I was reading, over lunch today, an article about the evolution of Steve Job’s career in identifying and launching revolutionary products. I remember working in the law faculty in my university, doing odd jobs such as running the printing section of the faculty and helping staff members with filing, furniture moving, etc. Usually at year end but sometimes in the middle of semester, lecturers change their offices and so they need to move their stuff frogfdm one room to another. I’d come in and do all the moving. It was during one of these moving jobs that I laid my hands on a Mac computer for the first time. It would have been 1987 or thereabouts. I was moving this professor’s stuff which included her Mac computer. It was smaller and had more chic than the IBM personal computer I was more accustomed to. The screen was white and the graphics were so pleasant. I later realised it was more expensive and less compatible with most other computers so I discarded any ideas of owning one but I always thought it had more class. I did however, jumped at the chance of playing around with it, and got a chance to save some files, shut the thing down, and restarted it when I’ve had it moved to the new office. It was such a fresh experience.

Recently when kiddo got her iPod and I was playing around with it, I got annoyed when she suggested I didn’t know how to operate it. I had my hands on a Mac before I even thought of conceiving her and here she was telling me I couldn’t operate an iPod. I had also had my hands on a HP PDA – the LX200 – way back in 1995, used the first Palm 2 years later, used the first expandable PDA 2 years later and used the first PDA Phone hybrid (the Treo 280) 2 years after that. I moved on to the Treo 600, which was fantastic and recently got the 650. All through the years, I was using gadgets few around me had even thought existed. Of course KL in the early to mid 90s had not seen the gadget craze which swept through in the late 90s through to the first few years of the new millennium, so it wasn’t hard to be at the forefront as an early technology adopter. I thought I was no slouch when it came to handling new technology. Yet, faced with the iPod, I was labelled one, by my 13 year old daughter. As much as I resented it, I couldn’t deny that compared to her who took to these gadgets like a duck to water, I was indeed a slouch. The 10 minutes or so I played around with it was way too long to figure it out, by her standard.

So when I read about Steve Job’s new adventure with the iPhone, I began to feel like an old grandmother who had problems operating the VCR. I wondered what multi-touch technology was. The 5-way navigator on my Treo 650 is beginning to sound like archaic tools, much like the huge buttons on those VCRs. Apparently the iPhone has ONE button, maybe a bit like the one button on the iPod (but has many parts to that one button – isn’t this just fiddling around?) The point is, I now feel as close to technology as I thought my grandmother is.  Why should I be? I will therefore, put a note in my  long term to-do list: find out what multi-touch technology the iPhone uses, is all about…