14 DAY TRIAL // Leaving aside the small legal problems Apple has at this time, today we have to celebrate! The reason is that on the 24th of January, 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh, after announcing it two days earlier using the now famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial, directed by Ridley Scott. In this commercial, Apple challenged the computers using text-based interfaces widely employed at that time, since the woman that throws a sledgehammer at the video screen that represented IBM symbolizes the "power to the people" policy promoted by Apple's first Mac.
The Macintosh project started in early 1979, and the first design of the new computer had 64KiB (kibibytes) of RAM, a Motorola 6809E microprocessor and supported a 256X256 black and white bitmap display.
Until the final design that made it to the market, things evolved so the first Macintosh computer came with 128KiB of RAM that consisted of sixteen 64 Kb (kilobit) RAM chips soldered to the logicboard, and although no memory slots were available, you could get 512KiB of memory by soldering sixteen 256Kb memory chips in place of the factory installed ones. First Mac's board design used Lisa's Motorola 68000 microprocessor, but increased its speed from 5 to 8 MHz, while keeping the same production costs, and the bitmap display supported had a maximum resolution of 384X256 pixels.
On the 24th of January, 1984, the Mac went on sale for a price of 2,495$ and came bundled with MacWrite and MacPaint, two programs designed to show off their interface. Obviously, the Mac got a crowd of enthusiastic followers instantly, but its design was too much for some people, and even worse, due to the fact that the computer was designed entirely around its graphical user interface, the command-driven and text mode programs of those days had to be redesigned and rewritten to work with it, leading to an initial lack of software for the new system.
Everything that followed is history, leading us to where we are today - only a few steps from the iPhone arriving on the market, with a Leopard approaching fast and a lot of other products that bring future in our hands, today. Happy Anniversary, Mac!