The humble Macintosh (now Mac) was released by Apple 40 years ago this week! Many of us grew up using various models of Mac in our daily lives. Some history:
Jef Raskin conceived the Macintosh project in 1979, which was usurped and redefined by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1981. The Macintosh has a 9-inch monochrome monitor built into the case, and was launched in January 1984, after Apple’s “1984” advertisement during Super Bowl XVIII.
Upon its January 1984 launch, the first Macintosh was described as revolutionary by The New York Times. Sales initially met projections, but dropped due to the machine’s low performance, single floppy disk drive requiring frequent disk swapping, and initial lack of applications.
Author Douglas Adams said: “But what I (and I think everybody else who bought the machine in the early days) fell in love with was not the machine itself, which was ridiculously slow and underpowered, but a romantic idea of the machine. And that romantic idea had to sustain me through the realities of actually working on the 128K Mac.
Most of the original Macintosh team left Apple, and some followed Jobs to found NeXT after he was forced out by CEO John Sculley. The first Macintosh nevertheless generated cult enthusiasm among buyers and some developers, who rushed to develop entirely new programs for the platform, including PageMaker, MORE, and Excel. Apple soon released the Macintosh 512K with improved performance and an external floppy drive. The Macintosh is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface.
Read more in Wikipedia.
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