25 years later, the revolutionary Mac still makes waves

Looking back, the first beige, boxy Macintosh—complete with its cute little "mouse" and friendly graphic interface—seems so simple, so obvious, and somehow inevitable. But believe me, back on January 24, 1984—the day the Mac first went on sale—Apple's game-changing system was anything but a sure thing.

First, a flashback to the early 80s. After years of success with the wildly popular Apple II (my parents bought one back in 1978 or so), Apple had hit a rough patch. The infamous, glitch-ridden Apple III came out in 1980 and bombed almost instantly, followed by another lead balloon, the Lisa—armed with the first commercially available graphical user interface and mouse, but saddled with an eye-popping, $9,995 price tag. Meanwhile, the IBM PC and its various clones were gobbling up Apple's PC market share.

Still, Apple was onto something with this graphical interface and mouse thing. Steve Jobs knew it, and he threw his weight behind the Macintosh team, which famously went into isolation on the Apple campus, running up a pirate flag (literally) and working long, nightmarish hours on a more elegant, friendlier, and cheaper version of the Lisa. Jobs was the head pirate—by turns cheerleader, slave driver, fearless leader and ruthless dictator. (I bet that was fun.)

Of course, Jobs is nothing if not a master showman, and he proved it with the now-iconic, Ridley Scott-directed "1984" Super Bowl ad (check out Caroline McCarthy's thorough CNET feature on the spot), broadcast once (and once only) on January 22, 1984. Two days later, the 128K (as in kilobytes, not megabytes) Mac went on sale—for $2,495, cheaper than the Lisa, but still a princely sum back then.

The Macintosh hit the tech world like an earthquake, all right; as this early review from the Los Angeles Times (via Boing Boing Gadgets) notes, the first Mac "started a fever in Silicon Valley that's hard not to catch … [it] is as innovative today as the Apple II was in 1977."

But the $2,495 price tag—a whopping $6,400 in 2008 dollars—was a tough pill to swallow, and as the Times reviewer pointed out, the Mac's lack of MS-DOS compatibility was a risky move. Sales were strong, but not staggeringly so, and then, of course … Windows came along.

The Mac certainly had its ups and downs in the intervening 25 years—way down by 1997, when Wired published its "101 Ways to Save Apple" story (and yes, Apple's future was very much in doubt back then), to way up in 2002, when the first iMac with a flat-panel display (the one that "looks like a desk lamp," as CNET News put it at the time) made the cover of Time magazine.

But looking back, there's no question that the Macintosh changed computing as we know it. Indeed, every time you look at a computer screen, touch a mouse—or fire up Windows Vista, for that matter—you're seeing (and feeling) its influence.

OK, so who wants to reminisce about their first Mac? Post your (brief) stories below.

Also, check out these cool Mac anniversary links from around the Web:

The history of the Mac Boot Beep [Boing Boing Gadgets]
1984 review of the original Mac: "A fever in Silicon Valley that’s hard not to catch." [Boing Boing Gadgets]
Photos: Mac through the years [CNET News.com]
Mac founding-fathers appear at Welcome to Macintosh screening [The Unofficial Apple Weblog]
Remembering the '1984' Super Bowl Mac ad [CNET News.com]
Twitterers remember their first Mac [The Unofficial Apple Weblog]
The Vintage Museum (A fascinating gallery of Mac systems from the original through the PowerPC series)