Friday, January 24, 2014

Happy 30th Birthday Macintosh!


Today is the 30th birthday of the introduction of Apple's Macintosh.

These are the first words that the Mac spoke when the bag came off by Steve Jobs:

“Hello, I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: Never trust a computer you  cannot lift..”

Below is the famous 1984 commercial shown at the Super Bowl:


Below is Apple's 30th anniversary video:

 Here is a nice article at Forbes on the anniversary by Connie Guglielmo, Forbes Staff 

As Ms. Guglielmo states in the article when she quotes Steve Jobs on state for the announcement:

“IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?”

From the same article, a quote from Steve Jobs famous Standford commencement address is shared:


“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.”
—  Steve Jobs, in a commencement speech at Stanford University, June 12, 2005