I just discovered this neat video of an Apple shareholder meeting from the year 1984, remarkable because this was the meeting where Steve Jobs first revealed the Macintosh, the first personal computer sporting a GUI (correct me if I’m wrong here).

Link to video : http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ12vNZ5yMY

Jobs doesn’t really explore the Macintosh interface in too much depth here, but even that brief look at the original Mac got me thinking : what’s different? After 24 years of breakneck development in the computing industry, nothing much has changed in terms of UI and the applications we run on our PCs (or Macs).

Sure, we have the web, and more processing power, and hi-res GUIs. But I’m still asking myself : what does my MacBook do right now which the original Mac couldn’t? Okay, let me rephrase that a little. What does my MacBook do right now which the original Mac couldn’t, provided both systems had an equal amount of processing power? What we’re looking at right here is not lack of good tech, but a lack of good ideas.

In the demo, the original Mac seems to have an image editor, a desktop publishing program, a text-to-speech program and a way to generate visuals programatically. It also has a selection of neat fonts. From what I’ve read on the tubes, I suppose it also has a way to play stored audio (MIDI), print stuff and connect to external devices.

My MacBook runs Photoshop, Scribus, Apple’s own text-to-speech program, and generates visuals programatically using a multitude of graphics APIs (Quartz, OpenGL, SDL …). It can play stored audio using iTunes, print stuff and connect to external devices.

People keep reinventing the same old wheel every year. How many office suites have we seen since 1984? How many media players, desktop publishing programs, spreadsheets, CAD tools and image editors? Hell, you see a new web browser almost every 2 months.

Innovation? Innovation can suck my ass.