35th Anniversary of the Macintosh Computer

35 years ago today, Apple announced their Macintosh computer. What made the Macintosh radically different at the time was its graphical user interface (GUI) that was navigated using a mouse (mice were very uncommon in 1984!).

The first Macintosh only had 128K of RAM and a Motorola 68000 CPU, but it was pretty snappy for the time. The picture at the top of this post is of my daughter next to an original Macintosh 128K (and yes, it still works).

The Macintosh enjoyed some success in the late 1980s and early 1990s - especially in the area of desktop publishing, where a GUI was important. The Macintosh (and Apple) nearly died in the mid 1990s amid competition from Microsoft Windows, but gained prominence again in the early 2000s when people drew their attention to Apple again because of the wildly-successful iPod music device. From the early 2000s to early 2010s, Macintosh (or simply Mac) computers were excellent quality machines with an operating system called Mac OS X (later renamed macOS) that was arguably better than Windows and Linux.

Today, Apple is a massive company due to the massive success of the iPhone and iPad. Unfortunately, Mac computers today no longer have any WOW value when it comes to hardware, and while macOS is “OK”, it’s nothing special compared to Windows 10 or Linux nowadays. Regardless, I still have a Mac desktop computer today, and have many fond memories of Mac computers that I’ve owned in the past - including the Macintosh 128K!