In 1984, I was working in a prepress plant, laboring over traditional cold (or photo-based) typesetting equipment. Instead of looking at a true representation of the printed page, the video display presented text and formatting commands. Yes, with a little practice, you could visualize the end result, more or less. However, these particular devices simply couldn’t render a graphical image. It was, as I recall, strictly white text on a dark, nearly black background.

This isn’t to say personal computers were that much better in those days. In fact, we had one, a Zenith that, in part, would serve as a proper PC clone, but was actually used primarily to translate data from one format to another. That way, our clients could submit documents created in a word processor, and we could convert them into the unique language used by our Agfa CompuGraphic front ends.

It sure beat retyping everything from scratch.

When it came to actually using PC software, however, that old Zenith was only partly successful. Not all of those PC clones were 100% compatible; some not even close. But there was one area where that old box pleased me no end, the result of the decision of the owner of the company to subscribe to CompuServe.

They were king of the online hill in those early days. Its text-based interface was a little rough, but usable. But don’t ask me how much all that online access cost. Remember that you paid by the hour in those days, and I was positively addicted. But I got the work out on time, so there were no complaints.

As to the Apple Macintosh, we acquired one of the first, used primarily for experimentation rather than production. So my exposure was limited, and I didn’t really get fully immersed in the Mac universe until I moved to another company, where they actually migrated a large portion of their production to the desktop.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

Once, a long time ago, and I don’t know where I wrote this suggestion, I envisioned a new line of Apple commercials featuring Steve Jobs. Since he’s such a master salesman, you’d think he’d do well in that setting.

He wouldn’t be the first corporate executive to become the star of an ad campaign either. Years ago, it was widely suggested that then-CEO Lee Iacocca of Chrysler proved to be such a credible pitchman, he may have even saved the company. Well, at least then. His attempted encore years later wasn’t nearly as successful, but that’s also true for many movie sequels.

These days, company leaders even appear on TV to sell such commodity products as baked beans, but in Apple’s case, they opted for two comic actors to portray the Mac and the PC, and that’s surely gained lots and lots of attention, and probably lots of sales.

In retrospect, maybe it was a good idea for Steve Jobs not to become fodder for commercial skipping with your TiVO. Besides, what did someone once say about overexposure? You can easily fire the actors who appear in a commercial, but the CEO represents a far more difficult issue.

Microsoft’s response to Apple’s campaign is to have former CEO Bill Gates take the Iacocca route, with comedian Jerry Seinfeld playing some role or other. Unfortunately the first ad, in a shoe store setting, doesn’t make much if anything terribly clear.

I needn’t dwell on the fact that Seinfeld’s hit TV series has been off the air for years, but with a big payday, the star of a show about nothing will apparently now appear in a series of TV ads with a similar intent.

But what about public information? Right now, any one of several possible corporate communications people will handle the chore, depending on which Apple department needs to respond to a particular question. There is no single person to go to, alas, and quite often, the questions are simply never answered, even when there are issues that might negatively impact customers.

More recently, Steve Jobs has taken on the role of writing terse one-liners to Apple customers who complain about something or other. That, and a certain company memo about the MobileMe launch fiasco, were quickly disclosed to the press, who took it from there. Well, if that was Apple’s intention all along, I suppose it succeeded, though it seems rather a backwards way of giving out critical information to customers.

Now some companies put one public relations specialist in charge of handling inquiries, usually someone reasonably charismatic, so they look good on TV. Certainly the White House has a press secretary to handle those chores, providing regular press briefings, but some of those people haven’t exactly emerged as TV stars. And don’t get me started on the quality and the extent of the information these people provide either. They still have to follow the guidelines — and usually direct instructions — from their employers.

Despite the potential downsides, it’s clear to me that Apple is large enough to consider the same sort of setup. I wouldn’t presume to suggest whether one of the existing members of their corporate communications team could serve this function. They might even have to go outside the company to find someone with the appropriate photogenic looks and penchant for sharp repartee.

In an ideal world, Steve Jobs himself might be ideal to do the job, but he can also be contentious with the press when he’s asked an uncomfortable question. That might suit for a special press briefing, but not on a regular basis. Besides, Jobs has better things to do, and, being endlessly suspicious of the press anyway, he wouldn’t be the ideal person to serve extended duty for such a task.

Anyway, he has more important things to do, such as running the company and building the products that, sometimes, people find reason to complain about.

So why would Apple need to consider an official information czar? Well, for one thing, their public relations performance has grown worse and worse over the past year. They have made some foolish moves that have resulted in bad press, or even a forced mea culpa from the CEO.

Last year, for example, when Apple cut $200 from the price of the iPhone, Jobs made an off-handed crack about the price you pay to be an early adopter of new technology. That remark didn’t go over too well, and, after being inundated with complaints, Jobs himself wrote a blog entry offering $100 rebates.

The MobileMe debacle was a more recent matter. For a few days, you heard nothing at all, except for obscure prompts about extended maintenance when you tried to login to your account. Finally, someone posted a few blog-style messages, claiming to have done so at Jobs’ behest. Except that a promised follow up never actually appeared. It wasn’t long before Apple put iTunes chief Eddie Cue in charge of cleaning up the mess before things got way out of hand.

Well, the 90-day membership extension was surely welcome. I have no complaints about that. For the most part, I’m a satisfied Apple customer of long standing. However, as the company continues to top the charts as the “it” tech company of the 21st century, they risk losing an awful lot of hard-won prestige if the issue of proper public communication continues to elude them.

All right, try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who has never purchased an Apple product, or perhaps did so way back when, but later migrated to the Dark Side. In recent months, you have been exposed to endless articles and ads about the joys of Macs, iPods and the ever-so-popular iPhone.

Now if you were once a Mac user, the next thing to consider is why you abandoned the platform. It’s not as if Apple didn’t do lots of things to drive you away, such as charging exorbitant prices for the hardware, and providing short-term limited warranties. Indeed, in those days all you got with your new Mac was 90 days parts and service.

Perhaps you loved your Mac, but didn’t appreciate the fact that the software you required for your business stopped supporting your favorite platform. They said go Windows, and so you did.

But you soon discovered that the other side of the tracks wasn’t so terrific after all. It wasn’t Mac-like in any respect, despite claims to the contrary. Yes, the interface was superficially quite similar, but all that malware, all those driver conflicts. Windows Vista was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Meantime, maybe you bought an iPod, and you realized that Apple builds some super cool stuff nowadays. So why not give them a try? So you went ahead and purchased a new Mac, ready to get back in the swing of things.

But, as with some of the folks who have written up their war stories in our Comments section, perhaps something went wrong. Perhaps your brand new Mac misbehaved big time almost out of the box, failing to sustain a Wi-Fi connection, for example.

Is it the Wi-Fi? Well, you boot your Windows box and it works just fine, so what’s this deal about Macs just working anyway? That’s not your experience, and your frustration is quite understandable. At this point, you have to consider whether it make sense to endure the problem or put yourself in troubleshooting mode and try to find a solution.

Now maybe all it takes is a Mac OS X update. Indeed, the initial releases of Leopard did have AirPort-related troubles, which have, or should have been, largely resolved. Perhaps that’s all it takes and it’s time to get on with your life.

But maybe things aren’t quite so simple. Perhaps your first foray into the Apple universe was the iPhone 3G. You saw the ads, about how it connected to the Internet up to twice as fast as the previous model, which was limited to the EDGE cellular data network. So you sweated for several hours immersed within a large crowd of eager buyers waiting for the honor of paying the full price, having it activated, and taking it home.

In the real world, however, the joys of broadband access on a mobile device proved elusive. You are like many others who found lots of dead spots where even the slower network wasn’t available. Maybe you even saw a “Service Unavailable” message on your iPhone, and you have to wonder whether it made sense to get involved in something that you have come to regard as perhaps a bait and switch scheme.

Unfortunately, troubleshooting a cell phone isn’t so easy. Two people with different devices in the very same location might have altogether different experiences. Network congestion or bad weather might impair reception big time. In fact, one of the frequent complaints about the iPhone 3G’s performance is that AT&T’s network in the larger U.S. cities simply isn’t capable of handling the load.

Here’s one possible cause, among many: With other phones, even smartphones, people aren’t constantly surfing the Internet. That’s because the browsers on these other devices are downright pathetic, even when they promise to deliver an authentic online experience. So it may well be that cellular networks are suddenly thrust into an environment where they must handle traffic quite different than what they were designed for.

For the end user, rather than blame Apple or the wireless carrier, you go after both. Certainly there’s already a legal action pending where someone charges that Apple’s claims about the iPhone 3G’s performance are false, and they are demanding restitution.

If you, as the recent Apple convert, encounter any difficulties of this sort, maybe that BlackBerry is starting to look a lot more attractive to you. Buyer’s remorse is starting to set in and you are seriously considering abandoning Apple for something, however imperfect, that you can reasonably rely on.

Right now, of course, most people are cutting Apple some slack. When the products work, they are simply marvelous. But having all recent problems pile up together has to have some impact, and not necessarily the kind Apple wants.

Consider running through hoops to get your iPhone even activated, trying out MobileMe and finding your email is offline, and then setting up a new Mac and encountering various and sundry difficulties. Consider if you were that new Apple customer, and encountered all this within the space of a couple of weeks.

What would you do? How would you handle it, and would you swear off Apple products forever? That, dear reader, is a very real danger. And Apple’s difficulties at providing solid customer information in a simple, organized fashion doesn’t help. You shouldn’t have to depend on a terse sentence in an email from Steve Jobs or a memo to company employees, both quoted in a news report, to find the answers you need.

Indeed, first impressions mean a lot, and Apple needs to consider the consequences. They may not get too many second chances.

All right, Apple Inc. really isn’t celebrating my birthday. Besides, that was so long ago, even I’ve forgotten how old I am. But, seriously, being so close to the main event makes the results ripe for speculation.

Apple enjoys giving the press broad hints as to what their events are all about. This one, set for September 9th at 10 AM Pacific Time in San Francisco, simply says, “Let’s Rock.”

Those two words are pregnant with meaning, and it easy to cover a reasonable set of possibilities. At its core, though, it’s clearly iPod-related, witness the telltale artwork that typifies the standard iPod promotional motif. It doesn’t take a huge stretch to consider the fact that September is the time for those annual updates to Apple’s best-selling digital music player.

Already, there have been mock-ups of possible revisions to the iPod nano, but it’s not at all clear if they are based on actual design graphics leaking from Apple or a little wishful thinking. I’m inclined to consider the latter. But the betting is that any changes to the iPod lineup will be relatively minor, since Apple has no real competition, and there’s only so far you can expand the traditional iPod before it morphs into something else entirely.

That takes us to the iPod touch, which is a genuinely fascinating product. At this point, though, other than perhaps making the case design a bit closer to the iPhone 3G, dropping the price somewhat and having a model with more Flash RAM, what sort of changes might Apple make?

Besides, there are still those tantalizing tidbits that emerged from the last quarterly session with financial analysts, where Apple’s executives talked of some major product transition and reduced profits that, in part, would be the result of aggressive pricing.

So would all that be the result of cheaper iPods? I think not. There are other possibilities that I’ll explore.

One of the more intriguing bits of speculation emerges from the fertile imagination of Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted Magazine. In a fascinating recent column, he posited a tiny touchscreen in place of the existing trackpad on a new line of Apple note-books. Extending the MultiTouch capabilities you now see on the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro lines, such a display would serve as a proxy for the main display, where your actual finger movements would be recognized in the same fashion as an iPhone.

You might ask why Apple doesn’t just make the entire display touch-enabled, but that would surely increase prices higher than most customers would like, even if some of those increased costs were absorbed by the company. It’s also an awkward reach from the keyboard.

But a tiny touch screen, which Daniel suggests would cost about $56 in raw materials, would cut profit margins all right, but not enough to prevent Apple from sticking with their current pricing.

In addition to the terrific press such a feature would generate, it would also separate Apple’s note-books from the pack in a huge way. Yes, some note-books have external LCDs, but they are designed to be similar to the second display on a typical clamshell mobile phone, where you see a miniature rendering of time, signal strength and the Caller ID when you get a phone call. It’s not the same thing.

Now I can’t tell you that Daniel nailed it. Yes, he’s got some good sources inside Apple, but I suspect this particular idea is nothing more than a great turn at common sense. It’s a logical extension of MultiTouch, and it avoids the clumsiness of a large touch screen.

And, yes, if it happens it will indeed rock!

Beyond these two product line upgrades, are there any other things Apple might reveal during this session?

My feeling is that iPhone 2.1, the one that will supposedly provide push notification and loads of bug fixes, may also make its debut. But that doesn’t have to happen. Apple could simply announce it, and say it’ll be released in a week or two.

For that matter, why assume that this is the only press presentation from Apple this month? Is it possible they might simply reserve the note-book revisions, and perhaps a reinvigorated iMac and Mac mini, for a later session, the better to focus attention on a small number of product introductions at a time?

Indeed, what’s going to happen to the Mac mini and is it a goner? I hope not, because I still think those tiny computers are great upgrades for folks who are ditching the PowerPC. Even though the most recent mini is actually less powerful than a MacBook, anyone with a G4-based Mac, except for those with tricked out dual-processor models and voluminous, speedy drives, would see a significant performance boost.

What’s more, it wouldn’t cost Apple a whole lot of money simply to upgrade the mini with the latest Intel parts. At the same time, with perhaps a speedier hard drive and the very same price, it would be a far more compelling alternative for those who want to acquire a new Mac, but find even the iMac too expensive. That’s particularly true if they already have a decent mouse, keyboard and display.

Yes, there’s still that concept of the headless iMac, the desktop that would be situated between the mini and the Mac Pro. I still believe it’s a viable product that would definitely find a substantial audience. But, as I’ve said many times already, when was the last time Apple listened to me? Or the first time for that matter?