36 Years Ago Today, Steve Jobs Unveiled the First Macintosh

[al mcguire]

 

 

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/24/macintosh-36th-anniversary

[cmgoodin]

I got one of these "Miracle Machines"  the year after they came out.  I traded an old IBM clone PC I had built to a writer that wanted to 

have a machine he could get work done on.   After I set up the Mac I discovered why.   It came with Microsoft Word

on Floppy disk.  I tried to use it, but since the machine had no Hard drive and only one Floppy drive,  it required

over 21 floppy disk swaps in order to open a single word document.  (I counted them)  After 15 disk swaps I was ready to throw the little portable machine out the window.  I had Atari and Commodore and IBM PCs that only had floppy drives (no hard disks) and they only required one disk swap to create or open a word processor file. 

[Philip Perkins]

I was seduced (having worked on all the Apple roll-out films) and bought a Mac around this time.  After experiences like Courtney's, I went back and spent almost the cost of the computer on a (get ready) 500 MB hard disk.  That made the Mac usable in its advertised fashion more or less.  I'm glad my eyes were better then--that screen was REALLY small!

[David Waelder]

4 hours ago, Philip Perkins said:

spent almost the cost of the computer on a (get ready) 500 MB hard disk

 

Are you sure you are remembering this accurately, Phillip?

 

I recall buying a hard drive for my Mac Pro about that time, or maybe slightly later. I paid about $560 for 20 (just twenty) megabytes.

 

David

[Philip Perkins]

3 hours ago, David Waelder said:

 

Are you sure you are remembering this accurately, Phillip?

 

I recall buying a hard drive for my Mac Pro about that time, or maybe slightly later. I paid about $560 for 20 (just twenty) megabytes.

 

David

You are probably right--at that time a 500 MB drive would have been very expensive, and apps were very small.

[Tom E]

I remember paying about 450 dollars for a 40 MB hard drive back then for my Mac. I’ve still got it too- though I haven’t fired it up in quite a while...

[borjam]

The NeXT Cube I have at home has a 450 MB hard disk. That was a huge disk in the late 80's  

 

And I remember back in 1991 we ordered a couple of 750 MB disks from the USA. Large Maxtor drives weighting a ton, the interface was SCSI probably. I think they were $2500 each. At that time it was worth ordering directly from abroad, in Spain prices for this stuff could be 2x or even 3x.

 

[Jay Rose]

I had a strung-together TRS80 doing studio chores like sfx database and dub labels/tracking, and my wife hated it... and by extension, all computers. (I think the 80 hated her as well; it seems like it would frequently crash when she came into the room. But it also had these dicey ribbon connectors, and software I'd written, so it crashed a lot.)

 

Then I dragged her to a "computer store", where she could see this new gadget. She later described it as "it had this little bar of soap with a wire, and I could move it on the desk and see something get drawn on the screen. I was hooked!"

 

Why she got to describe it that way, was in an interview after she wrote some two dozen books about Photoshop!

[Rick Reineke]

My first computer was a Mac SE, with a whopping 20MB hard drive. Someone gave me a floppy w/ MS Word and a printer which kept me amused.

[Matthew Steel]

First computer I remember using was a Timex Sinclair 1000.  My dad bought it on clearance at K-Mart.  It lived on our dining room table for a while until my mom got sick of that.  The computer then moved to the room I shared with my brother and essentially became our toy.  I believe my dad rigged it up with a second memory expansion module for 32k of RAM.

 

My dad then proceeded to get a Kaypro which (unlike the Timex Sinclair 1000) could easily do real work.