folks who paid for expedited shipping for iPads won’t have to wait until Saturday to get their mitts on their new toys: They’re being delivered today. (I reserved one for retail pickup, so no iPad for me just yet.) iPad pre-orderers, have yours shown up yet?

[UPDATE! This was, of course, an April Fools' prank. I am, of course, a sucker..]

5Words: Netflix, an iPad Killer App

Netflix? On iPad? Saturday? Joy!

Stephen Fry tries iPad, meets Jobs.

Tech April Fools’ day roundup.

Wolfram Alpha’s mammoth price cut.

Microsoft to open more stores.

How to fix phone service.

Local stores to get iPads.

2.5 percent can drive, talk.

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Palm Prices Plunge

Wow. When I wrote about Palm’s Pre Plus on Verizon one month ago, it was $150 (after a $100 rebate) on a two year contract, and the Mobile Hotspot feature was $40 a month. Now the Pre Plus is $50, and Mobile Hotspot is free. (The Pe Plus’s little sibling, the Pixi Plus, is $30.) The price cuts make the nifty Pre Plus one of the best bargains in smartphones–maybe the best buy.

The Joke Was on Them

If you venture onto the Web at all today, you run the risk of being crushed to death by an avalanche of April Fools’ gags.  Technologizer, however, is a prank-free zone today. Which doesn’t mean we’re ignoring the holiday–we just decided to celebrate it by reveling in art and descriptions that were used to sell practical jokes sixty years ago. As far as I can tell, it was an age when April Fools’ Day happened 365 times a year…

View Fooled You slideshow

Fooled You! The Golden Age of Practical Jokes

Devilishly clever tech-related April Fools’ pranks? Sorry, we’re abstaining from pulling the wool over anyone’s eyes this year–you’ll need to look elsewhere. Frankly, the golden age of practical jokes in America was decades ago–and its epicenter was the Johnson-Smith Catalog, an amazing compendium with hundreds of pages of jokes, tricks, novelties, and just plain weird stuff. Here’s a sampling of items from the 1950 edition. Betcha all the items in here saw heavy use exactly sixty years ago today…

iFixit’s Scoop

Impressive: iFixit already has a detailed Apple tablet teardown on its site. Wonder how they got ahold of a unit?

The First iPad Reviews Are In

The iPad doesn’t arrive in stores until Saturday, and most tech reviewers, like civilians, will need to wait until then to get their hands on one. As usual, though, Apple provided early review units to journalists from a few major newspapers and other media outlets.

The big surprise in these reviews is…well, there aren’t any big surprises. Everyone’s impressed. Everybody brings up both pros (the interface, the form factor, the general level of polish) and cons (lack of Flash, no camera, inability to replace a laptop in every circumstance) that we already knew about. The most significant new positive factoid: Apple’s battery-life claim of ten hours seems to be conservative. And there are a few new quibbles (did we know that the iPod app doesn’t do Cover Flow)? Bottom line: It’s the extremely slick first-generation device we thought it was.

After the jump, summaries of the reviews that have hit the Web so far. You might want to read ‘em all, but if you can only read one, see Tim Gideon’s piece at PCMag.com–it’s by far the most detailed look at the gizmo. And come back here on Saturday: I’ll be up bright and early to report on the insanity (if any) at my local Apple Store, pick up my iPad, and start the conversation here. (Looks like plenty of you will have iPads on Saturday–and I look forward to hearing what you think of ‘em.)

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