Page created by: Philip Dickinson

The Macintosh computer, released by Apple on January 24, 1984, was one of the first computers to combine most of the elements of a modern day computer - a display, a keyboard, and a mouse. The Macintosh 128k was Apple's first Macintosh model. It is also considered to the first commercially successful computer to use a GUI (Graphical User Interface).

Overview

The Macintosh is a later development of one of Apple's earlier computers called "Lisa". The Macintosh was similar to Lisa in a number of ways, but there were important differences between the two as well.

Both Lisa and the Macintosh shared the use of a mouse. Interestingly enough, Apple wanted consumers to use the mouse so much that they didn't include arrow keys on the keyboards of their earliest Macintoshes.

In a combination of both similarities and differences, upon start-up, the Macintosh displayed a graphic user interface, something that Lisa also had. The difference is that the Macintosh used square pixels, which made mapping graphics a lot easier. Also, the Macintosh not only took the same microprocessor from Lisa, but it also increased the speed of it from 5 MHz to 8 MHz.

Some of the problems faced by the first Macs were the fact that they had a very small amount of memory. It also lacked a hard disk drive. Most unfortunately, the only way to counter problems such as those was to create new models of Macintosh since Apple's computers were un-openable by the user. Another drawback to the Macintosh was its tendency to overheat, which gave it the nickname The Beige Toaster. And with the birth of new models of Macintosh, such as the Macintosh SE and the Macintosh Portable, came the untimely death of the Macintosh 128k.

Significance

The creation of the Macintosh is all too important. It ushered in a new era of graphic interface using, mouse equipped, large memory storing computers and increased "friendly" competition between computer building industries. These competing industries all sought to critique the failures in the Mac models and were all to eager to incorporate and advance the successes of the Mac in their own computers.