Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Steve Jobs unveiling the Macintosh, the first successful mass-marketed computer with a graphical user interface. My first “Mac” wasn’t until my 2015 MacBook Pro but as a third grade kid my parents got me an Apple II1 which I loved and on which I learned to code BASIC.
Pricing for the original Macintosh started at $2,495, equivalent to over $7,000 today. Key specs and features included an 8 MHz processor, 128 KB of RAM, a 400 KB floppy disk drive for storage, and serial ports for connecting a printer and other accessories.
- Technically it was a third party clone of an Apple II but at that age I didn’t really know the difference[↩]