Technology has evolved at a rapid pace over the centuries, from the caveman’s wheel to the first personal computers to wireless gadgets like iPhones that power our world today.
Tech blog Gizmodo has created an interactive museum in New York City to pay homage to the 80 coolest gadgets from today and years past. The Gizmodo Gallery, open September 23-27, features high-tech new inventions alongside some “off the beaten path” electronics and devices from decades ago. CNNMoney chose a six of their favorites, two of which mention Apple:
• First Apple Macintosh (1984): Long before the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” battle, Apple launched the first commercially successful personal computer with a graphics-based interface. The 1984 Macintosh, released on Jan. 24 for $2,500, was a revolutionary new device that shook the tech world. Instead of entering computer commands made up of rows of text and numbers to run the device, users could operate the Mac with a mouse — the first ever — to click on the screen’s images.
To launch the Mac, Ridley Scott directed a now-famous commercial aptly titled “1984” — a nod to George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel. The $1.5 million spot featured a blonde woman with a picture of the new Macintosh on her white tank top, smashing a screen meant to represent Big Brother. The ad was hailed as a marketing “watershed event” and helped set the tone for Apple’s long reign.
• Apple touchscreen and tablet prototypes (1980s): These two designs never made it to market, but they continue to inspire Apple’s products. First, industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger — who actually assembled the Gizmodo Gallery — developed a monochrome touch screen computer that could be operated with a stylus. These days it looks a lot like a precursor to the iPhone and iPod touch. Esslinger had been working for Sony when his work caught the eye of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who offered the designer an eye-popping $1 million contract. In the process of creating the touch screen, Esslinger also developed the “Snow White design,” an aesthetic motif characterized by the machine’s off-white color and a shape framed by horizontal and vertical lines. The design was ultimately applied to all Apple products from 1984 to 1990.
Esslinger also used the Snow White design to create a tablet computer for Apple, which has yet to see the light of day. Rumors have swirled for months that Apple will roll out a touch screen tablet PC that can run on a 3G network. The blogosphere says we can expect to see an Apple tablet computer in stores by early 2010 — but Esslinger saw it in his mind’s eye decades ago.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lurker_PC” for the heads up.]
That was a lame article IMHO
@ Spark,
Thanks for the insight.
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link error. should link to page 6 not 7 of the full article. LOLz.
cheers!
It said that it was the first mouse.
Absolutely wrong!
The first mice were blocks of wood in a computer lab.
Admittedly, it was the first successful commercial pointing device.
It was the first mouse that was on a commercial product. Nobody cares about its prenatal life in the R&D;lab. That phase doesn’t count.
@ Sir Bill
You’re welcome!
@MacIntosher
The way the brief article was written, this is getting a bunch a people upset that Apple is claiming to have “invented” the mouse. The author did precede the the mouse stuff by stating that the Mac was the first “commercially” version of a GUI computer. Regardless of PARC or other implementations of a mouse or pointing device, it can hardly be argued that before the Mac you could go into a local computer store and buy a GUI based computer with a mouse for personal use. That was certainly the point, and that is irrefutable.
People don’t seem to realise that I said it was “the first successful commercial pointing device” (keyboard arrow keys don’t count). To people who “corrected” me, read it all, but still, well done on clarifying things.
Have a nice day!
Hey Spark, thanks for the chuckle:
“Regardless of PARC or other implementations of a mouse or pointing device, it can hardly be argued that before the Mac you could go into a local computer store and buy a GUI based computer with a mouse for personal use. That was certainly the point, and that is irrefutable.”
Of course one could ask why this was… because there were no mice commercially available or because there were no local computer stores available.
Thanks for the smile.
@Spark
“That was a lame article IMHO”
That was humble, VERY humble indeed.
“The $1.5 million spot featured a blonde woman with a picture of the new Macintosh on her white tank top”
Okay, I’ve seen the ad dozens of times over the years and although I certainly recall all the running and the white tank top, and the running, and the white tank top… and the white tank top… and the white tank top, I can not recall it ever having a picture of the Mac on it.
actually, you could buy a xerox 8010 from your friendly xerox document management salesman back in 1981 ( few years before the mac). wiki link if you are interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
mouse/gui, ethernet/arpanet (internet), laser printer, file/document server, email, and an 8″ floppy. apps for document creation that would still make you drool and could hold its own against most math composition software today. just the workstation would run about $18k (GSA discount). it was basically a client built to showcase the capabilities of a laser printer for document creation. people back in those days didn’t know what a PC was (the star was more of an print station input device), so this never got much credit for being the first, but it was.
The first successful commercial pointing device?
Wasn’t that some caveman’s finger?
“Wasn’t that some caveman’s finger?”
Not if he was pointing at a cavewoman!
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“Commercial device.”
I don’t think the cave man sold any of his fingers.
@Cubert
Not electronic, huh?