This week in CS History – 22/1/1984 – Apple launches the Macintosh
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Apple launched the Macintosh (also known as the Macintosh 128K) on January 22, 1984. The Macintosh was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a graphical user interface and a mouse.
The Macintosh was introduced by a $1.5 million advertisement directed by Ridley Scott during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII. It was the first time that a computer company had advertised on television and it was a huge success. The advert showed a dystopian 1984 as imagined in the George Orwell novel ‘1984’. A woman throws a hammer into a screen displaying ‘Big Brother’ apparently meant to symbolise IBM.
The advert didn’t show the Macintosh itself, just the Apple logo.
The original Macintosh used an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, 128 KB of RAM, and a 400 KB floppy disk drive for storage.