The first Apple Macintosh goes on sale
On this day · 24 January 1984
Two days after a Super Bowl ad promised it would smash conformity, Apple's little beige box finally went on sale to the public.
On January 24, 1984, Apple put the first Macintosh on sale for $2,495. It was a compact, all-in-one machine with a built-in screen, a single-button mouse, and a graphical user interface that let people click on pictures instead of memorizing typed commands.
The idea of icons and windows had been pioneered earlier at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, but Apple packaged it for ordinary buyers and sold it hard. Two days before launch, the now-famous “1984” television commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, aired during Super Bowl XVIII, casting the Mac as a rebel against gray conformity.
The original Macintosh was costly and underpowered, with just 128 KB of memory, and after a strong start its early sales soon cooled. Yet its friendly point-and-click approach set the template that nearly every personal computer, and later every smartphone, would eventually follow. The revolution it promised was a little slow to actually arrive, but arrive it did.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
