Macintosh

The Macintosh shipped on 24 January 1984 at $2,495: a Motorola 68000 running at 7.83 MHz, 128 KB of memory, a 9-inch monochrome screen at 512×342, a mouse, and an operating system you could use without knowing a single command. It was the first mass-market computer with a graphical interface, and its lineage runs straight back through the Xerox Alto to NLS and the 1968 demo.

Two days before it went on sale, Apple aired Jobs’s "1984" commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, during Super Bowl XVIII. It showed no product.

Two people wanted two different machines

Jef Raskin started the project in 1979 wanting an appliance: a small, cheap, information appliance for ordinary people, built around a Motorola 6809, with 64 KB of memory, targeted first at $500 and then at $1,000. He treated the price as a specification — as binding as the memory or the processor — because the price decided who the machine was for.

Jobs took the project over in 1981 after being pushed off Lisa, and changed nearly every decision that touched the price. The 68000 replaced the 6809. Memory doubled to 128 KB to feed the video buffer a graphical interface requires. A Sony 3.5-inch drive went in. The estimate reached $1,995, and then John Sculley added $500 more to fund the launch campaign.

So the Macintosh arrived as the machine that made computers approachable, at a price that put it out of reach of most of the people that was supposed to serve. Both halves of that sentence are true, and the tension between them is the most instructive thing about the product.

What was actually new

The interface ideas were not invented at Apple. What was invented at Apple was the craftsmanship of making them ordinary. Bill Atkinson wrote QuickDraw, the graphics layer fast enough to make a bitmapped screen feel alive on cheap hardware, and MacPaint. Susan Kare designed the icons and bitmap typefaces — drawing, pixel by pixel on graph paper, the visual vocabulary that taught a generation what a file, a folder and a trash can look like on a screen. Andy Hertzfeld wrote much of the system software.

The Macintosh sold modestly at first and was discontinued within twenty-one months in favour of the 512K, because 128 KB was not enough memory for what the machine was trying to do. Its significance is not commercial. It is that after January 1984 the graphical interface stopped being a thing research labs demonstrated and became the thing a computer simply is.