30 years ago today the Macintosh was introduced to the world, a different PC that has given foundation to 30 years of innovation which lead to other great discoveries such as the Power Macintosh, the Portable Macintosh and finally approaching the new millennium, the iMac. Let us walk down it’s beginnings.
Steve Jobs, in his initial presentation for the Macintosh, alludes to the crowds for the machine as learning specialists and aspiring school learners – a product for the Arts and Sciences. It was evident especially with the Apple II present in many American schools and institutes of research already that the successor would surely follow in its footsteps. Little did we know at the time that it would instead exceed it. 30 years too no less.
[image src=’http://fnx.network/fnxnetwork/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Macintosh30_iMac2007.jpg’ width=’190′ height=’190′ title=’The 2007 Macintosh’ align=’left’]I was born in 1989, I grew up with the Macintosh… specifically a Macintosh LC II. My first experience with computers was Macintosh, learnt to type on a Power Macintosh Workstation, my high school taught IT on eMacs, during University I could be found doing assignments on my MacBook Pro and here I am now writing this on an iMac.
I grew up with Macintosh, indeed. As I matured, so did the device, yes it had phases where it was a laptop in the shape of a clamshell or a desktop in the shape of a bubble in a variety of funny colours… but I dyed my hair purple in high school… it’s all part of growing up right?
[image src=’http://fnx.network/fnxnetwork/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Macintosh30_iBook2000.jpg’ width=’190′ height=’190′ title=’The 2000 release of the iBook.’ align=’right’]In all of it’s forms it was a work of art, style meets technical. On the outside the shell was designed to be practical yet beautiful and on the inside was an achievement – creating standard PC parts in a non-standard way all to run operating systems that gained a reputation of “just working”. Okay, there was OS 8… we all have our Vista/ME moments…
The Macintosh was like nothing else, especially not it’s rival the IBM PC which was had it’s place only for corporate suits and compliancy to conservative, the definitive Macintosh was exceedingly transportable, it was visioned to be the central part of all 21st century startup businesses in the new computer dominated economy we have today. The personal computer did exactly that… but in the late eighties this was far too early to know (keeping in mind too that the Web wasn’t publicly huge until 1994).
[image src=’http://fnx.network/fnxnetwork/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Macintosh30_iMac98.jpg’ width=’190′ height=’190′ title=’The iMac from 1998.’ align=’left’]It’s still funny to think that one of the companies that helped make Macintosh as big as it is today was a tiny startup called Microsoft, perhaps you’ve heard of them? I don’t just mean by the fact they used to be a software company that made applications for the Mac (true story) but the fact that their competition kept making the Macintosh team redefine what a PC should be. That “war” gave us great outcomes… iMac, iBook, OS X (as well as on the other side Windows 98, 2000, XP and Seven).
Steve Jobs raised his baby from a young age himself, evident by the dorky neck ties he seemed to wear everywhere. He was offering the artistic vision of innovation, one in which the children of the information age could be raised with. As primitive as the very first Macintosh might seem to be today, it held the foundation of the modern components that we now distinguish as fundamental to the PC in the post-Command Line Interface world; the graphical user interface with symbols (icons) and drop down menus, finding out more things by just clicking, the capability to store records in a compact way. It even held propelled characteristics like animation work and content to discourse text-to-speech. These were indicative to what our individual technology has gotten to be. Like the iPhone, it was the complete epitome of the list of capabilities of what made up the absolute standard.
The new Mac Pro released and on sale now takes less space, and two thirds of the weight of the original Mac. Yet, Apple now runs a chip five hundred times as quick with one hundred thousand times the measure of Computer RAM for just 20% higher sticker cost.
But still, we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that little beige box saying “Hello” to the world all those years ago.