Happy Birthday MacIntosh

Apple 30 years today

 

 

30 years ago, January 24th, 1984, the Macintosh was invented by Apple and has since taken the world by storm. It is said that it came with a promise, "that the power of technology, taken from a few and put in the hands of everyone, could change the world".

 Has this promise being fulfilled?
Whether it has or not, depends on how we see it. This is some history of the revolution of the MacIntosh.
Previous to the Macintosh developer team, others had already tried to design a computer with a mouse and a graphical user interface – one year before Apple did, with its own business computer Lisa, which retailed for 10,000 dollars.
However, the Lisa computer proved to be a huge flop. With a price of 10,000 dollars (exclusive of a hard disk drive), it was far too expensive; the graphical user interface devoured the Lisa’s power so that the computer did not work particularly briskly. It lacked the necessary programs to induce the business world to buy the Lisa in large numbers. Moreover, the newly established distribution team could hardly resort to any experience in the handling of Corporate America.

In 1987, Apple sold one million Macs and suddenly played in the IBM league again. More than half of the 2,000 dollars for a Mac constituted profit for Apple, so that Sculley and his colleagues in the Apple management believed that the users would always be willing to pay much more for a better technology. Within these years, Apple missed the gigantic opportunity of establishing the Mac as the general industry standard. At that time, either the prices should have been cut dramatically, or a broad licensing program should have been agreed with other hardware producers. With the introduction of Windows 3.0 in 1990, this “window of opportunity” finally shut.
When Steve Jobs returned to his former company in hard times by the beginning of 1997, first as a counselor and then as a principal, the competition for the industry standard between Apple Computers and Microsoft had long been settled. With new Apple talents such as Jonathan Ive, he not only succeeded in bringing the company back on the course of success, but also in making a mark in the industry.
With the Mac, Jobs also astounded experienced pioneers of the computer industry: Future PCs, Intel co-founder Andy Grove said in 1998 in an interview, wouldn’t be general purpose computers to which networking has been added as an afterthought, but networking machines that also do computing. “The iMac embodies a lot of the things I’m talking about,” Grove said. “Sometimes what Apple does has an electrifying effect on the rest of us.”