Tech Rewind: When the Apple Macintosh was first introduced

The Apple Macintosh went on sale on this day January 24 in 1984 33 years ago On this occasion we list some lesserknownfacts about the personal computergtgt The Apple Macintosh is the first personal computer intended for the mass consumer market It stood out for featuring the an integral graphical user interface and mouse Users communicated with the computer using a metaphorical desktop that included icons of real life items instead of abstract textual commandsThe Apple Macintosh as introduced by Steve Jobs in his 1984 keynote address PicYouTubegtgt The name Macintosh was coined by Apple employee Jef Raskin who was incharge of the project in 1979 Raskin decided to name the machine after his favourite type of apple the McIntoshgtgt Burrell Smith a team member of the Apple Macintosh project a selftaught engineer provided the computer with the following configuration based on Jef Raskins design specificationsRAM 64 kilobytes kbProcessor Motorola 6809E microprocessorDisplay 256times256pixel blackandwhite bitmap displayBy December 1980 an improved design using Apple Lisas Motorola 68000 microprocessor and an increased speed from 5 MHz to MHz with the capacity to support a a 384times256pixel display was possibleThe final Mac design after these design changes was as follows QuickDraw picture language and interpreter in 64 kB of ROM 128 kB of RAM in the form of sixteen 64 kilobit kb RAM chips soldered to the logicboard RAM was expandable to 512 kB by means of soldering sixteen IC sockets to accept 256 kb RAM chips in place of the factoryinstalled chips since there were no memory slots 9inch screen with 512x342 pixel monochrome displaygtgt The Apple Macintoshs groundbreaking graphical user interface GUI became a reality after Steve Jobs negotiated a visit to see the Xerox Alto computer and its Smalltalk development tools in exchange for Apple stock options The user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh were influenced by technology seen at Xerox PARC and were combined with the Apple Macintosh groups own ideasgtgt The Snow White design language was developed for the Apple Macintosh line by industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger who was commissioned by Steve Jobsgtgt The Apple Macintosh later renamed Macintosh 128k after its successor Macintosh 512K was introduced was formally announced on October 1983 with a 18page brochure included in various magazines in Decembergtgt The nowfamous Ridley Scott directed Television commercial named 1984 was screend at aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22 1984 is considered Apples watershed moment The ad cost USD 15 million to make It featured an unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh as a means of saving humanity from the conformity of IBMs attempts to dominate the computer industry and alluded to author George Orwells famous novel Ninteen EightyFourgtgt Apple Macintosh came bundled with two applications namely MacWrite and MacPaint which were demonstrated by Steve Jobs in the first of his famous Mac keynote speechesgtgt Apple introduced the Macintosh Office suite the same year with the Lemmings ad Infamous for insulting its own potential customers the ad was not successfulgtgt Following the release of the Apple Macintosh and subsequent bundled application MacPaint and MacWrite in April 1984 Microsofts MultiPlan migrated over from MSDOS with Microsoft Word following in January 1985gtgt There was an initial lack of software for the new Apple Macintosh system since it was designed largely around the GUI existing textmode and commanddriven applications had to be redesigned and the programming code rewritten which was a timeconsuming task that many software developers chose not to undertakegtgt The sales of the Macintosh were strong from its initial sales release on January 24 1984 and reached 70000 units on May 3 1984