Almanac: The Macintosh
And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: January 24th, 1984, 32 years ago today ... the day Apple delivered on a promise it made in a Super Bowl commercial just two days earlier:
"On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'"
Steve Jobs himself presented the first Macintosh to the world that day ... the very first computer offering user-friendly icons along with a mouse.
"Many of us have been working on Macintosh for over two years now," Jobs said. "And it has turned out insanely great!"
Not entirely.
At $2,500, consumers found that original Macintosh too expensive for what it could actually do. Sales fell short of expectations. And in little more than a year, Jobs was effectively forced to leave the company.
Of course, what happened next is now the stuff of high-tech legend -- not to mention the recent film "Steve Jobs," for which Michael Fassbender has been nominated for an Oscar.
On the verge of bankruptcy in 1997, Apple brought Jobs back -- and what followed was a seemingly endless succession of successful Apple products, continuing up to Jobs' death in 2011 -- and beyond.
By the way, the early 1984 Macintosh computer had 0.13 MegaBytes of memory. The iPhone 6S, introduced last year, has 16 GigaBytes ... that's 123,000 thousand times more memory.
For more info:
- Apple.com
- "Steve Jobs" (Official movie site)
- Gallery: Macintosh through the years
- Passage: The inventor of the computer mouse ("Sunday Morning," 07/07/13)
- Macintosh 128k (apple-history.com)
- History of the Apple Macintosh (mac-history.net)
- 1984 Apple Macintosh replica crafted from wood and gold (CNET)