On Saturday, January 24th, the Apple Macintosh turned 25. And its history deserves to be celebrated, indeed. They say these computers are definitely the best thing since bread came sliced.
The original Macintosh was unveiled January 24, 1984, virtually inventing the personal computer for the masses. But Apple did a crummy job in profiting from it, and the company stumbled for years; "cult" was a reasonable term for Macintosh fans even into the late 1990s, when Apple Computer Inc. was a niche computer firm, happy with a 3 percent market share. This device was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command line interface. In other words, it was called "graphical user interface" because it let people interact with computers by using images instead of typing software commands.
It came bundled with two applications designed to show off its interface: MacWrite and MacPaint. Although the Mac garnered an immediate, enthusiastic following, it was too radical for some, who labeled it a mere "toy." But although not everyone admitted it, it was the thing for the ones who had any interest in being considered cool.
In September 1986 Apple introduced the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW that allowed software developers to create software for Macintosh on Macintosh, rather than cross-developing from a Lisa. In August 1987 Apple unveiled HyperCard, and introduced MultiFinder, which added cooperative multitasking to the Macintosh.
Of course much has changed in technology over the course of the past 25 years, with Apple often at the center of the advances we now take for granted.
Revolutionary Macintosh features included a "mouse" for navigating on-screen cursors and small pictures clicked to trigger applications or open files. And the show went on… Apple computers earned a reputation for being premier products, well-crafted machines with intuitive controls non-geeks could easily grasp.
The eternal battle between Microsoft and Apple has been going on since we were in kindergarten. An event worth mentioning took place back in1988, when Apple sued Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard on the grounds that they infringed Apple’s copyrighted GUI, citing (among other things) the use of rectangular, overlapping, and resizable windows. After four years, the case was decided against Apple, as were later appeals.
As far as the competition’s glorious years are concerned, Microsoft and Intel began to rapidly lower Apple's market share with the Windows 95 operating system and Pentium processors respectively. So the competition between the two major companies was always an interesting battle to watch.
And last but not least, we can’t ignore the absolute star that brought Apple the notoriety it has today; announced at Macworld Expo in 2007, the first iPhone went on to take the mobile world by storm when it was released almost six months later. Featuring technologies not initially available on the desktop version of Mac OS X, such as Core Animation, the iPhone’s user interface did to the mobile industry what the original Macintosh did to the computer industry.
"I think the iPhone (and) iPod, have drawn more people to think of the Macintosh. People are seeing how really neat the iPhone is, and how easy it is to use, and the iPod the same way, and they're going out and looking at the computer," said Tim Adams of Nashua, who has been part of a Nashua-based group of Mac fans called Southern New Hampshire Apple Core for close to three decades.
