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Concept
Macintosh 128K
Summary
The Apple Macintosh—later rebranded as the Macintosh 128K—is the original Apple Macintosh personal computer. It played a pivotal role in establishing desktop publishing as a general office function. The motherboard, a CRT monitor, and a floppy drive were housed in a beige case with integrated carrying handle; it came with a keyboard and single-button mouse. It sold for . The Macintosh was introduced by a television commercial entitled "1984" shown during Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984 and directed by Ridley Scott. Sales of the Macintosh were strong at its initial release on January 24, 1984, and reached 70,000 units on May 3, 1984. Upon the release of its successor, the Macintosh 512K, it was rebranded as the Macintosh 128K. The computer's model number was M0001.
In 1978 Apple began to organize the Apple Lisa project, aiming to build a next-generation machine similar to an advanced Apple II or the yet-to-be-introduced IBM PC. In 1979, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs learned of the advanced work on graphical user interfaces (GUI) taking place at Xerox PARC. He arranged for Apple engineers to be allowed to visit PARC to see the systems in action. The Apple Lisa project was immediately redirected to use a GUI, which at that time was well beyond the state of the art for microprocessor abilities; the Xerox Alto required a custom processor that spanned several circuit boards in a case which was the size of a small refrigerator. Things had changed dramatically with the introduction of the 16/32-bit Motorola 68k in 1979, which offered at least an order of magnitude better performance than existing designs and made a software GUI machine a practical possibility. The basic layout of the Lisa was largely complete by 1982, at which point Jobs's continual suggestions for improvements led to him being kicked off the project.
At the same time that the Lisa was becoming a GUI machine in 1979, Jef Raskin began the Macintosh project. The design at that time was for a low-cost, easy-to-use machine for the average consumer.
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