Today, January 24, 2024, is the 40th birthday of Apple's Macintosh computer - which, although it was not the first computer in the world, or even of the company founded by Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak, changed the industry forever.
We used Forefront to tell about the first revolutionary invention of Steve Jobs.
The first Macintosh computer, called the Macintosh 128K after the apple variety typical of the northeastern United States and its amount of RAM memory, looks quite similar from the outside to many computers from companies such as IBM, Xerox, Apple itself (which previously produced the Apple II which looks similar, and the Apple I that came without a screen) and many more that worked in the field from the 1950s onward: a full keyboard, on which sits a CRT screen (the "fat" screens of the past). But when you turn it on, "magic" is revealed: instead of lines of text that display information and allow to request information by typing queries and commands that need to be learned (the so-called "command line"), the first graphical user interface was discovered, which was later copied by Microsoft in Windows. Next to the graphical interface with icons, windows and option menus, it brought another innovation - the mouse , which made it possible to open and close different types of software to access different types of information. The 9-inch black-and-white display with a resolution of 512x342 pixels allowed users to move files and folders graphically instead of by textual commands.
This new paradigm, combined with the innovative design of the Macintosh, made computing accessible to non-technical users – even if at $2,500 it was still out of reach for the average person.
His influence was enormous, and helped drive the rise of the personal computer for both work and home use - as mentioned, including the use that inspired Bill Gates to create Windows, which anticipated Apple's interface on other companies' computers.
Over the following decades, Apple continued to refine and improve the Macintosh.
Key innovations it introduced included color screens, multitasking (meaning: more than one window active at the same time, unlike the first generation where only one software could be running at any given moment), working with networks, internal search, and more.
In the late 1990s, it acquired NeXT, founded by Steve Jobs after he was ousted from the company he founded, and made his new software, which was based on open source, the core of its system, which improved development possibilities for it.
In the field of design, Apple also made quite a few innovations: beyond the initial innovation of a computer that comes as a single unit that includes both the computing components, both the keyboard and the screen, over the years it introduced other creative designs, such as the iMac in the late 1990s and the thin MacBook Air in 2008.
In the field of hardware, it was initially based on Motorola processors, in the 90s it introduced computers with IBM processors, in the mid-2000s it switched to Intel processors and at the end of the previous decade it switched to M series chips, which are carefully designed by Apple itself (mainly in its development center in Israel) and manufactured for her by the Taiwanese TSMC.
Although Mac computers - the abbreviated version of the Macintosh introduced by Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple in 1998 - are still relatively niche and make up only about a fifth of the computers connected to the Internet according to the analysis company StatCounter, Apple regularly stars in the top five computer manufacturers in the world, and even strengthens its position (analysis Its market has doubled 2.5 times in the last 10 years).
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