CNN iReport

Golden, Colo (iReport) - On January 24, 2009 Apple Computer celebrated the 25th anniversay of the Macintosh computer. The Macintosh followed the path of Apple's popular Apple 1 and Apple 2 computers. The difference with the Macintosh was it's graphical user interface (GUI) which made computing faster and easier that it had been to that point.

The Macintosh GUI was based on research carried out at the Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (called Xerox PARC). The Xerox Information system 8010 (better known as the Star) had pioneered many aspects of modern computing including the GUI, the mouse and networking.

When Apple introduced the Macintosh to the world in a legendary television ad on Superbowl Sunday (the ad played only once but made history just the same) they changed the course of modern computing.

While many don't remember, Microsoft was selling a system at the time based on the command line interface. Their disk operation system (DOS) was difficult to use and required users to memorize thousands of commands to accomplish even simple tasks. In response to the Macintosh and its GUI interface Microsoft started a campaign of derision, telling people that no serious computer user would ever want to use a GUI.  They did this until they were able to copy the look and  feel of the Macintosh interface and release it as Windows.

The first week the Macintosh was available I bought one. The system cost about $3500 and included an all-in-one computer box that contained 128K or random access memory (RAM) and a 400K disk drive. Having already used command line systems I was thrilled by the ease of use and elegance of the original Macintosh. In response to the call for "my first Macintosh" stories in iReport I pulled out the computer, hooked it up and started using it again. While the Macintosh OS has gone through many revisions in those years, the computer is very similar in use the the current generation of Macintoshes. Also, the file structures are amazingly compatible. I was able to word process a document using the original MacWrite software and copy it to my current MacBook PRO which opened and read it with no problems. Try that with some of your 20 year old Microsoft files.

As we hit the quarter century mark in Macintosh computing and Apple's share of the market has finally started to grow, we salute Wozniak and Jobs, two computing pioneers who will go down in history as the visionaries who brought computing out of the corporate world and made is possible for ordinary people to own and use computers at home.