This machine and its so-called clones, all utilizing the MS-DOS operating system and some variation on the Intel 8086/88 family of microprocessors, have thoroughly dominated the business market. IBM compatibility became almost essential for a machine to have any success as a business system. In addition, hundreds of manufacturers of add-on boards, IBM specific software and clones owe their very existence to the revolution that this essentially mediocre machine started.On January 24, 1984, the next major element in the evolution of the microcomputer was introduced: the Apple Macintosh. This diminutive computer didn't resemble anything currently considered normal in the world of personal computers.The Mac, as it soon became called, was certainly an innovation. Just about everything about it was different from the norm. The machine had a nine inch high-resolution, black and white, no color, monitor; 128K of RAM that was not expandable; a single 400K 3 inch micro floppy disk drive; no expansion slots; a keyboard with no function keys, numeric keypad or cursor control keys; a 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 microprocessor operating at a clock speed of 7.8336 MHz; a mouse used as a cursor control device; and a user-interface designed for 'the rest of us.' The initial list price for this 'toaster' of personal computers was $2495.00.The most prominent feature of this system, however, was the user-interface and the mouse. The Mac employed an interface that has come to be known as a desktop environment. This typically employs overlapping windows, smaller sections of a screen containing output from parts of an application; icons, small graphic symbols representing various computer functions; and the mouse input device.The Macintosh was not the first to employ this type of interface. For that you must go back to 1981 and the Xerox 8010 Star Information System, and to some extent even earlier to the experimental Xerox Alto computer in the late 1970s. This...
