• Apple Macintosh Games
• Apple Macintosh 1984

By William Gallagher
Thursday, January 24, 2019, 03:48 am PT (06:48 am ET)

1. Jun 26, 2010  Iconic 1984 Apple Computer Macintosh commercial conceived by Chiat/Day and directed by Ridley Scott was nationally aired on television only once - during the 3rd quarter of the 1984 Super Bowl football game.
2. Apple’s “1984” commercial is aired during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984. Earlier that month, Apple's Macintosh computer was already the most anticipated personal computer release ever. As a part of the rollout, Apple commissioned director Ridley Scott to direct a one-minute commercial for the Mac.
3. Jan 27, 2020 On January 24, 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh. That was 36 years ago last Friday, and, with the introduction of the Mac, Apple started on a path that has given them a market value of $1.3.
4. You must be at least 18 years old to be eligible to trade in for credit or for an Apple Store Gift Card. Not all devices are eligible for credit. More details are available from Apple’s Mac trade‑in partner and Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch trade‑in partner for trade-in and recycling of eligible devices.
5. Apple’s “1984” commercial is aired during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984. Earlier that month, Apple's Macintosh computer was already the most anticipated personal computer release ever. As a part of the rollout, Apple commissioned director Ridley Scott to direct a one-minute commercial for the Mac.

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At launch, the Macintosh was far from a hit, far from being affordable and even far from being completely workable. Yet, the that original model did succeed in forever changing computing not just for fans, but for the entire world.


'You've just seen some pictures of Macintosh,' said Steve Jobs at the official launch of the Mac. He was on stage at the Flint Center in De Anza College, Cupertino, on Tuesday, January 24, 1984. 'Now I'd like to show you Macintosh in person.'

The Mac he unveiled looks little like today's machines. It had a small, monochrome monitor, blocky graphics and the kind of synthesized voice that you wouldn't even get in a toy now. Yet crucially, it also looked nothing like the computers of its time.
'Up until that moment,' wrote Steven Levy of when he saw a preview of the Mac, 'when one said a computer screen 'lit up,' some literary licence was required. By the end of the demonstration, I began to understand that these were things a computer should do. There was a better way.'
Levy was one of the journalists who got an early demonstration when Apple previewed the Mac in October and November 1983. This was part of the company's dual-pronged aim of having everyone talking about the Mac at its launch but also everyone being able to get right away.
As well as briefing journalists, Apple was manufacturing the Mac and getting it into resellers. And there were videos. It's possible that an outside news agency or station decided to cover the Mac but what's more likely is that Apple itself made a series of videos as it does today. This Evolution of a Computer looks most like an early Electronic Press Kit.

There appear to have been around eight of these videos and in a later one, then-CEO John Sculley inadvertently reveals his entire attitude to computing. 'With Macintosh we have put together an extremely well-coordinated, very powerful consumer marketing program to introduce this product,' he says.
Bless. Compare him to someone else in these videos, someone you'll recognize immediately. 'We're gambling on our vision. And we would rather do that than make 'me too' products. Let some other companies do that,' said Steve Jobs.
Perhaps he would come to rue saying that when later Microsoft did exactly this with Windows and much later when Google did so with Android.
Yet if they were copiers, Jobs was not the original either. He did not invent the Macintosh, as much as he would regularly let people believe.

Jef Raskin

In fairness, the Mac we got that day in 1984 would not have been what it was without Jobs. It wouldn't have had a mouse, for a start. 'I couldn't stand the mouse,' Apple's Jef Raskin told Owen W. Linzmayer in Apple Confidential 2.0. 'Jobs gets 100 percent credit for insisting that a mouse be on the Mac.'
Raskin, however, gets 100 percent credit for starting the project, starting the basic ideas of what the machine would do, and for calling it Macintosh. He even gets credit for how the mouse turned out as despite his preference for a joystick, it was his work that resulted in the one-button model when others use two or three.
Talking to High Tech Heroes around 1987, Raskin explained that he had been was a regular at the Xerox PARC facility —' I had an honorary beanbag chair [there]' —long before Steve Jobs's fateful visit in late 1979.
'They had this three-button mouse and I couldn't keep track of which button was which. And so when I came to create the Macintosh project.. I realized you could do all that you have to do with a one-button mouse. It took me a while to convince people that was possible.'
Jef Raskin, who died in 2005, wasn't always precise in his telling of how the Macintosh came to be but in either Spring or September of 1979, he was talking with Apple chairman Mike Markkula. Either Raskin straight-out pitched the idea for Macintosh or he first turned down Markkula's request that he work on a game machine.
Whichever it was, he says in that High Tech Heroes interview that he had been thinking about the future of Apple.
'The projects that were in the works were the Apple III and the Lisa. I [told Markkula that] I thought the Apple III didn't have the technical pizazz to take us to the future.. and the Lisa was going to be overpriced and too slow. So I proposed a thing which I called Macintosh.'

Apple V

Even though the company was then working on the Apple III, Raskin considered the name Macintosh to be just a code one and that the final machine would be called the Apple V. It was to be a simpler machine than previous Apple computers, or at least it was in terms of how easy it was to use.
'There were to be no peripheral slots so that customers never had to see the inside of the machine,' he said. He proposed an all-in-one machine that had bitmapped graphics —so that the screen could show any image, not just DOS-like characters - and he planned to make it sell for $500. That's the equivalent today of $1,208, which is a little more than the cost of a six-core Mac mini.
Raskin also imagined the machine would be out by Christmas 1981. Instead, it launched in January 1984 and went on sale for $2,495 or $6,000 in today's money. That's about the cost of a 2019 Mac Pro.

What happened in between

Steve Jobs happened. And then John Sculley happened. Having originally disregarded the Mac project as unimportant, Steve Jobs changed his mind when he was removed from the Apple Lisa project.
One of the reasons he was removed was that he had now visited Xerox PARC and had been pushing to change the Lisa to be more like the machines he'd seen there. He still had that in mind and Macintosh was this little project nobody on Apple's board seemed to care about, so they found each other.
It was late 1980 or early 1981 when Jobs really took over the Mac project —and then steadily cut Raskin out until the Mac's creator resigned in March 1982.
Without question, it is unfair that Raskin fails to get credit for the Macintosh and it is undoubtedly true that Jobs didn't deserve it. However, Raskin did get another chance to put his ideas into practice and he created the Canon CAT.

The CAT was a failure where the Mac was this giant success.
Eventually.

What happened afterwards

The launch of the Macintosh was a giant success in terms of marketing and publicity, so perhaps Sculley was right. It was not, initially, much of a hit in terms of being a visionary product because all it had was vision. You couldn't do a lot with the original Macintosh, so maybe Jobs was wrong.
Both men, though, pushed the price up. Jobs by demanding higher specifications and then Sculley by spending $78m ($188m today) on marketing and trying to recoup that as fast as possible.
So the original Mac that launched on January 24, 1984 was a lumbering and very costly machine. Even so, it transformed the computing industry and ultimately it actually, genuinely did change the world.

You can trace the history of the screen you're reading this on all the way back to the very first Macintosh. And on that screen of yours, you can watch something else from the introduction of the Mac.
The Apple of 1984 and the Apple that created the Macintosh also created one of the most famous adverts of them all. It had aired on TV during the Super Bowl two days before and Jobs screened it again as part of the launch.
Since those days, and surely because of what the Mac started, television is no longer the screen that everybody watches the most. Today we're more likely to be online, too, and it was of course here that Tim Cook chose to celebrate the Mac's 35th anniversary in 2019.

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Apple Macintosh Games

On January 24, 1984, Apple announced the Macintosh to its Board of Directors – and to the world. The tiny computer was a radical departure from the large Lisa with it’s 12″ screen, just as Lisa itself had been a huge departure from the Apple II series and the growing family of MS-DOS computers on the market.

The PC Market

But before we look at the Macintosh, let’s look at the PC market in early 1984. The February 1984 issue of Byte magazine featured the Macintosh on the cover, an ad for Apple’s ImageWriter printer was inside the front cover, and an editorial decrying the creativity lost in the quest for compatibility was on page 4.

Glancing through the ads, we see Commodore, Atari, and Apple still selling 6502-based computers, Radio Shack selling TRS-DOS and MS-DOS machines, lots of CP/M systems still on the market, and a growing number of IBM compatible computers.

The back cover contains an ad for the Tandy TRS-80 Model 2000, perhaps the only PC ever designed around the 80186 processor. Tandy claimed the 8 MHz true 16-bit CPU was a big improvement over the 4.77 MHz 8088 (with its 8-bit bus) that IBM used. And for just $1,500 extra, you could buy the Model 2000 with a 10 MB hard drive.

Texas Instruments was pushing its Professional Computer, an MS-DOS machine with a better keyboard than IBM’s, higher capacity floppies than IBM, more memory expansion space than IBM (768 KB vs. 640 KB), better standard graphics than IBM, and a better CPU than IBM’s PC, Intel’s 16-bit 8086 instead of the 8088, which used an 8-bit bus. Of course, all those improvements made this MS-DOS computer less than 100% IBM compatible.

Heathkit was pushing the H-100, their kit version of the Zenith Z-100 that Byte columnist Jerry Pournelle loved (especially the keyboard) and the US Navy bought a lot of (I once worked in a Heath-Zenith store in Virginia Beach, Virginia – it’s amazing how dusty a shipboard computer can get after a few years). The Z-100’s claim to fame was an Intel 8085 for CP/M software along with an 8088 for MS-DOS.

Creativity vs. Compatibility

MS-DOS was winning mindshare, since it drove both the 100% IBM compatible computers and the semi-compatible not-quite-clones.

An interesting failure of the era was the Dimension 68000, which contained “the microprocessors found in all of today’s popular personal computers.” Apparently, getting the 6502, Z-80, 8088, and 68000 to behave with each other was more than Micro Craft could pull off, and I don’t believe the computer ever hit the market.

One more interesting historical footnote before we look at the Macintosh: the IBM CS-9000 Lab Computer was also featured in this issue of Byte. What sets it apart is that it was not based on any Intel chip, but on the same 68000 found in Lisa and Macintosh.

The Macintosh

That was the computer market in early 1984. Most computers, even DOS ones, shipped with 64 KB or 128 KB of memory and had one or two 5.25″ floppy drives. Hard drives, when available, where $1,500 options.

The Macintosh was different. First, there was the mouse, just like Lisa had. In fact, Apple was so adamant that you use the mouse that the original Macintosh keyboard had no arrow keys. (The Ctrl key was also a later innovation.)

Then there was that 3.5″ floppy drive storing 400 KB of date – 25% more than the 320 KB 5.25″ floppy disks in the IBM world.

But when you turned it on, the Macintosh showed it’s greatest difference, a graphical user interface (GUI). Although similar to the interface of Lisa, the Mac used square pixels instead of rectangular ones, making it far easier to accurately map graphics to the screen.

A glance at the screen shot of MacWrite looks remarkably familiar. There’s the menu bar we all know and love: Apple, File, Edit, Search, Format, Font, and Style, along with pull-down menus. The menu bar clock and heirarchical menus would come later, but you’d certainly find the experience comfortably familiar.

The 8 MHz 68000 processor was 60% faster than the 5 MHz one found in Lisa, so the Mac was pretty fast in its day. (As noted above, the Tandy Model 2000 used a cutting edge 8 MHz 80186 CPU, which was about equal in power to the 8 MHz 68000.)

Memory prices were a limiting factor, which is the main reason the original Macintosh shipped with 128 KB instead of 256 KB. This probably shaved $200-400 from the retail price!

Apple sore of cheated there, building huge portions of optimized code into a 64 KB ROM that didn’t tie up expensive RAM. This included routines for sound, drawing text, doing graphics, and more, so programmers didn’t have to reinvent these procedures and could write more compact code.

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The Mac was essentially a 192 KB computer where 64 KB was already programmed – or at least that was the spin Apple tried to put on it. On the downside, the memory mapped video used up a precious 22 KB of RAM, leaving only 106 KB of memory available for software and data.

As for expansion slots, Apple claimed the “high speed serial bus” would provide all the expansion the Mac would ever need. The RS-422 serial ports support 230.4kbps as shipped from the factory, but it could be externally clocked to four times that speed, something that LocalTalk accelerators would take advantage of in the future.

Still, the original Mac had its limitations. One floppy drive wasn’t enough, unless you had the patience to shuffle 400 KB disks frequently, so the external floppy became a popular accessory. The same ImageWriter printer that worked with the Apple II line could print Mac graphics beautifully, so that also became a very popular part of the Macintosh system. (BTW, I can’t find any mention of laser printers in this issue of Byte.)

Apple didn’t introduce the Macintosh all by itself – at the same January 24 meeting, it unveiled a less expensive Lisa, the Lisa 2. The new Lisa used the same 3.5″ disk as the Mac and could run either the Lisa OS or the Mac OS. It shipped with 512 KB of memory and was even available with a 10 MB hard drive. In fact, only the Lisa and Lisa 2 had enough memory for anyone to do program development for the RAM-limited Macintosh – and all the Mac software run on the Lisa 2 could automatically take advantage of the extra memory.

Realizing the limitations of the 128 KB Macintosh and seeing RAM prices drop, Apple introduced the Fat Mac with 512 KB of memory in September. The original Mac, retroactively called the 128K, remained on the market until October 1985, leaving the Mac 512K as the only model until January 1986.

Other Developments

MacWrite and MacPaint sofware came bundled with the Macintosh, and PowerPoint was developed by Forethought for the Mac in 1984. (In 1987, Microsoft acquired Forethought and made PowerPoint its own.)

On the DOS side, IBM introduced the first 80286-based PC during 1984, running at 6 MHz and introducing high density 1.2 MB 5.25″ floppy disks. Best middle age war simulation games mac. Competitors soon upped the ante to 8 MHz – the same clock speed as the Macintosh – but that’s another chapter.

Next – 1985: Word, Excel, PageMaker, and the LaserWriter

Keywords: #mac128k #mac512k #fatmac

Apple Macintosh 1984

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