Exactly 40 years ago, on January 24, 1984, Steve Jobs, dressed in a black double-breasted jacket and gray bow tie, took the stage at De Anza College in Cupertino to introduce the Macintosh to the public. The first mass-produced computer with a graphical user interface and mouse, the Apple Macintosh, later called the Macintosh 128K, set the course for personal computing forever.

The all-in-one system had a Motorola 68000 @ 7.8336 MHz processor (effective frequency of 6 MHz), 128 KB of memory, and a 3-inch floppy disk drive; the PC did not have a hard disk. The built-in 9-inch monochrome display had a resolution of 512×342 pixels. The weight of the Apple Macintosh was 7.5 kg, which meant that it was theoretically portable; there were even special bags for carrying this PC.

The initial cost of the Apple Macintosh was $2 495 (now it’s more than $7 000!). In 3 months, Apple sold 70 thousand Macintosh, and at the time, these were very good numbers. The Macintosh ran System Software 1.0, which launched the macOS family of operating systems.

As a reminder, Steve Jobs “borrowed” the concept of a windowed graphical interface and mouse control from the Xerox Alto computer developed at the Xerox PARC research center in the late 1970s.