January 24, 1984: Apple ships its first Mac, the mighty Macintosh 128K.
Bringing a mouse and graphical user interface to the masses, and heralded by an acclaimed Super Bowl commercial that’s still talked about today, the first-gen Mac will quickly become one of the most important personal computers ever released.
November 16, 1982: Intent on calling Apple’s upcoming personal computer the “Macintosh,” Steve Jobs pens an impassioned plea to audio company McIntosh Laboratory asking permission to use the name.
You can probably guess how the resulting discussions turned out!
September 27, 1979: Years before the Macintosh will ship, Steve Jobs and Jef Raskin clash for the first time over the direction of the R&D project to produce the revolutionary computer.
Raskin, the founder of the Macintosh project, wants to produce a machine that’s affordable to everyone. Apple co-founder Jobs wants a computer that’s going to be the best, regardless of price.
Guess who won?
July 27, 1955: Joanna Hoffman, who will join the original Macintosh and NeXT teams and become Steve Jobs’ first right-hand woman, is born in Poland.
Six months younger than Jobs, the marketing executive is one of the few people willing and able to stand up to the oftentimes-fierce Apple co-founder during the first part of his career.
February 19, 1981: Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh project, sends a memo to Apple CEO Mike Scott, listing his many complaints about working with Steve Jobs.
He claims that Jobs, who joined the Mac team the previous month, is tardy, shows bad judgment, interrupts people, doesn’t listen and is a bad manager.
July 20, 1978: Apple DOS makes its debut on the Apple II, giving Apple its first official operating system.
A command line interface with green text prompts on a black background, Apple DOS looks incredibly primitive next to today’s graphical user interfaces. Nonetheless, for Apple users this was the macOS Sierra of its day.
Everyone associates the Mac’s creation with Steve Jobs (with very good reason), but there is another person without whom we wouldn’t have Apple’s iconic home computers: user interface guru Jef Raskin, who passed away on February 26, 2005 — exactly 11 years ago today.
Raskin not only named the Macintosh — after his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh (even though that spelling was already being used by an audio company) — he also gave the lovable computer some of its lasting personality traits.
