That Happened!

New York - Twenty five years ago, one of the most famous advertisements for one of the most famous computing products ever made was aired during the super bowl. The advertisement, which featured a young female athlete destroying a massive television in a futuristic, Orwellian dystopia, was intended to embody the revolutionary nature of this new computer.

The computer was, of course the Apple Macintosh, which was a machine that the Apple Corporation had staked it’s entire future on.

It turned out to be an excellent bet, as the Macintosh was one of the most popular and successful computers of the 1980s, and it brought about a revolution in home computing unlike any seen before or since. But what made the Apple Macintosh so successful? Why, after so many years, is it fondly remembered when so many other computers of the era have been all but forgotten?

The big difference the Macintosh had over all other machines of the era is that it was not designed to be exclusively for technically-minded persons. Before the Macintosh, a high degree of technical skill was required to operate a computer. Most computers were sold in an incomplete or disassembled state, and so it was necessary for the purchaser to know how to assemble them. They also tended to lack operating systems and software, and what software they did had required the user to understand how the program was written and what the commands were.

The Macintosh did away with all this, coming pre-assembled from the factory with an operating system hardwired into the machine. It used 3.25″ floppy diskettes for software, and the software was designed so that even someone who had never used a computer before could operate it. In place of command prompts it used desktop icons and a mouse, and it was this ease of use that insured it’s longevity and helped shape the future of computers in the home.

Many people believe that modern computers would not be possible without the existence of the original Macintosh. It’s easy to see why. While the Macintosh was not the first computer with a mouse, or the first computer with an icon-based operating system, it was first to have both and be widely distributed to the computer-literate and the novices alike. The Macintosh brought computers out of garages and basements and put them on the desktops of families, office workers and programmers alike.

It was the fact that the Macintosh solved the people problem that made the Macintosh so successful, and that is why it is so liked and well remembered, and why so many people became quite fond of it.

So Happy 25th, Macintosh! May your next 25 be as revolutionary as the first 25!