Robert Hampton

Today is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the first Apple Macintosh. There’s a picture of it over to the right. Fans of Apple’s modern designs will probably not be too inspired by the… beigeness of it all. This product predates Jony Ive‘s arrival at Apple by nearly a decade, and Apple’s computers would remain stubbornly in the “beige box category” until the late 1990s.

The computing masses at the time didn’t quite know what to make of it. Instead of a black screen with a flashing cursor, users were presented with something called a desktop, and a strange device called a mouse. Instead of typing commands, you could move a pointer on the screen and click on icons to tell the computer what to do.

It wasn’t, as is often misreported, the first computer to use a graphical user interface or a mouse – Xerox had a product at least two years earlier. Apple themselves had already tried it a year earlier with the Lisa, which failed because of its astonishingly high price point ($10,000!). It was certainly the first to be successfully marketed and sold to consumers.

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