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Dec.19 - Dec.26, 2004 |
Macintosh turns 20
Steve Jobs' company has undergone highs and lows
By Alessandro Cancian
Originally Published: 2004-02-01
On January 24 Apple will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984."
With this slogan, Apple announced to the world the birth of a computer that would revolutionize the history of information technology.
The year was, of course, 1984, and from the Tampa, Florida, stadium the most important media event of the year was being televised: the 18th Super Bowl, pitting Los Angeles vs. Washington.
Under Ridley Scott's masterful direction, the commercial followed a script that was inspired by the Big Brother metaphor conceived by George Orwell in his famous book, 1984. Orwell would be amazed by a TV commercial showing an audience of grey and mute people, harangued by a figure projected on a large screen. The totalitarian society was enslaved by Big Brother and depicted in Orwell's work. In the commercial, a girl dressed in bright colours threw a hammer into the big screen, breaking Big Brother's grip on the minds of his slaves.
Twenty years have passed since the first time the world heard of the Macintosh. That commercial, shot specifically for the Super Bowl, was never broadcast again, but the Macintosh did not cease to amaze.
It sported 128KB of RAM, an 8-MHz MC68000 processor, 400-KB floppy drive, 9 inch integrated B/W screen, audio output, mouse, keyboard, and two serial ports, but the real revolution was in the software. Its innovation on competing computers was the introduction of the GUI (Graphical User Interface), which nowadays allows users to operate a computer with extreme ease.
While contemporary MS-DOS based computers by IBM still worked (and would continue to do so for quite a while) in the classic command-line mode, the Macintosh used a mouse to move a cursor on a screen with windows and icons. Even today, the desktop of the first Macintosh, despite being small (just 9 inches) and in black and white, looks remarkably familiar: it already had pull-down menus, directory icons, the trash basket.
The idea for this interface between man and machine was originally conceived in a laboratory at XEROX, and Steve Jobs had the merit of understanding its efficiency.
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