Apple introduced the Macintosh on January 24, 1984, and ultimately changed the world

When the Macintosh was released, not only was it not a popular choice, it was also too expensive and even unusable. However, this original model did manage to change computing forever, not just for its followers but for global breakthroughs.

"You just saw some pictures of the Macintosh," Steve Jobs said when the Mac was officially announced. He appeared on stage at the Flint Center at De Anza College in Cupertino on Tuesday, January 24, 1984. "Now I want to show you the Macintosh in person."

The Mac he introduced looked much like today's machines. It features a small monochrome display, blocky graphics, and the kind of synthesized sounds that aren't currently available on the market. Crucially, however, it also looked nothing like the computers of the day.

"Up until that moment," wrote Steven Levy in his book about the Mac, "some literary license was required when someone said the computer screen 'lit up.' By the end of the presentation, I began to understand that these were things computers should be able to do. There was a better way."

Levy was one of the reporters who got an early demo when Apple previewed the Mac in October and November 1983. It's part of the company's twin goals of getting people talking when it releases a Mac, but keeping it easy for everyone to get started.

In addition to briefing reporters, Apple also makes Macs and delivers them to resellers. There are also videos. It's possible that an outside news organization or radio station decided to cover the Mac, but more likely, Apple itself produced a series of videos, as it does today. Versions of the

eight-part Computer Evolution series have come and gone on YouTube, although not available at the time of this writing. They look most like early electronic press kits, including one showing then-CEO John Sculley inadvertently revealing his full stance on computing.

"We launched this product with a well-coordinated and intense consumer marketing plan using the Macintosh," he said.

bless. Compare him to the others in these videos and you'll recognize him immediately. "We're betting on our vision. We'd rather do that than make a 'me too' product. Let other companies do it," said Steve Jobs.

Maybe Jobs would regret saying that later Microsoft did exactly this on Windows, and much later Google did the same on Android.

However, if they are plagiarists, Jobs is not the original author. He did not invent the Macintosh, as he often led people to believe.

Jeff Raskin

To be fair, the Mac we got on that day in 1984 wouldn’t be what it is today without Steve Jobs. First, it won't have a mouse. "I can't stand the mouse," Apple's Jef Raskin tells Owen W. Linzmayer in Apple Confidential 2.0. "Jobs gets 100% credit for insisting on a mouse on the Mac."

However, Raskin gets 100% credit for starting the project, coming up with the basic idea of ​​what the machine would do, and calling it the Macintosh of praise. He was even credited with the results for the mouse, because although he preferred a joystick, it was his work that led to the one-click model when others were using two or three. Talking to High Tech Heroes around 1987, Raskin explained that he had been a staff member at the Xerox PARC facility long before Steve Jobs' fateful visit in late 1979. Regulars - "I have an honorary bean bag chair there."

"They had this three-button mouse and I didn't know which button was which. So when I started creating the Macintosh project...I realized you could do everything you have to do with a mouse with one button. I It took a while to convince people that it was possible." Jef Raskin, who died in 2005, didn't always tell exactly how the Macintosh came to be, but in the spring or September of 1979, he Talking to Apple Chairman Mike Markkula. Raskin either came up with the Macintosh idea outright or declined Markkula's request to work on the console in the first place. No matter what the situation is, he said in an interview with

"High-Tech Hero"

that he has been thinking about Apple's future.

"The ongoing projects were the Apple III and the Lisa. I [told Markkula] I didn't think the Apple III had the technical capabilities to take us into the future... and the Lisa was going to be "too expensive and too slow. So I came up with something I called the Macintosh. ”

Apple IIIAlthough the company was developing the Apple III at the time, Raskin believed that the name Macintosh was just a codename and that the final machine would be called the Apple V. It should be A simpler machine than previous Apple computers, or at least in terms of its ease of use.

"There are no peripheral slots so the customer doesn't have to see the inside of the machine," he said. He came up with an all-in-one computer with bitmapped graphics—so the screen could display any image, not just DOS-like characters—which he planned to sell in 1979 for $500. The 27-inch iMac cost more than $1,920 today.

Ruskin also envisioned the machine being launched before Christmas 1981. It doesn't go on sale today, but was launched in January 1984 and went on sale for $2,495 or $6,695.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE MIDDLE

Between Raskin’s idea and the Mac shipping, Steve Jobs happened. Happened to John Sculley too. Steve Jobs originally thought the Mac project was unimportant, but changed his mind after being dropped from the Apple Lisa project.

One of the reasons for his removal is that he has now visited Xerox PARC and has been pushing to transform the Lisa into something more like the machine he saw there. He still remembered that fact, and the Apple board seemed to care little for the little project Macintosh, so they found each other.

Jobs actually took over the Mac project in late 1980 or early 1981 - and then gradually phased out Ruskin until the Mac's creator resigned in March 1982.

There's no doubt that Raskin's failure to get credit for the Macintosh was unfair, and it's certainly true that Jobs didn't deserve the credit. However, Ruskin successfully implemented his concept and created the Canon CAT.

CAT was a failure and Mac was a huge success.

What happened next

The launch of the Macintosh was a huge success in terms of marketing and publicity, so maybe Sculley was right. Initially, it was not popular as a visionary product because it only had a vision. Maybe Jobs was wrong because the original Macintosh wasn't capable of doing a lot of things.

However, both pushed up prices. Jobs demanded higher specs, and Sculley then spent $78 million ($209 million today) on marketing—and then tried to recoup it all as quickly as possible.

So the original Mac, launched on January 24, 1984, was a heavy and very expensive machine. Even so, it transformed the computing industry and ultimately literally changed the world.

You can trace the history of the screen you're reading on all the way back to the first Macintosh. On your screen, you can watch other content from Intro to Mac.

Apple, which existed in 1984 and created the Macintosh, also produced one of its most famous advertisements.. As part of the launch, Jobs played it again on television during the Super Bowl two days earlier.

Since then, and certainly because of the Mac, the TV is no longer the screen that everyone looks at the most. With the possibility of being online much greater today, Tim Cook will of course be here to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Mac in 2019.

Tim Cook Tweeted About Mac's 35th Anniversary in 2019

Since then, Macs have been undergoing massive changes to run on Apple Silicon. It's certainly a huge change, but it's done so well that it's easy to forget just how much effort it had to cost Apple.

Despite all the changes, all the growth, all the advancements since 1984, the Mac is still the Mac.

It failed when it was launched, but the Macintosh did so well that it truly changed the world. finally.

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