Thursday, December 18, 2003
Twentieth Anniversary of the Macintosh
The Macintosh will turn 20 next month. The original 128K Macintosh was released in January 1984 with much fanfare including the infamous 1984 commercial shown during the Super Bowl. Apple had released the Lisa a year earlier with many of the same features but the Lisa was substantially more expensive ($9995 in 1983 dollars!). Also, the Lisa relied on Apple Twiggy drives that used non-standard media.
I didn't get my hands on a Macintosh until a few months after it was released. The CFO of the startup where I worked bought one. I was able to spend a few hours with it late one night. Even though I was using Apollo workstations with more powerful hardware, I was blown away by this amazing machine. And it was something I could actually afford to buy. I waited a while and finally bought a "Fat Mac" (512k Macintosh) which I eventually upgraded to a Mac Plus. I bought an external hard drive (a 20 MB DataFrame drive). All of this cost about $3500 including $800 for the hard drive. But I was able to develop code with this machine. It was even capable of running Apple Smalltalk.
Note: Back in 1997 Apple released the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh but that was to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Apple, not the Mac.
I didn't get my hands on a Macintosh until a few months after it was released. The CFO of the startup where I worked bought one. I was able to spend a few hours with it late one night. Even though I was using Apollo workstations with more powerful hardware, I was blown away by this amazing machine. And it was something I could actually afford to buy. I waited a while and finally bought a "Fat Mac" (512k Macintosh) which I eventually upgraded to a Mac Plus. I bought an external hard drive (a 20 MB DataFrame drive). All of this cost about $3500 including $800 for the hard drive. But I was able to develop code with this machine. It was even capable of running Apple Smalltalk.
Note: Back in 1997 Apple released the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh but that was to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Apple, not the Mac.
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