In late January 1984, during the 3rd
quarter of the Superbowl between the Washington Redskins and the Los
Angeles Raiders, the world was treated to one of the greatest
commercials ever produced. That commercial introduced the Macintosh.
A computer so great, that to quote Steve Jobs, "it's
insanely great!".
The Macintosh introduced
the world to the GUI (Graphical User Interface). Although
technically the Lisa, with its own GUI, was introduced a
year earlier and would be considered the first commercially distributed GUI based
computer. But its high price ($9,995) and the targeting of large
corporations as its market severely limited sales and exposure to the
general public.
The Macintosh, with a
much lower price, was very successful and reached a much larger portion
of the market, introducing the GUI to millions of people and
changing the computing world forever. No longer would it be necessary to
memorize a bunch of cryptic commands to manipulate files or open
programs. Operating a computer now was as easy as pointing to an icon
and pushing a button on the mouse.
In 1984 the computing world was dominated by
IBM and its Microsoft DOS OS (Operating System).
With the Mac introduction even Bill Gates realized the GUI
was the future of the computer OS and in 1985 he introduced a PC
version of it called MS WINDOWS.
In 1983, with the failure of the Lisa
to gain a foothold in the corporate market and the failure of the Apple
III, there was great concern amongst the financial analysts.
Was the Apple Computer Company finally running out of steam? The
computer company that could do no wrong had now twice missed the mark
and failed to market a computer for its future. But Apple wasn't
done yet. As it had done many times in the past with its great
wealth of talented resourceful people, Apple again performed a
miracle. With only the aging Apple II series sales supporting the
company, Apple's attention now turned to the Mac project
as its last hope to save the company.
The Macintosh design team was
headed up initially by Jef Raskin who laid the initial groundwork
in 1980 on a portable computer based on the Motorola 6800 8-bit
microprocessor with 64K of RAM, which would eventually evolve
into Macintosh of 1984 with its Motorola
68000 32-bit
microprocessor and 128K of RAM.
In early 1983, Steve Jobs
was removed from the Lisa project and he took over the reigns of the Macintosh
project, eventually forcing Jef Raskin out. The Mac team
under Steve Jobs' stewardship was given priority and privilege
over other projects at Apple and with ample resources, the
project flourished. The Mac team was now able to raid any other
project, including the Lisa, to acquire technology and manpower
needed to finish the Mac. A lot of the Mac's OS was borrowed
from the Lisa's GUI code. Before Jobs took over the Mac
team, this was forbidden, as the Mac was considered the poor
cousin to the Lisa (Jobs' prior project) and the design
team under Raskin was relegated to a small building across the
street from the main Apple company complex.
The Macintosh truly was a
revolutionary computer. Although a little underpowered with only 128K of RAM
and no hard drive. Its unique GUI operating system
ushered in a completely new era in computing. A person with no computing
skills at all could have the Mac up and running in less than a
half an hour. The Mac had a style all of its own, it wasn't
shaped like any other computer that came before it. It looked like a
friendly little robot with a keyboard attached. Even its opening screen
was designed to be user friendly: when you first turn the computer on
you are greeted with a small Mac computer icon that smiles at you
if you have inserted the proper disk and has a sad face if the wrong one
is used.
The Mac was
released with 128K of RAM soldered onto the motherboard so an
upgrade of RAM would involve a major project (third party
manufacturers would later design add-on boards to piggyback on top of
the mother board to increase the RAM and ROM
of the Original
Mac). The OS and programs were loaded into the computer using
a 400K 3.5 inch single sided floppy drive built into the front of the
case. The floppy drive is motorized and self ejects on shutdown (a nice
feature that unfortunately wasn't adopted by the PC
manufacturers). The built in 9 inch monochrome monitor is capable of
producing a 512 by 342 pixel screen in black and white only. This
was by far the highest resolution of any of the desktops of that era.
The Macintosh
exhibited in this museum is one of the Original Macs
released between January and September of 1984. Apparently there are 2
versions; when the upgraded Mac with 512k of Ram (nicknamed the 'Fat
Mac') was released in September, Apple still kept selling the
128k version at a lower price. The distinguishing feature was the
addition of the 128K to the Macintosh logo on the rear of the
case. The Original Macs only said Macintosh. This Mac
was added to the museum on June 6, 2000 and was purchased at a local
thrift shop. It is displayed with a 400K external floppy drive and a one
button mouse. It also has the original users manual and operating
systems disks.
