The first Mac was released 28 years ago

Today Apple celebrates its 28th anniversary of the launch of its flagship Macintosh computer. It's hard to believe, but it has been a quarter century since the first version of this computer became the talk of the computer industry. Mac brought a lot of innovation and became the subject of pride not only for the company, but also for its creator Steve Jobs.

Then the world saw a computer, which subsequently gave birth to a series of world-famous products. And it was him who advertised the famous movie "1984" . It was a personal computer using a graphical user interface, the idea of ​​which Steve borrowed from the Xerox PARC research center, instead of the then standard command line interface.

Jeff Raskin was the ideological developer of the first computer up to $ 1000, but he could not finish his project, as Steve Jobs, to put it mildly, forced him to retreat, after which he took over the reins of control (before that, he was working on the too expensive Lisa computer). However, despite all the difficulties, the change of leadership went to the development of the benefit, for example, from Lisa, the first Mac got the OS and mouse.


The characteristics of the first Mac may seem ridiculous today, but then it was one of the most powerful PCs:

Processor: Motorola 68000 (8 MHz)
RAM: 128 KB
Display: 9 ″, monochrome (512 x 384 pixels)

Yes, and it’s worth mentioning that the Macintosh was the first a computer that told itself about itself.

Andy Hertzfeld succeeded in the impossible: in two days he wrote a music reproduction program that could play the theme from the Chariots of Fire. But Jobs did not like the computer sound transmission, and it was decided to use the recording. But Steve was madly in love with the speech generator, uttering the written text with a charming electronic pronons; Jobs included him in the presentation. “I want the Macintosh to be the first computer to make a name for itself!” He insisted. Steve Hayden, a copywriter and author of the 1984 video , wrote the script, Steve Capps came up with a way
to display the name Macintosh in large letters, and Susan Kare
prepared a welcome screen saver.

- This is stated in the biography of Steve Jobs , written by Walter Isaacson with the participation of Steve himself and his relatives last year.

The price of the finished product amounted to $ 1995, but later $ 500 was thrown for the image by Apple CEO John Scully.

Presentation by Steve Jobs demonstrating the capabilities of a computer: