The Macintosh, later rebranded as the Macintosh 128K, is the original Macintosh personal computer from Apple. It is the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer with a graphical user interface, built-in screen and mouse. It was pivotal in establishing desktop publishing as a general office function. The motherboard, a CRT monochrome monitor, and a floppy drive are in a beige case with an integrated carrying handle; it has a keyboard and single-button mouse.
The Macintosh was introduced by a television commercial titled "1984" during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, directed by Ridley Scott. Sales were strong at its initial release on January 24, 1984, at , and reached 70,000 units on May 3, 1984. Upon the release of its successor, the Macintosh 512K, it was rebranded as the Macintosh 128K.
Development
1978–1984: Development In 1978, Apple began to organize the Lisa project, to build a next-generation machine similar to an advanced Apple II or the yet-to-be-introduced IBM PC. In 1979, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs learned of the advanced work on graphical user interfaces (GUI) taking place at Xerox PARC. He arranged for Apple engineers to be allowed to visit PARC to see the systems in action. The Lisa was immediately redirected to use a GUI, which at that time was well beyond the state of the art for microprocessor abilities; the Xerox Alto has a custom processor spanning several circuit boards in a case the size of a small refrigerator. Things had changed dramatically with the introduction of the 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 in 1979, with at least an order of magnitude better performance than existing designs, making a software GUI machine a practical possibility. The basic layout of the Lisa was largely complete by 1982, at which point Jobs's continual suggestions for improvements led to him being kicked off the project.
At the same time that the Lisa was becoming a GUI machine in 1979, Jef Raskin began the Macintosh project. The design at that time was for a low-cost, easy-to-use machine for the average consumer. Instead of a GUI, it intended to use a text-based user interface that allowed multitasking, and special command keys on the keyboard that accessed standardized commands in the programs. Bud Tribble, a member of the Macintosh team, asked Burrell Smith to integrate the Apple Lisa's 68k microprocessor into the Macintosh so that it could run graphical programs. By December 1980, Smith had succeeded in designing a board that integrated an 8 MHz Motorola 68k. Smith's design used less RAM than the Lisa, which made producing the board significantly more cost-efficient. The final Mac design was self-contained and had the complete QuickDraw picture language and interpreter in 64 KB of ROM – far more than most other computers which typically had around 4 to 8 KB of ROM; it had 128 kB of RAM, in the form of sixteen 64-kilobit (kb) RAM modules soldered to the logic board. The final product's screen was a , 512×342 pixel monochrome display.
Smith's innovative design, combining the low production cost of an Apple II with the computing power of Lisa's Motorola 68000 CPU, began to receive Jobs's attentions. Jobs took over the Macintosh project after deciding that the Macintosh was more marketable than the Lisa, which led former project leader Raskin to leave the team in 1981. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who had been leading the project with Raskin, was on temporary leave from the company at this time due to an airplane crash he had experienced earlier that year, making it easier for Jobs to take over the program. After development had completed, team member and engineer Andy Hertzfeld said that the final Macintosh design is closer to Jobs's ideas than Raskin's. InfoWorld in September 1981 reported on the existence of the secret Lisa and "McIntosh" projects at Apple.
1984: Debut
In 1982, Regis McKenna was brought in to shape the marketing and launch of the Macintosh. Later the Regis McKenna team grew to include Jane Anderson, Katie Cadigan and Andy Cunningham, who eventually led the Apple account for the agency. Cunningham and Anderson were the primary authors of the Macintosh launch plan. The launch of the Macintosh pioneered many different tactics that are used today in launching technology products, including the "multiple exclusive," event marketing (credited to John Sculley, who brought the concept over from Pepsi), creating a mystique about a product and giving an inside look into a product's creation.
After the Lisa's announcement, John Dvorak discussed rumors of a mysterious "MacIntosh" project at Apple in February 1983. The company announced the Macintosh 128K (manufactured at an Apple factory in Fremont, California) in October 1983, followed by an 18-page brochure included with various magazines in December. The Macintosh was introduced by a US$1.5 million Ridley Scott television commercial, "1984". It aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, and is now considered a "watershed event" and a "masterpiece". McKenna called the ad "more successful than the Mac itself." "1984" used an unnamed heroine to represent the coming of the Macintosh (indicated by a Picasso-style picture of the computer on her white tank top) as a means of saving humanity from the "conformity" of IBM's attempts to dominate the computer industry. The ad alludes to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised "Big Brother."
Two days after "1984" aired, the Macintosh went on sale, and came bundled with two applications designed to show off its interface: MacWrite and MacPaint. The Macintosh was the first successful mass-market all-in-one desktop personal computer with a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse. It was first demonstrated by Steve Jobs in the first of his famous Mac keynote speeches, and though the Mac garnered an immediate, enthusiastic following, some labelled it a mere "toy". Apple sold it alongside its popular Apple II line until the others were discontinued in the 1990s. Because the operating system was designed largely for the GUI, existing text-mode and command-driven applications had to be redesigned and the programming code rewritten. This was a time-consuming task that many software developers chose not to undertake, and could be regarded as a reason for an initial lack of software for the new system. In April 1984, Microsoft's Multiplan migrated over from MS-DOS, with Microsoft Word following in January 1985. In return for Microsoft's commitment to Macintosh, Apple agreed to not provide software development kits and prototype computers to companies with applications competing with Microsoft's. Apple introduced the Macintosh Office concept the same year with the "Lemmings" ad; infamous for insulting its own potential customers, the ad was not successful.
Apple spent $2.5 million purchasing all 39 advertising pages in a special, post-election issue of Newsweek, and ran a "Test Drive a Macintosh" promotion, in which potential buyers with a credit card could take home a Macintosh for 24 hours and return it to a dealer afterwards. While 200,000 people participated, dealers disliked the promotion, the supply of computers was insufficient for demand, and many were returned in such a bad condition that they could no longer be sold. The computer sold well, nonetheless, reportedly outselling the IBM PCjr which also began shipping early that year; one dealer reported a backlog of more than 600 orders. By April 1984 the company sold 50,000 Macintoshes, and hoped for 70,000 by early May and almost 250,000 by the end of the year.
Processor and memory
The heart of the computer is a Motorola 68000 microprocessor running at , connected to 128 KB RAM shared by the processor and the display controller. The boot procedure and some operating system routines are contained in a 64 KB ROM chip. Apple did not offer RAM upgrades. Unlike the Apple II, no source code listings of the Macintosh system ROMs were offered.
The RAM in the Macintosh consists of sixteen 64k×1 DRAMs. The 68000 and video controller take turns accessing DRAM every four CPU cycles during display of the frame buffer, while the 68000 has unrestricted access to DRAM during vertical and horizontal blanking intervals. Such an arrangement reduces the overall CPU performance as much as 35% for most code as the display logic often blocks the CPU's access to RAM. Despite the nominally high clock rate, this causes the computer to run slower than several of its competitors and results in an effective clock rate of 6 MHz.
Peripherals
The built-in display is a one-bit per pixel, black-and-white, 9 in (23 cm) CRT with a fixed resolution of 512 × 342 pixels, using the Apple standard of 72 ppi (pixels per inch). Expansion and networking are achieved using two non-standard DE-9 serial ports named "Printer" and "Modem" that support the RS-422 standard, but do not support hardware handshaking. An external floppy disk drive can be added using a proprietary connector (19-pin D-sub).
The keyboard used a simple proprietary protocol, allowing some third-party upgrades. The mouse used standard quadrature signals for X and Y, and the single mouse button used a single wire (all signals were compatible with TTL and referenced to ground). The original keyboard had no arrow keys, numeric keypad or function keys. This was an intentional decision by Apple, as these keys were common on older platforms and it was thought that the addition of these keys would encourage software developers to simply port their existing applications to the Mac, rather than design new ones around the GUI paradigm. Later, Apple made a numeric keypad available for the Macintosh 128K. The keyboard sold with the newer Macintosh Plus model included the numeric keypad and arrow keys, but still no function keys. Function keys eventually appeared in 1987 with the Extended Keyboard available for the Macintosh II and Macintosh SE. As with the Apple Lisa before it, the mouse has a single button.
Standard headphones can be connected to a monaural jack on the back of the computer. Apple also offered their 300 and 1200 baud modems originally released for the Apple II line. Initially, the only printer available was the Apple ImageWriter, a dot matrix printer which was designed to produce 144 dpi WYSIWYG output from the Mac's 72 dpi screen. Eventually, the LaserWriter and other printers were capable of being connected using AppleTalk, Apple's built-in networking system.
Storage
The Macintosh contained a single 400 KB, single-sided -inch floppy disk drive, with no option to add any further internal storage, like a hard drive or additional floppy disk drive. The system software was disk-based from the beginning, as RAM had to be conserved, but this "Startup Disk" could still be temporarily ejected. (Ejecting the root filesystem remained an unusual feature of the classic Mac OS until System 7.) One floppy disk was sufficient to store the System Software, an application and the data files created with the application.
The 400 KB drive capacity was larger than the PC XT's 360 KB 5.25-inch drive. However, more sophisticated work environments of the time required separate disks for documents and the system installation. Due to the memory constraints (128 KB) of the original Macintosh, and the fact that the floppies could hold only 400 KB, users had to frequently swap disks in and out of the floppy drive, which caused external floppy drives to be utilized more frequently. The Macintosh External Disk Drive (mechanically identical to the internal one, piggybacking on the same controller) was a popular add-on that cost .