Computer Profile: Apple Macintosh

by Anthony Huynh

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 spelling to Macintosh. 

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. Smith designed the first Macintosh board with 64 kilobytes (Kb) of RAM, the Motorola 6809E microprocessor, and to support a 256 × 256 pixel black-and-white bitmap display. Bud Tribble suggested to Smith to improve upon his design by using the Motorola 68000 microprocessor (the same as was being used on the Lisa computer).  It was one of the most powerful CPUs at the time and could help maintain 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. 

However, the most iconic and memorable Macintosh promotion was a 1984 Superbowl commercial, which was directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed Blade Runner, Alien, and later, Gladiator. The commercial opens with a shot of numerous bald men in gray outfits walking uniformly in a long straight line down an industrial tunnel in an extremely dreary atmosphere. Then it cuts to a shot of a woman in a white top and orange shorts holding a sledgehammer running down a tunnel being chased by guards in security gear. It’s revealed that all these men are walking towards benches in front of a large blue screen projecting the face of a man, resembling Big Brother, who is indoctrinating these lifeless men. When the woman reaches the screen, she swings and throws the sledgehammer at the screen, resulting in a bright explosion and a gust of wind blowing against the astonished looking men. A message scrolls upwards saying, “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like '1984.’ ” Even though this commercial didn’t outright advertise the Macintosh itself or any of its features, except for a brief mention at the end, it was still very effective in generating a lot of excitement in the media, which is how it managed to sell 250,000 units by the end of 1984. This convinced other advertisers that commercials didn’t need to outright feature the product they were selling to make an effective promotion and create lots of publicity. Apple estimated that the resulting conversation and ad replays in the media gave the Macintosh over US $150 million of free advertising and airtime. An influential aspect of this commercial, many have argued, is that it led to the modern era of Superbowl advertising, where the halftime ads are as entertaining or looked forward to as the game itself. 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.” 

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.  

(Link: UWCM 2016.7.9)

The Mac Plus was the first Macintosh model to include a SCSI port, which started the popularity of external SCSI devices for Macs, including hard disks, tape drives, CD-ROM drives, printers, and even monitors. SCSI ports remained standard equipment for all Macs until the introduction of the iMac in 1998. The Macintosh Plus was the last classic model to have a port resembling that of a phone cord in front of the keyboard, as well as the DE-9 connector for the mouse since later models would use ADB ports. It had a new 3.5-inch double-sided 800 KB floppy drive, offering double the capacity of previous Macs along with backward compatibility. The 800 KB drive had two read/write heads, enabling it to simultaneously use both sides of the floppy disk and thereby doubling the storage capacity. 

The Mac Plus was the first of several Macintoshes to use SIMMs (single in-line memory modules) for its memory. It had 128 KB of ROM on the motherboard, which was double the amount of ROM that was in previous Macs; the new System software and ROMs included routines to support SCSI and the new 800 Kb floppy drive. In addition to the typical MacWrite and MacPaint that came along with the Macintosh, the Macintosh Plus included the convenient HyperCard and MultiFinder which allowed users to multitask and use multiple applications simultaneously. Like the previous Mac models, the Plus still did not provide adequate support for an internal hard drive, and it would take over 9 months before Apple would offer a SCSI drive replacement for the slow Hard Disk 20. It would take well over a year before Apple would offer the first internal hard disk drie in any Macintosh. The Plus had a 9-inch, 512 x 342 pixel monochrome display with a resolution of 72 PPI, identical to that of previous Macintosh models. Unlike earlier Macs, the Mac Plus's keyboard included a numeric keypad and directional arrow keys, and, as with previous Macs, it had a one-button mouse and no fan, making it extremely quiet during performance.