featured a small built-in high resolution monochrome display, the wonderful Macintosh operating system with its graphical user interface, and a klunky looking single button mouse. It sold for $2495. With only 128 Kb of RAM, the Mac was memory starved at first, but later models quickly corrected this.Apple included several key applications that made the Macintosh immediately useful. MacPaint showed people what a mouse was good for, and MacWrite demonstrated that WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processing really worked. The Macintosh redefined what we meant when we said that a program was easy to use. The Mac also had a floppy disk drive that used 3.5" disks, which were physically smaller than their 5.25" PC counterparts, but were sturdier and could hold more data (400k).A couple of years later, Aldus PageMaker allowed high end desktop publishing to be performed on a Macintosh. PageMaker's paste-up metaphor made sense to people who had worked in traditional design and production departments. A Mac became the tool of choice on which to run a publishing business, and the combination of a Macintosh, PageMaker and the PostScript based Apple LaserWriter laser printer went on to dominate the desktop publishing industry.The Macintosh was powered by Motorola's 68000 processor, a powerful 32-bit processor which had been around since 1979. The 68000 contained about 60,000 transistors, and had 16 registers and a large instruction set which used 13 addressing modes. Future versions of the 68000 architecture would further extend this so that by the end of the 68000 line over a thousand different combinations of instructions and addressing modes were possible!Word PerfectIn 1984, Satellite Software International introduced Word Perfect, a powerful new word processor for the IBM PC. Despite having a relatively bland and unfriendly character cell user interface, Word Perfect soon became the dominant word processor for the PC market, especial...