macintosh

What is a Macintosh?

After 25 years on the market, it's a good question, since someone with no knowledge of computers looking at, say, today's MacBook Pro, would not necessarily know that it evolved from 1984's original 128K Mac.

But evolve it did, and on the 25th anniversary of the release of that original machine (which is this Saturday), one might indeed wonder what hereditary DNA, if any, today's Macs retain from their much more humble ancestors.

The answer is some, but not that much, at least not when it comes to specific identifiable hardware features, … Read more

For my daily segment on San Francisco's KCBS radio station, I spoke with co-anchors Patti Reising and Jeff Bell about the 25th anniversary of the Mac, my original impressions of the machine, and my predictions--not just for Apple but also for tech innovation.

Read my Los Angeles Times review of the Mac, published in January 1984.

In January 1984, Steve Jobs--whom I described in my Macintosh review as "Apple's young chairman"--gave me a preview of the original 128K Macintosh. I was very impressed. Thousands of reviews later, I'm still impressed not only by what Apple accomplished back then but by what the company has been able to do since--especially after Jobs returned to Apple.

So, without any editing, here is what I said at the time. And, yes, along the way, I changed my byline from Lawrence J. Magid to Larry Magid.

Macintosh Shapes Up a Winner by Lawrence J. Magid … Read more

As the Mac celebrates its 25th birthday, we asked CNET readers to send us stories of their most vivid memories of the groundbreaking computer. Here are some of the stories we received.

Mac as typesetter I was working at an ad agency and had just left a client who was complaining bitterly about the high cost of typesetting changes on his catalog. The agency's typesetter was a $100,000 state-of-the-art unit that was an art director's dream but could not manage a simple change from page 23 to page 34.

On the way back to the agency, I … Read more

January 24 marks the the 25th anniversary of the release of the original Macintosh, a computer that--with its whimsical design, innovative graphical user interface and all-in-one form factor--permanently changed personal computing.

Any student of the history of PCs should know that the Mac project was first championed by the late Jef Raskin and then brought to fruition by Steve Jobs. But the team that built the first Mac was, of course, much larger than those two. In fact, the team had a wide range of personalities and skill sets and seems universally to have been regarded as a singular experience … Read more

Twenty-five years after the debut of the Macintosh, the product that is the soul of Apple is not necessarily its vehicle to the future.

It was a quarter-century ago that Super Bowl XVIII viewers saw the now-famous introductory ad for Apple's Macintosh, formally released two days later. Apple had announced back in 1983 that the Macintosh was coming, but for many, that Sunday was their first look at the product that would drive Apple to new heights in the personal computer industry and usher in the graphical user interface as the standard way for regular people to interact with … Read more

On January 24, 1984, the Macintosh came into the world, starting the second major revolution in the personal computer industry. Steve Jobs and team took some lessons from Xerox PARC and created the first user-friendly, mass market computer.

By today's standards, it wasn't that user-friendly (some will remember disk-swapping with the original Mac, which had 128KB of RAM and a 400KB 3.5-inch floppy disk drive), but compared with Microsoft's DOS operating system, it was a major technical innovation.

The 128K Mac version of the graphical user interface, with icons, fonts, folders, audio and a mouse, started … Read more

Microsoft said Friday that it is changing the leadership of its Macintosh Business Unit, the group responsible for Office for Mac.

Eric Wilfrid, a product unit manager in the division, will succeed Craig Eisler, who is moving to a role elsewhere in Robbie Bach's entertainment and devices unit. In an interview, Wilfrid declined to say what exactly his former boss will be up to or even to whom Eisler will report.

Eisler took over in June 2007 when then MacBU head Roz Ho moved to a secretive mobile job within the entertainment unit.

Wilfrid said that Office for Mac … Read more

If Tuesday's news of new, more-powerful, Mac laptops wasn't enough to stoke the fires of the Apple faithful, I've got even more to offer.

Tuesday afternoon, the producers of the forthcoming film, MacHeads, released a new trailer. The film is scheduled for a fall release. No word yet on how it will be distributed.

The film, as noted here in January, will take a close look at what Wired writer Leander Kahney has termed the "cult of Mac."

The new trailer doesn't shed much more light on the contents of the film, but for … Read more