“In 1984, a youthful Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh and changed personal computers forever.”
“The digerati of that day derided just about everything about the Macintosh, but they were particularly harsh about its ‘mouse’ which our NEWSWEEK reviewer needed to define for readers as ‘a tethered box the size of a cigarette pack.’ The big criticism was that users would have to take their hands off the keyboard to use the mouse, making it inefficient and thus certain to be ignored. ‘Operating the Macintosh sometimes seems to require three hands,’ sniffed one critic. So much for critics.”
“More than a few reviewers also suggested that users would soon tire of ‘cute icons’ like the trash can, as well as clicking and dragging to move files. Computer magazine columnists argued that ‘command line’ prompts typing in cryptic phrases like ‘del c:/files/story.doc’ were more direct than dragging and dropping a file into the trash can. There was also considerable tsk-tsking over the absence of cursor keys, the arrow buttons which allow movement up, down, left and right. Jobs considered them obsolete although, uncharacteristically, he later relented and Mac keyboards now sport cursor keys.”
“As this article made clear, there was an infectious and inspirational spirit behind the birth of the Macintosh, which has lasted to this day as does the continuing chorus of industry doubters predicting trouble for Apple. At least some things in the computer industry never seem to change,” writes Michael Rogers for Newsweek. Read the original Newsweek article from Jan 30, 1984 here.