Apple will be celebrating its 50th birthday in April. Fifty years since the company was formed to sell simple computer kits designed by Steve Wozniak to local computer hobbyists in and around Palo Alto.

Meda and I jumped on the Apple bandwagon not long after the introduction of the Apple II in 1977, probably late that same year.

I knew nothing about computers. When we were in college, “computer” meant the room of electronic equipment in the administration building where an anointed few had access. The rest of us used fancy addling machines. Even handheld calculators were still in the future.

But I had been reading that these new “personal” computers would be fundamental “game changers” and wanted to learn more. I finally convinced Meda that we should just buy one and see what it could do, and we did.

That was the year we turned 30, and over the next nearly 50 years we have remained firmly in the Apple camp.

The original Apple II introduced what became the familiar beige case with an apple in rainbow colors. It had very limited memory, no disk storage and no built in software. The few programs that were available for purchase came on standard audio tape cassettes. You would plug your cassette player into a port on the computer and manually download each program. I remember the thrill of playing “Little Brick Out” at the Apple II’s slow speed after loading it from a cassette. It was like magic!

I can date our first Apple purchase by the use of cassette tapes. A year late, in mid-1978, Apple introduced a floppy disk drive priced at $600. It stored what was then a dramatic amount of data–113K, that is, kilobytes. It seemed to open up whole new worlds.

The following year, Apple introduced the Apple II+. We quickly got on that bandwagon via a Bell & Howell black Apple II+ manufactured under license for the education market. One day we walked into a small Honolulu computer hobbyist store and saw a stack of black Apples, and took one home.

That same year, 1979, saw the introduction of Apple Writer and VisiCalc, which turned the hobbyist-oriented Apple II into something that could do real work!

A few years later, Apple added the Apple IIe, with more memory and other features.

By that time, we had yielded to the “need” for his and her Apples at home, along with Apple’s for our office desktops as well.

Apple added Macintosh in 1984, but we didn’t invest in the new computer until the Macintosh Plus was introduced two years later. Unfortunately, the mists of time have erased any memory of which exact models followed as the first Mac Plus was replaced with newer iterations.

We invested thousands of dollars in new Macs over the years, more than I can recall at this point. Each made us more productive, or perhaps simply more efficient.

But it’s fair to say that our affair with Apple changed our lives for the better.

So I’ll simply say, Happy Anniversary, Apple!

A little afternoon experiment. I uploaded a photo of a Sudoku puzzle and asked both Gemini and ChatGPT to solve it.

Gemini went first. It took only a few seconds. Very few. There was its completed solution, along with an explanation of its methodology.

Then I turned to ChatGPT. It took longer. Not seconds. At least a minute, perhaps two. Then it too returned an answer, with explanations of how it reached its solution.

Surprising to me–The two solutions were quite different.

When I work my way through one of these puzzles, it seems like each correct choice is the only one for that particular position. One by one, they fall into place as other possible choices are eliminated.

But at first glance, each answer seemed plausible.

But as I examined each answer, I spotted the problem.

To win in Sudoku, you must fill the 9×9 grid so every row, column, and each 3×3 box contains digits 1-9 without repetition.

Gemini managed to get only two of three dimensions correct.

Gemini properly placed numbers 1 through 9 only once in each row and in each of the 3×3 blocks. But each of its columns included at least one number that was repeated more than once.

ChatGPT, on the other hand, appears to have solved the puzzle correctly.

Then I went back and asked Gemini a question: “Is there a chance that this solution is incorrect?”

It responded.

Actually, you have a sharp eye—my previous response contained a few errors where numbers were repeated in the same row or column. In Sudoku, each number from 1 to 9 must appear exactly once in every row, column, and 3×3 grid.

Here is the corrected solution, double-checked against the original puzzle’s constraints

It’s response made clear that Gemini knew the rules, but it again made the same type of errors, with a number repeated in each of several columns.

It’s quick answer masked a fundamental error in its logic.

I wonder if there are instructions I could have given that would have prevented Gemini from returning these erroneous answers.

Overall implications? I haven’t a clue.

Should Google’s investors have concerns?