On January 24th in 1985, a little company called Apple launched a revolution in personal computing with the first Macintosh computer — a chunky-looking desktop with an equally clunky-looking mouse and a washed-out screen, which cost $2,495 US (the equivalent of about $7,000 today). It’s difficult to see this as revolutionary now, but in the mid-1980s it absolutely was. The only computers most people — including me — were familiar with were room-sized corporate servers with tape drives. The Mac made computers human-sized, and its graphical user interface with the trash can icon and file folders, and the mouse to navigate among them (both of which Steve Jobs borrowed from the Xerox PARC research lab) were unlike anything else on the market. No more typing DOS commands in green text on a black background!
I didn’t get one when they first came out — instead, I asked a friend who knew about such things what I should buy, and knowing of my interest in both drawing and music, he suggested the Atari 1040ST, because it had a better colour screen and a MIDI interface (which I never used). But I admired the Mac, and every Apple computer that came after it — especially the candy-coloured iMacs and the all-in-one desktops that succeeded them. I could never afford to actually buy one; I almost always wound up with some PC knockoff, which I liked in part because they were easier to take apart so you could upgrade the RAM, graphics card, etc. Also, PCs were better for playing games like Doom. But there’s no question Jobs and Apple were masters of marketing, especially the original Mac “1984” ad, which was created by Ridley Scott.