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The
Mac at 25!
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The
DigiBarn Computer Museum Celebrates
The
25th Anniversary (Happy Birthday!) of the Apple Macintosh Computer!
DigiBarn's Mac
at 25 Special Online Exhibit of Rare MacArtifacts
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Quiz: who
is this little guy? (see answer at bottom of page) |
Bruce and others from the Digibarn crew and others appeared on stage at MacWorld 2009 in San Francisco for their part in the new feature documentary MacHeads the Movie (January 7, 2009)
Why we are celebrating!
On January 24,
1984 the personal computing movement was changed forever with the Superbowl
launch of Apple's Macintosh computer. While the graphical user interface,
mouse, and bitmapped display+printing had been around for more than
a decade, the Mac represented the first combining of these key innovations
into a beautifully crafted package that an ordinary consumer could pick
up and use in daily life. The Mac went on to spawn several revolutions
including the "Desktop Publishing" phenomenon of the 80s.
This site is a special project of the DigiBarn Computer Museum to bring
together some of the rarest artifacts relating to the Mac (many never
seen online or published in any way). We will also pull together many
materials that will give you an idea of where the Mac came from, predecessor
systems, people and organizations, and where the Mac fits today in our
evolutionary tree of visual computing. We hope you like this online
exhibit and hope you will take the time to let
us know about any other artifacts, stories or comments we can include
to help this effort in 2009, the Mac's 25th birthday year (actually
this is the 30th anniversary of its conception by Jef Raskin)!
OK, now check out the
Stuff, the People, the Macintosh
Way, the Predecessors, the Mac
in the Family Tree, Weird Mac, the Relatives
of the Mac, Your Mac Memes, Other Mac
25th Anniversary Coverage
The
Stuff (Rare
Hardware and Other Artifacts from the Prehistory & Early Years
of the Mac)
128K Mac with original packaging (1984)
Building the Mac! A special
online exhibit of rare hardware
artifacts that represent the effort to build the Mac from
1979 to 1983
Documenting the Mac! A special online exhibit of rare
document artifacts that represent the effort to build the
Mac from 1979 to 1983
Also see our large collection of Apple computers and other artifacts
Folklore.org,
Andy Hertzfeld's superb site on Apple and Macintosh folklore, written
by those who where there!
AppleLore,
Apple Computer History Weblog. (sponsored by the Computer
History Museum)
The Mothership, an excellent site all about Apple (Mac, Lisa, Apple II), including ads, downloadable historic software, timelines, columns and much, much more!
Stanford
Universities Early Macintosh (1979-81) site.
See our artifacts:
DigiBarn's original
Macintosh with packaging and Macintosh
Division cap (worn by original team) and Macintosh
16 page brochure (published December 1983) and screen
shots of the Macintosh OS, version 1.1 (1984) and
Chuck Colby and his famous innovations (including the MacColby
and many other early
Macintosh innovations)
The
People (Who
Made the Mac, Who Produced the Predecessors)
Early Macintosh Division Org Chart
(from mid 1981)
Jef
Raskin,
the "Father of the Mac" and the rest of the Gang of Four
(Brian Howard, Marc LeBrun, Burrell Smith)
Andy Hertfeld's
commentary The
Father of the Macintosh at folklore.org
The story of most
members of the Mac Dream Team (Daniel
Kotte, Jobs, Atkinson, Hertzfeld, Tribble, Kare,
Espinosa, Fernandez, Horn, Smith and many others can be found
at Folklore.org
Interview
with Macintosh Design Team from 1984
Interview
with Jef Raskin, Bud Tribble and Brian Howard
The
Macintosh Way
(reality or reality distortion? religion or cult?)
The
Predecessors (The Companies, The Machines)
Apple's Lisa its
business-oriented computer system & the first Apple system with
a graphical user interface (released January 1983)
Xerox, Xerox PARC and the birth of the personal workstation (the
project began in 1973 and was the proving ground for much of what
came later, including the Xerox Star, Lisa, Mac, Windows and others)
The Xerox Star
8010,
introduced in the Spring of 1981, Star set the standard for networked
compuers with graphical user interfaces and was the definitive environment
until the world caught up in the 1990s.
The
Three Rivers PERQ (a
commercial rendition of the Xerox Alto, Mach Kernel's birthplace and
the home of the groundbreaking Intran publishing system)
The
Mac in the Family Tree
(Cousin Mac in the Family Tree of Visual Computing Systems)
Weird
Mac (odd variants
of the Mac)
Relatives
of the Mac
(What Be NeXT or direct offspring or cousins)
Your
Mac Memes
(How Did it Change YOUR Life?)
Other
Mac 25th Anniversary Coverage
(Mac@25 and original Mac@20in the Press)
See excellent
stories in the Mac at 20 by the good folks at Wired News including:
The
Macintosh's Twisted Truth (by
Owen Linzmayer, Jan 10, 2004)
The
20 Macs that Mattered Most (by
Owen Linzmayer, Jan 9, 2004)
We're
All Mac Users Now (by
Leander Kahney, Jan 6, 2004)
Apple's
Unlikely Guardian Angel (by
Leander Kahney, Jan 8, 2004)
Mac
Founders Push for New Ideas (by
Daniel Terdiman, Jan 6, 2004)
Radio and
TV:
National
Public Radio coverage of the Mac at 20 (Talk of the Nation,
Neal Conan, Jan 20, 2004)
MacWorld
Steve
Jobs on the Mac's 20th Anniversary, Exclusive Interview
(Jason Snell, Jan 2004)
The
Mac Turns 20 Looking Back on the Mac (Adam Engst, Jan 2004)
Happy
Anniversary, Macintosh (Jan 2004)
Twenty-Twenty
Vision (by Jason Snell, Jan 2004)
CNN
Apple's
core: The Mac turns 20 (by Marsha Walton, Jan 24, 2004)
The San Jose
Mercury News stories are also worth a look:
The
Mac that Roared (bjy Jon Fortt, Jan 18, 2004)
And Merc articles from the original Mac launch in January 1984:
A
look at secret new Apple computer and How
the Macintosh computer grew
Also worth
seeing:
Forbes.com's
Happy
Birthday Mac (by
Quentin Hardy, Dec 15, 2003)
10th
birthday of the Mac in 1994,
Happy
Birthday Mac (by
Al Fasholdt)
The DigiBarn's special exhibit of rare and early Macintosh artifacts at the Computer History Museum on Jan 22, 2004 together with a special lecutre "The Macintosh Marketing Story".
Original "Mac at 20" page here at the Digibarn.
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