40 Years of Macintosh
A Love Affair
The now-famous Macintosh computer turns 40. When Apple President Steve Jobs launched this computer at the Flint Center on the De Anza College campus on January 24, 1984, to the theme from Chariots of Fire, he called it “insanely great!”
The $1.5M “1984” Super Bowl commercial filmed by Sir Ridley Scott had appeared on TV two days before Macintosh went on sale, and the world was holding its breath.
The ad read:
On January 24th,
Apple Computer will introduce
Macintosh.
And you’ll see why 1984
won’t be like “1984”
When IBM released the so-called IBM PC in 1981, I remember telling my workmates I had at a Silicon Valley startup at the time that it
“legitimized the desktop microcomputer market,”
… at least for business. Though it was called a Personal Computer, few people I knew had one at home. It was driven to popularity with MS-DOS, a character-based user interface, initially with green characters on a black screen, then in living color.
The PC had been around for almost a decade, back to the Xerox PARC Alto machine, but they were too expensive and…
