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Jef raskin user interface12/28/2023 He studies how the brain works with special emphasis on how that relates to us using computers. But, more than a computer scientist, Raskin is a cognitive psychologist. For those who don't know, he is the "Father of the Macintosh," one of the original geniuses who guided the Mac in the early days. Happy birthday, Mac! What was your first Mac?ĭid you own an original Macintosh 128K? What was the first Mac you ever used, and how did it change your life? Tell your Mac-tastic stories below."The book that explains why you really hate computers."I've admired Jef Raskin for years. However, the original Mac 128K remains iconic - and for very good reason. The highly efficient Arm-based processor delivered astonishing performance and set the stage for a revitalization of the Mac lineup. A little more than a decade later, Jobs revealed in 2005 that Macs would transition from PowerPC chips to Intel processors.Īnd in 2020, Apple again roiled the computer industry by shipping the first wave of Macs powered by the company’s custom-built M1 chip. From PowerPC to Intel to Apple siliconĪpple introduced the Power Macintosh, the first to use a PowerPC processor, in 1994. (That’s one reason the Apple II product line continued for another nine years or so.) It took at least two more iterations before the Mac truly hit its performance and commercial stride with the Mac SE/30 model. The first Mac actually sold disappointingly for Apple. It ran Mac OS 1.0, arrived with a 9-inch black-and-white monitor, and carried a price tag of $2,500 (the equivalent of around $7,100 today). The first Mac featured two serial ports, and could accommodate one 3.5-inch floppy disc. The “128K” in its name indicated the computer’s RAM. The Macintosh 128K boasted an 8 MHz Motorola 68000 processor. Nor was it the company’s first machine to use windows, icons and a mouse pointer (that would be the Lisa).īut the Mac brought together ease of use, a focus on personal creativity, and a belief that users deserved something better than the green-text-on-black-screens that was more or less ubiquitous at the time. The Macintosh wasn’t Apple’s first mass-market computer (that would be the Apple II). Photo: Apple Macintosh 128K: An iconic computer Had this not happened, Apple could have called the computer the “MAC,” for “Mouse-Activated Computer.” (Some people joked that it actually stood for “Meaningless Acronym Computer.”) The signatures of the original Mac creators. Jobs convinced McIntosh to let Apple use a variant of the name, with the two companies agreeing to a financial settlement. (Raskin considered using female names for computers sexist.)Īpple changed the spelling, however, since the name already belonged to a high-end audio equipment company called McIntosh Laboratory. Originally, Apple planned to spell the Macintosh as “McIntosh,” a reference to Raskin‘s favorite cultivar of apple. (It failed to take off.) Macintosh: What’s in a name? Raskin left Apple and wound up releasing a computer based on his original idea, called the Canon Cat, a few years later. Raskin and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wound up clashing over the direction of the project due to their disagreement on price versus quality. Even a low-cost TRS-80 - a fairly bare-bones computer sold at Radio Shack - cost $599 at the time. While that’s equal to more than $1,400 in today’s money, it was far cheaper than the Apple II, which cost $1,298 in the 1970s. Raskin targeted a price point of $500 or less. He had the revolutionary (and, today, decidedly un-Apple) idea to build an easy-to-use personal computer that everyone could afford. The Mac project dates back to the late 1970s and original creator Jef Raskin.
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