The first Macintosh was born on January 24 1984 and turns 40 years old! Its technological antiquity Apple revolutionized her time and paved the way for modern computers.

A compact object consisting of a screen and a floppy disk reader, the Macintosh was the tool that democratized computing, thanks to an interface that allowed a simple click of icons with the help of a mouse.

The app has been around since the 1960s, but the Mac popularized its use. Previously, only insiders had access to computers, which responded to complex command lines.

1984: The Super Bowl unveiling of the first Macintosh and the video that made history

At January 22, 1984two days before its release, the Macintosh makes his appearance at Super Bowlthe final of the American football championship, which he collected that year 77.6 million viewers.

The advertising his spot Ridley Scott it was 60 seconds long and titled “1984” inspired by the world of George Orwell’s “1984”. A female athlete in Apple colors smashes his screen with a hammer Big Brother.

Steve Jobs’ Apple paid $800,000 (2.5 million today’s dollars) to run the ad during the Super Bowl, having already spent hundreds of thousands of euros to create the commercial, according to the book “Apple Confidential 2.0” by Owen Linzmayer.

$2,495

The first Macintosh goes on sale in January 24, 1984 in the US as a luxury product with a selling price of $2,495, nearly $7,400 today (€6,700). Its price will quickly drop to $2,195.

The Mac is cheaper than its main competitor, the IBM PCwhich at the time cost 3,270 (10,000 today’s dollars, 8,800 euros), but was twice as expensive as the Apple II, Apple’s bestseller.

January 24, 1984: Steven Jobs, chairman of Apple Computer, with the company’s first computer, the day the Macintosh was released

Today, the first Macs fetch up to 2,000 euros at auctions. But more sought-after are internal Macintosh presentation papers dating back to October 1983 that fetched more than $12,000 in 2022 at RR Auction.

370,000 sales

Apple hoped to sell 250,000 Macintoshes in 1984, according to the April 1984 New York Times. Although official numbers are secret, sales must have reached 372,000 Macs in the first year, plus the one million Apple II, according to with Jeremy Reimer, technology history blogger.

9 inch screen and 128 Kb memory

Although a far cry from today’s giant screens, the screen of the first Mac was 9 inches, almost 23 centimeters.

For comparison, the latest iMacs have a 23.5-inch (60 cm) screen, some MacBook laptops reach 16 inches (41. cm).

The first Mac is 34.5 cm high, 24.4 cm wide and 27.7 cm deep. Despite its 7.5 kg weight, “you can take it everywhere, even on the plane,” read an AFP cable in January 1984.

The first Mac had 128Kb of memory, about the size of a low-resolution photo or a very small Excel file.

Today, computers with less than 8 Gb of memory are rare, and Apple’s most powerful computer, the Mac Pro, has 1.6 million times more memory (192 Gb) than its great-grandfather.