First MacIntosh Computer (1984)
Macintosh, typically shortened to Mac, is a brand name which covers several lines of personal computers planned, produced, and distributed by Apple Inc. The Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984 and was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface instead of a command line interface.
Jef Raskin, a human computer interface expert and an employee of Apple, was the one who came up with the idea of making an inexpensive and easy-to-use computer. In 1979, Raskin began planning for building a team that would bring his idea into reality. The initial Macintosh board that their team produced had a 64KB RAM, employed a Motorola microprocessor and had a black and white bitmap display. By the end of 1980, Smith, one of the team members of the first Macintosh team, produced a board that operated on a higher speed, had a higher-capacity RAM and supported a wider display. Steve Jobs, impressed by this plan, began to take interest in this project. His ideas have greatly shaped the design of the final Macintosh.
Seventy-four days after the debut of the "Macintosh" in 1984, 50,000 units had been sold, not that substantial a show. Apple refused to license the OS or the hardware, the 128k memory wasn't sufficient and a single floppy was challenging to use. The "Macintosh" had "Lisa's" user friendly GUI, but initially left out some of the more effective features of the "Lisa" like multitasking and the 1 MB of memory. Jobs corrected this by making certain developers created software for the new "Macintosh", which he figured that was the way to win the consumer over. Unfortunately, to pay for the huge promotion costs, the price of the computer itself had to be increased from $1,995 to $2,495, further immersing the original idea of an affordable computer.
The Macintosh computer was released in January of 1984, with 128K RAM of memory. It quickly became evident that this was too little, so eight months later Apple brought out an updated version, un-officially referred to as the 'Fat Mac'. It had 512K RAM, four times as much. In 1985, the "Macintosh" computer line picked up a big sales boost with the unveiling of the LaserWriter printer and Aldus PageMaker, which made home desktop publishing now possible. But 1985 was also the year when the original founders of Apple left the company.
Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers had been attempting to hire Pepsi's John Sculley since early 1983. In April of that year he succeeded. But Steve and John determined that they did not get along and one of John Sculley's first actions as CEO of Apple was to boot Steve Jobs off the Apple "Lisa" project. In 1985, Steve Wozniak went back to college and Steve Jobs was fired.
Through the second half of the 1980s, the company built market share simply to see it dissipate in the 1990s as the PC market shifted towards IBM PC compatible machines running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows.
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