This last Monday, we celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one of our official holidays where we as a nation pause and reflect together. However, there are holidays every day that are important to someone, so let’s dive into today’s Obscure Holiday, Macintosh Day!
Many of us enjoy a good apple, they do keep the doctor away after all. However, the Macintosh celebrated today isn’t an apple you can take a bite out of, it’s instead an Apple device. Forty one years ago today, Apple, Inc. released the first Macintosh revolutionizing the world of computers.
At this point, personal computers were becoming more mainstream, though still primitive. Apple and IBM were competing against each other in the market, slowly implementing features that many of us take for granted today like a graphical user interface that lets you click a button rather than write a line of code to perform an action. However, these first computers were untouchable for most people. A year earlier, Apple released the Lisa with many of these innovations, however the computer cost an equivalent of $30,000 in today’s money. Imagine paying the price of a modest car for a computer. Needless to say, the Lisa ended up being a commercial failure. During the same time as this, however, a small team was hard at work combining the cost saving features of the Apple II with the innovation of the Lisa.
Team member Burrell Smith was asked to combine the Motorola 68k microprocessor into the new computer’s design. Ultimately, he was able to save cost by designing a self contained circuit board with the processor, 68 kb of read only memory, and 128 kb of random access memory. Jobs recently was kicked off of the Lisa team due to his continual suggestions for improvements, and so he was able to take over the mysterious project from project led Jef Raskin and a sidelined Steve Wazniak from a recent plane crash. In September 1981, both the Lisa and “McIntosh” were rumored to InfoWorld.
The world learned what the project was during the Super Bowl, one of the most famous commercials aired; a woman wearing a white tank top breaks out of a drab, gray world controlled by Big Brother from the Orwell book 1984. The Macintosh 128k sold over 500,000 units during the roughly year and a half it was on the market, and still lives on today. Apple laptops and desktops still bear the name “Mac” and have become the industry standard for professionalism and durability. Even non-Apple computers have adopted the designs of the Mac and the features like a GUI and house that the Mac revolutionized are now standard place. To read more about the Mac, click the link below!
