How the 'i' got into Apple

[Spartan_X]

Have you ever wondered when people started putting a lowercase `i' in front of words and what it stood for? In that case, read on

By William Safire

NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Sunday, Oct 30, 2005, Page 9

"Buffalo Bill's defunct ...," wrote E.E. Cummings (usually written e.e. cummings) in 1920, "Jesus/he was a handsome man/and what i want to know is/how do you like your blueeyed boy/Mister Death."

The poet Edward Estlin Cummings dropped the hyphen in blue-eyed and put no question mark after his question about the mortality of heroes. On top of those deliberate grammatical outrages, he went so far as to lowercase what has become known as the perpendicular pronoun: he wrote "I" as i.

Cummings lives. For people who prefer listening to talking, the iPod is the most-talked-about new device on earth. This column focuses not on the hot-selling MP3 gizmo that converts 1s and 0s to music and chatter but asks, When was the lowercase "i" before an uppercase anything born, and what did it stand for?

Officials at Apple Computer were unhelpful, presumably because they suspected that etymological revelation would cause their stock to plunge again, but Dan Frakes of Macworld magazine informs me that the first i-product was the iMac in 1998: "Apple said at the time that the i in iMac stood for `Internet,' as the iMac was allegedly the easiest computer to connect to the Internet." Why not Imac or I-Mac? "They didn't want to dilute their brand name by lowercasing it (e.g., Imac)." And IMAX Corp, all caps, is a theater network founded in 1967.

The iMac led to the iBook, a laptop, in 1999, followed by Apple's iPhoto, iTunes and a bundle sold as iLife. The meaning of i went beyond "Internet" to be taken as "individual," "integrated," "interactive" or -- most appealing to consumers -- "what I want when I want it." Because it is difficult to copyright a letter of the alphabet, other companies jumped in: a furniture manufacturer calls its massage chair an iJoy "to emphasize the `individual' interaction with the chair."

Why wasn't iPod, which originally played only music, named iMusic? "Apple planned from the very beginning," says the Times tech columnist, David Pogue, "to expand its mission to text, photos, files and, as of this month, videos." The word pod was chosen, I deduce, to describe an all-purpose media module, its meaning "a container or protective housing," long associated with peas and pregnancy but in recent decades applied to the streamlined fuel compartments under the wings of aircraft.

The marketing fad will last until another letter gets hot. Keep your i on u.

Source: The Taipei Times

[+Peewee210 Subscriber¹]

Thanks for the Info. Very Interesting. Like BTallack Said: I knew the "i" was for the internet but didn't know why it was lower Case.

[BTallack]

Very Interesting. I knew the i was originally for internet, but I didn't know the reason for the lower case.

[.Neo]

I knew it all! :cool:

[jlmodell]

do they write this article every other year or something? lol .. i swear ive read this a long long time ago.. (but im not so exhaustive that i'll try looking it up.. haha)

[yudi_lks]

Wow.. Interesting