Computer Museum at the University of Waterloo : physical object : Apple Macintosh Plus [2016.7.9]

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physical object

Identifier

2016.7.9

Description

This Apple Macintosh is stamped Mac Plus and has a label on the back that reads, " has the updated PS m.k". With this computer are the Mouse 9Model M0100" and the keyboard (model m0110). The first Apple Macintosh was announced in October 1983 and introduced on January 24, 1984 by Steve Jobs. The idea for the Macintosh was conceived by Jef Raskin, an Apple employee who dreamed of an intuitively designed and affordable computer for the average person. He chose to name the computer after his favourite apple, the McIntosh, but due to legal reasons, he had to change it. In September 1979, Raskin had been approved to start hiring for his project. His main cooperative partners were Bill Atkinson, who was part of Apple’s Lisa team, which was developing a similar but more advanced computer, and Burell Smith, who was recently hired as a service technician. Burell Smith designed the first Macintosh board which had 64 kilobytes (Kb) of RAM, used the Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and could support a 256 × 256 pixel black-and-white bitmap display. Bud Tribble suggested to Smith to improve upon his design by integrating the Lisa computer’s Motorola 68000 microprocessor, which was one of the most powerful CPUs at the time, into the Mac while also maintaining a low manufacturing cost. Smith would successfully implement Tribble’s suggestion in December 1980, which increased the clock speed from 5 to 8 megaHertz and gave it the capacity to support a 384 × 256 pixel display. The design of the board maintained its cost-efficiency by using fewer RAM chips than the Lisa. The final design for the product would include 64Kb of ROM, 128 Kb of RAM, a 9-inch screen, and a 512 × 342 pixel monochrome display. This project would soon catch the attention of Steve Jobs as he realized the Macintosh had a lot more marketing potential than the Lisa. The increased involvement from Jobs would lead Raskin to leave the project in 1981 due to a personality clash with Jobs, which would ultimately cause Jobs to have much more significant impact on the final design of the Macintosh than Raskin. Jobs was heavily interested in the innovative GUI technology being developed at Xerox PARC, so he negotiated a deal to see some of the technologies and development tools which were used at Xerox in exchange for Apple stock options. Xerox PARC’s GUI technology had already influenced Apple’s work on the Lisa, but now that he had a more in-depth knowledge of the same technology, he applied it to the Macintosh. Apple invested a significant amount of effort in promoting the Macintosh including spending of over US $2.5 million to appear on all 39 advertising pages of the special post-election edition of Newsweek magazine. They also funded a promotion event for the Macintosh where potential consumers could borrow a Macintosh for 24 hours, which proved to be a mistake due to low supply and many were returned in conditions unfit to be sold. As a result, the then-CEO John Sculley raised the price from US $1,995 to $2,495 to make up for these costs. However, their most iconic and memorable advertisement for the Macintosh was their Superbowl commercial. The Macintosh was so revolutionary that even Bill Gates stated that “To create a new standard takes something that’s not just a little bit different. It takes something that’s really new and captures people’s imaginations. Macintosh meets that standard.” The original Macintosh was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature the mouse and a graphical-user interface (GUI), as opposed to the less friendly command-line interface (CLI). The difference between the GUI and the CLI is that they allow users to interact with the interface in different ways. For example, the command-line interface lets the user input text commands into a console or terminal window. When the user runs the command, the terminal interprets the command and executes the requested task. This user interface is extremely similar to coding or programming which means it’s required that you have proficient knowledge of different commands, their syntax, and what they can do. Although the CLI is harder to use and understand, it is significantly more effective than the GUI as it is more memory efficient and performs tasks faster. On the other hand, the graphical-user interface is mainly based on graphics and visual elements, allowing users to interact using a keyboard and mouse. The emphasis of the GUI is on user-friendliness and system management as it provides windows, various menus, buttons, and icons which makes interaction with the interface a lot more intuitive. This Apple Macintosh GUI ended up influencing the entire personal computer market. Even though Apple did not invent GUI technology and it would not become common until 1990 with the release of Windows 3.0, Apple paved the way for a mainstream personal computer GUI.

Related Term

Desktop Computers (describes)

Related people

Tyler Savard (is documentarian of)
Institute for Computer Research, UW (was donor of)