14 DAY TRIAL // Getting around to posting this day-old piece of news just now, Softpedia would like to congratulate Apple on the Mac’s 26th anniversary. Today, January 25th, the Apple Macintosh is already 26 years and one day old. Most of all, however, we would like to praise Apple for its advancements. From 128K to Snow Leopard, the Macintosh and its operating system never ceased to amaze us.
Readers should not mistake Apple’s first Macintosh model, released on January 24, 1984, with the Apple I, a case-less computer that shipped without a monitor, or a keyboard. The Macintosh had all these, plus something entirely revolutionary – the mouse!
It was introduced by the famous television commercial “1984” (by Ridley Scott), which aired on CBS during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984.
The computer was designed to achieve an adequate graphics performance at a price accessible to the middle class. It was introduced at a pocket-burning $2,495. Apple dared set the high price as its Macintosh was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a graphical user interface, rather than a command-line interface.
It had an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor connected to a 128 KB DRAM by a 16-bit data bus. The lack of RAM proved to be a fatal constraint to many pieces of multimedia software. Later, due to the lack of memory, Apple intentionally chose to exclude the 128K from three of its most important early developments, “banishing” it from the rest of the Macintosh family.
The built-in display was a one-bit, black-and-white, 9-inch CRT with a resolution of 512×342 pixels. It actually established the desktop publishing standard of 72 PPI.
It featured a 400 kB, single-sided, 3.5-inch floppy disk drive and dedicated no space to other internal mechanical storage. The Mac OS was disk-based, as RAM had to be conserved. However, the “Startup Disk” could still be temporarily ejected. The Macintosh shipped with the first System and Finder application, known to the public as “System 1.0.” This saw three upgrades before the original Macintosh was discontinued.