Apple, Inc. celebrated the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the Macintosh this week. January 24th, 1984, Steve jobs showed the world his new machine complete with graphical user interface. The machine initially envisioned by The like of Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs had come to a fruition and Apple introduced it in a manner which has never been forgotten.
Few can forget the image of Steve Jobs up on stage two days after the commercial aired during the Superbowl, showing off a machine which was not only revolutionary in thinking but a whole new direction for how people would work.
While many folks jumped up and bought the machine immediately, it would take nearly another two years before the machine would really take off. The initial machine came with a single 400KB floppy drive and was introduced at a cost of nearly $3000 USD. A nine inch screen was what was put in the machine and while ample area for the few programs available at the time, it was not really a very good display for much other than showing off the Mac Write fonts.
Now thirty years on, the Macintosh is one of the worlds most recognizable items with its distinct apple logo and a large 27 inch display on the highest end models. The 32GB max of the machines now make the paltry 128K of that initial machine seem like a mistake. But then it has been thirty years and while Moore’s law has not quite kept up with memory amounts, the amount of memory required by today’s machines is stupendous and continues to grow on a nearly yearly basis. The graphical qualities of the machines have also advanced to the point where real video is easily rendered on the machines. Yet the best the 128K mac could do was a digital line art drawing.
Yet, that day was revolutionary and was definitely not like 1984.
