It was 25 years ago today that the Macintosh was introduced as a commercial product. A quarter century later, I’m still using one to type this post. It’s interesting in the videos shown in the link above to see much younger versions of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Also interesting that in their Macintosh promotional video, they felt the need to explain how a mouse works. They were a completely unknown technology to most people at the time.
8 thoughts on “Quarter Century of Macintosh”
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OS X is the best user OS today.
I kinda feel sorry for all the unenlightened people toiling in Windows hell.
While I spent many years using the classic Mac OS, I prefer my openSUSE to Mac OS X, but I have to agree that Windows is hell.
It’s also Tam’s birthday; she’s 25, too.
Coincidence? I think not.
My IT department just gave me a Mac Mini to replace my aging desktop. As a longtime Windows & Linux user (those tend to be the most applicable skills for a Systems Admin), I’d never played with OS X before. Since my company owns VMWare, my first instinct was to install VMWare Fusion and run XP, only to find that the paltry 1GB of memory the Mini shipped with was insufficient to run both OS X and XP simultaneously.
Then I found out that opening a Mac Mini involved the use of a putty knife or a spludger. The last iBook I worked on required the removal of 60+ screws to get at the hard drive.
Call the OS user friendly as much as you like (that boils down as more to personal preference and usage environment than anything else), but their hardware is the epitome of inconvenient.
You’re right that people didn’t understand the Mouse, but not very long later it was used as a gag in a movie (Scotty talking into the mouse in Star Trek IV). Actually pretty rapid uptake into the general public’s consciousness.
Or trekkie’s consciousness. ;-)
I remember reading about the mouse in Scientific American back in the late sixties or early seventies. It was an interesting device, but no one knew what to do with it at the time.
RC, on the other hand, the Mac towers just pop right open and are easily accessible.
The fact that you’re using a computer called a Mac today and that the first computer that was known as a Mac is 25 years old now really doesn’t mean much. After all, any similarity between that one and yours is purely coincidental.
Other than in a generic sense, the hardware is completely different. Not just newer versions, but entirely different families of CPU, memory, hard drives, monitor, etc. I’ll bet you couldn’t even use the same keyboard and mouse if you wanted to.
The software from that old one won’t run on the new one without going through an emulator. The OS comes from a whole new code base with no relationship to the original. The old GUI looks nothing like the new one except that they both have icons.
I believe IBM still sells a “PC” and nobody thinks anything of that and the new PCs are actually more similar to their old ones than the new Macs are to their original models.
It’s not like you’re using an Amiga or something.