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Happy 40th Anniversary

Avatar Euan Williams
The original Mac was announced forty years ago on January 24, 1984 at the 1984 Superbowl.

It cost $2,495, or $7,366 in 2024 dollars, featured a 9-inch black-and-white display, 128KB of RAM, a 400 KB floppy disk drive, a mouse, and built-in networking. Decried as an elaborate 'Etch-a-sketch' it developed to 500KB RAM and then to the MacPlus after a very serious update which Apple offered to original users at a heavily subsidised price.

Windows appeared about a year later.

These days you can emulate the original MacOS even on your current Apple silicone.

Thank you to Jeff Raskin, the original team, and Steve Jobs.

Re: Happy 40th Anniversary

Avatar Richard I
We had them at work. I particularly enjoyed making mine speak out loud whatever I wanted! Happy days...

Re: Happy 40th Anniversary

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Remind me Richard, did we ever do anything useful with them? :)

Re: Happy 40th Anniversary

Avatar Richard I
They were transformational. Productivity improvements and also contributed to employee moral. Honest guv!

Re: Happy 40th Anniversary

Avatar Euan Williams
Just for fun, and for Mick's next quiz, this site has everything Apple has produced including the advertising videos (such as "I'm a Mac and he's a PC" series.

Pure nostalgia... ;))

Re: Happy 40th Anniversary

Avatar Eleanor Spenceley
OMG. of the 9 Macs on the front page of that site I have 8!

The 9th, the Mac Classic II, I have just the Mac Classic (1) ...

:-)

Re: Happy 40th Anniversary

Avatar Tony Still
Trevor,
Of course! I ran Microplanner on mine, being the first time a PERT chart belonged to me rather than being locked up in some other department. You could inspect exactly one activity at a time on screen...but you could print out a whole network. Then you could edit the activities again!

And then there was Excel! Having previously used Lotus 123 on a DOS PC you could stop hitting the slash key (or something obscure) and wondering what you'd done: you could tweak hours and see the overall impact in Pounds - straight away.

Oh, and we did have a networked Star Trek game (on Apple Talk) but I don't think senior management ever saw that as it boosted morale at lunchtime.
 
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