Despite having a tiny black and white screen and not even a hard drive in its first incarnation, the original Macintosh was one of the most transformative and iconic computers of all time. I’ve always wanted to have one on display in my office, but when I stumbled on this wooden version, I’d much rather have this on my bookshelf.
This wooden Macintosh sculpture was created by artist Lee Stoetzel a dog’s age ago back in 2007, and it’s just as timeless as the computer on which it’s based. It’s even got a wooden mouse and matching keyboard.
The only thing better would be if it had a slot that you could slide an iPad into and a functional wooden Bluetooth keyboard – both of which I’m sure could be done. Oh, and even better than that would be if Lee made one for me.
Be sure to check out Stoetzel’s other incredible wood creations, which include a VW bus.
With Macintosh turning 30 this year, you’d think Apple would go big. Maybe they’d spring for another Super Bowl commercial like the 1984 ad that changed the way the world thinks about computers. Nah… they just made an Apple promo reel that was shot entirely on iPhones—with a little help, of course.
30 years ago. The Los Angeles Raiders are slaughtering the Washington Redskins at halftime. You decide it’s time for a refill on your Crystal Light. You’re headed to the kitchen when something stops you in your tracks—a chick with a Brigitte Nielsen haircut and a hammer, running towards you.
30 years ago, the landscape of personal computing was vastly different. It hardly even existed, compared to what it is today. Footage of the Mac’s initial unveil is out there, but this second, more polished run—a presentation for the Boston Computer Society—hasn’t been available since the event itself back on January 30th 1984.
Today is a big day for Apple and fans of the Mac computer. Apple is celebrating the 30th birthday of the launch of the very first Macintosh back in 1984. I can remember vividly being in grade school back in ’84 or ’85 and our class got a Macintosh computer. It sat there and no one ever touched it because the teacher didn’t know how to use it.
I never played with that Mac, and I was always rather bitter about it sitting there with no fun to be had. Regardless of my personal experience with the original Macintosh, its launch was still a pivotal moment in desktop computing. In celebration of 30 years of Macintosh, Apple has put together a cool timeline that gives some details about each iteration of the Mac on the road from 1984 to today.
The timeline shows some of the famous people that used the machines and what they did with them. Technology has certainly changed in 30 years; it makes you wonder what the Mac will look like 30 years from now.
The Mac turns 30 today, and what better way to celebrate than with a good ol’ fashioned autopsy. iFixit proves that can be a lot more fun than it sounds with its classic 128K Macintosh teardown, a beautifully gory history lesson.
Radical! In honor of the Macintosh’s 30th birthday, iFixIt has created a tubular video of their teardown of the Macintosh 128K, the original Mac released in 1984 to much fanfare. The system has a Motorola 68000 processor and most of the parts are accessible through the back panel. The best thing? Back in the day, this machine cost $10,000. Given that a modern $35 Raspberry Pi can emulate a dozen Macintoshes at once, it’s amazing how far we’ve come over the past three decades.
Today is a very special day for a very special computer. This is the computer that started it all, the device that changed everything, the very thing that kicked off the era of the personal computer. Happy 30th birthday, Macintosh. It’s been quite a trip.
Apple is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Mac with a new video and microsite released today featuring some fond remembrances of the machines over the years from creative professionals including Moby, artist April Greiman, photographer Jon Stanmeyer and more. The site features use cases exemplified by some of the best creative, educational and scientific professionals of the past 30 years, attaching a renowned face to each generation of new hardware from the original Macintosh all the way up to the brand new Mac Pro.
There’s also an interactive element to the site, with a section called “Your First Mac” where Apple asks visitors to tell them about their own first experience with a Cupertino computer, featuring a brief quiz where you select your inaugural introduction to Macintosh and then choose from a list of general activities you used said machine for. For me, the first Mac I actually owned all to myself was 2005′s eMac, which I bought used and which had been modified by the local authorized Mac shop to have the power button up front instead of hidden all the way round back of that deep CRT.
Apple seems to be tabulating that input in real-time on the site, and is displaying a running breakdown of the most popular first Mac models and what percentage of visitors were using said machines. There’s also a slider that lets you see, depending on which year you’re looking at, what first-time Mac users were mostly doing on their hardware: Early on, there’s a lot of educational use and desktop publishing, but ‘Internet & Email’ starts taking over in the mid-90s as you might expect and remains dominant right through to today.
If you are or have been a Mac user at any time during the past three decades, the site’s bound to trigger some nostalgia, and even if you aren’t, you’ll get a glimpse into why this computing pioneer has managed to invoke so much devotion from its fans, and why Apple executives told MacWorld that the “Mac keeps going forever.”
I haven’t had an original Macintosh on my desk in years, but I always thought about buying a used one. But now that I’ve seen this LEGO version, I think I’d rather have one of these.
Creative artists Jason Kinsella and Charlotte Bakken fabricated this awesome scale model of the original Apple Macintosh, and captured the build in this neat stop-motion video clip:
The best part of the design is that it’s actually got a slot in the side so they can set an iPad inside of it to serve as the display. With a properly jailbroken device, they could probably even run a Macintosh emulator on it to complete the effect. Just don’t try and cram a floppy disk in its drive slot.
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