Happy Birthday Macintosh!

mac-30-yrs-old

Apple has a tribute to Macintosh on its website on its 30 year birthday

The Mac was introduced thirty years ago today on the Super Bowl with the now famous ad directed by Ridley Scott, and won numerous awards. Advertising Age called it the top ad from a pool of the 50 best commercials of all time

But I had a sneak-peek in November of 1983 when, while in Hawaii with all the other sales and marketing folks from around the world, Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh to the company and showed us the commercial!

Though forced to use PCs at many of the companies I worked at over the years, I did so reluctantly while always owning my own machines…and those machines were almost always Macs (had to buy PCs only for our business accounting). If not for the Mac my wife’s business would never have started 28 years ago (one we now run together…you can read the story about its founding here) and all the creative stuff I’ve done over the years can be directly attributed to, what Steve Jobs describes in this short video snippet, is how Macintosh is like a “bicycle for our minds.” 

Every month I get pinged by family, friends, colleagues and clients of mine who are increasingly turning away from PCs and buying Macs (and I’m probably not alone since Apple’s U.S. Mac sales surge 28.5% as Windows PC market drops 7.5%). Though their embrace of the Mac is nice validation that I wasn’t actually nuts and made poor strategic personal computing choices for decades, as I coach and assist folks today with using Macs I continually am asked, “Damn! How do you know all of this stuff!?!” My answer always is, “Um…because I’ve worked, played, created, and loved Macs essentially my entire adult life.

Though my iPhone couldn’t be pried from my cold, dead hands and I’d be saddened if my iPad was gone, if the Mac went away it would negatively impact everything I do with a personal computer: web development; photography; video; page layout and interactive PDFs; ebook creation; podcasting; and so much more.

Thanks to anyone and everyone who created the original Mac, have worked on it over the years, and are now carrying it in to the future. I’ll keep buying ’em as long as I can.

Here is a short video of my kids using the first iMac, one which I was sent since I worked in Apple Business at the time and needed to demo it:

MACINTOSH HISTORY LINKS
If you’re interested in exploring more about the history of Macintosh, here are some great places for you to go and poke around:

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About Steve Borsch

Strategist. Learner. Idea Guy. Salesman. Connector of Dots. Friend. Husband & Dad. CEO. Janitor. More here.

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Connecting the Dots Podcast

Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.