25 years ago: Apple’s Macintosh says hello
25 years ago today, on Jan. 24, 1984, the first Macintosh computer went on sale. Now better known as the “Mac,” the name came from the Apple employee who created the project, Jef Raskin, who wanted to name it after his favorite kind of apple, McIntosh, but had to tweak the name for legal rights.
This original Macintosh came with 128 kilobytes of RAM (it would later become known as the Macintosh 128K) and featured a 8 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor. It had a 9-inch black and white CRT screen and featured a 400 kB, single-sided 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. The price? $2,495, which in today’s dollars would have been well over $5,000.
The computer featured the signatures of the entire Apple Macintosh division molded inside the case. Those name include Raskin, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and many others.
Below watch Jobs unveil the first Macintosh, as well as some other notable Mac videos throughout the years.
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About the Author, MG Siegler
MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.