Yesterday, 20 years ago, on January 24th 1984, Apple released its first affordable Mac which had a GUI. The Mac 128k ran at a blazing 8MHz speed and came with System 1.0. It was the first ever computer to accept the new 400k 3.5″ floppy discs and was originally sold for $2495.
The cost of the Mac was a huge blow to the programmers who worked on the computer and it hampered acceptance of the machine. Not that they didn’t try to hold the cost down. Steve Jobs negotiated the price for the Motorola 68000 down to $9 per chip. High price and low power aside, January 24, 1984 was the day Apple introduced the computer that changed everything. Yet it didn’t change Apple’s penchant for pricing their computers in the stratosphere.
I know that the ‘Lisa’ was released in 1983, however that had a price of $9,995 which really isn’t affordable and was a “plunge few businesses were willing to take“. The Lisa ran its own OS and wasn’t as funky as the Mac 128k (above). There is more info about the Lisa here.
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