Apple Mac at 40

I've been reading a lot of opinions from the Tech Press about the Apple Macintosh which celebrated its 40 anniversary this week. Ridley Scott's '1984' Super Bowl commercial introduced the Mac's graphical interface to the masses, a distinct alternative to IBM's lines of code.
The Computer History Museum held a talk with all the main cast and characters.

Fantastic website just posted celebrating all 40 years of Mac hardware:


Anyone else seen any great videos or stories?

I particularly enjoyed re-reading the original Rolling Stone article written in 1984.

The Birth of the Mac: Rolling Stone’s 1984 Feature on Steve Jobs and his Whiz Kids​

Proud to have a compact Mac in my sig since I joined this site over a decade ago.

Really enjoyed the CHM 40 year panels, thanks.

Keep on Macin'

And next year will be the 40th anniversary of the Amiga - hands down winner over the Mac as a graphics/audio processing PC. It was unfortunate that Commodore, who bought out the original designers, marketed it as a high end business machine instead of a home PC since they could not compete on an equal financial footing with IBM and their 5150 Personal Computer introduced in 1981. Also, most saw it an a game machine instead of being for serious use as a PC and software development for it was too minimal to make it a big contender in the market.

This is probably one of the rarest items

Now I know where skimping on Ram and Storage in Macs got started. Steve wanted the first Macintosh to only have 128K with no possibility for upgrades to it. Bill Atkinson says so in the interview. One of the engineers though, secretly made it possible to upgrade the first Macintosh to 512K. To this day, Apple still ships Macs with the bare minimum amount of ram and storage to make them function properly. You can now only upgrade those when you order.

trs96 said:

Now I know where skimping on Ram and Storage in Macs got started. Steve wanted the first Macintosh to only have 128K with no possibility for upgrades to it. Bill Atkinson says so in the interview. One of the engineers though, secretly made it possible to upgrade the first Macintosh to 512K. To this day, Apple still ships Macs with the bare minimum amount of ram and storage to make them function properly. You can now only upgrade those when you order.

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Well as far as there being "no possibility to upgrade past 128k" goes, I bought a "Skinny Mac" when they first came out at the local Computerware not long after they went on sale in early '84. I had it for a while before moving on to a Mac IIci about 5 years later. Sometime after I bought my Mac TOS (The Original System), I went to the inaugural MacWorld Expo (I believe it was in the SF Civic Center basement but don't quote me on it) and found a company (the name of which is long forgotten after 40 years) was selling 1MB (yes, Megabyte) clip-on RAM upgrades while another vendor was selling SCSI kits. Both required the purchase of the then Unicorn-like TORX bit to open the Mac 1's case to install (and yes, it was great to see that the signatures of the entire original Macintosh team ARE molded into the back of the main shell). After the show, I found a vendor near where I was working at the time selling Mac-compatible SCSI external drives and bought a 30MB (!!!!) version for somewhere in the low triple-digit range. Never had a problem with what was essentially a semi-professional kludge of a FrankenMac. LOL! I long ago gave it to my sister as a starter computer for her to learn on but I'm hoping that the next time I go and visit her, I'll see if she wouldn't mind parting with it as I'd like to have it home sitting on a shelf as a conversation piece after first seeing if the thing will boot up and maybe run MacPaint after all these years. Amazing how far we've come in 40 years from that ground-breaking little box.

TOS was the name of the operating system used on the Atari ST line of computers.

pastrychef said:

TOS was the name of the operating system used on the Atari ST line of computers.

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I meant to put that it's actually my riff on Star Trek: TOS (The Original Series) as there have been so many Macs and OSes - like there have now been so many Star Treks since that first one. Of course, back in 1984, it was simply called Macintosh while the OS was just System 1.0.