The Mac@40

Almost unnoticed, the Mac turned 40 last week, on January 24th. It might seem inconsequential today, but the original Macintosh was our first glimpse of the ubiquitous computer that we take for granted today. The intuitive, graphic interface is a part of every device today. The mouse was really a metaphor for the touch screen interface — it was the start of something new.

The original Macintosh was, to be kind, resource constrained. I owned one. There’s not a lot can be done with 128 Kb of RAM, and no hard disk. But it quickly got better. The 800Kb disk was a revelation. Microsoft managed to fit the first version of Excel, together with a copy of Apple’s prosaic little operating system onto a single disk. You had to do a lot of disk-swapping to save your work, but it was Excel, and Word wasn’t far behind it.

My first hard disk was a big, fat external disk with a fat 10 Mb on it, and a SCSI cable connection. It cost about as much as the Mac, took? what seemed like ages to wind itself up and appear on the desktop — but that was magic.

All of that was before the advent of digital imaging, and desktop publishing of course — two things that really changed the World. After 1989 of course, Photoshop had started to undermine the truth of imagery. I had a Beta — version 0.63 — and as crude as that was, it was clearly going to change our World.

It’s no accident that some key applications like Photoshop, Powerpoint, Illustrator, Pagemaker and so on, appeared first on the Macintosh. Graphics were native to the Mac environment, in a way that they weren’t yet to the standard PC, and it gave rise to the widespread adoption of the Mac in graphics and production shops. Mac addicts were fiercely proud of their “toolbox”.

It wasn’t always easy. Some of Apple’s operating systems were notoriously flaky. As fast as the Mac grew, bloated applications took all of the capability of the machine, and then some. Microsoft’s Office 6 shipped on more than 30 floppy disks — unless you were lucky enough to have a CD drive. OS 7, 8 and 9 didn’t have much more to commend them, but with OS X Apple seemed to take on a new level of maturity.

The iMac was the Mac that brought plug-and-play (!) Internet into homes. As quirky and as novel as the iMac was, it was as much about the Internet as it was about the computing hardware itself. Inside that candy-coloured case, the iMac was a computer that almost anyone could have made — but only Apple dared. It marked the return of Steve Jobs to Apple, and the beginning of a design-led revolution. Apple promoted the iMac as the heart of a digital lifestyle, which was a step ahead of the reality of the Internet in 1998, but it did happen.

No 40-year old wants to remember growing up. It’s probably fitting that even Apple didn’t make a feast of the Mac’s 40th Birthday. We take so much for granted now, that it’s hard now to appreciate now just how important some of these innovations were when they first appeared, but next time you sit down at your desk, give a thought for how far the technology on your desktop has come in just the last 40 years.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the history of computing, drop me a line. Just in, I have some fresh copies of my book “Machines That Count” available.