Gallery · Room 18 · Cupertino, California, 1984
Macintosh
The computer that brought windows, icons and the mouse to a mass market, with type you chose from a menu.
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Apple put the Macintosh on sale on 24 January 1984, two days after its "1984" commercial ran during the Super Bowl. It cost $2,495. Instead of typing commands, people pointed with a one-button mouse and clicked small pictures called icons on a 9-inch black-and-white screen. It was the first mass-market success for this way of working.
The ideas were older. Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demonstration showed a mouse and multiple windows. At Xerox PARC, the Alto of 1973 built on his work, with a mouse, a graphical screen and the Smalltalk environment. Steve Jobs and Apple engineers saw it in December 1979. The Computer History Museum says the visit reinforced work under way on the Lisa and the Macintosh.
Type became a menu choice. Susan Kare designed many of the icons and the screen fonts, including Chicago for menus, with letters of different widths. In his own account, given at Stanford in 2005, Jobs traced these proportional fonts to a calligraphy class at Reed College. Kare's icons are still in copyright, so they are linked here rather than shown.
