Forty years ago today, the Apple Macintosh went on sale in the U.S., and it was one of those moments that changed everything. People who are old enough to remember the Ridley Scott commercial know that it was one of the rare cases where the hype was justified.
It’s true that the IBM P.C. started the democratization of the computer. Yet it was the Mac which finally positioned the personal computer as a consumer device first and foremost.
In a sense we live in a world that was created on January 24, 1984. There are things we all take for granted about our comfortable relationship to our computer technology that were simply not yet true on January 23, 1984.
So happy 40th birthday model M0001. Because of what you started, many people are now looking forward to seeing whether February 2, 2024 will turn out to be as momentous a day of birth.