by Jason Snell
We don’t fully understand the 1984 Mac
Another great Mac at 40 overview from my ol’ PC World counterpart Harry McCracken at Fast Company:
Even if everyone knows the 1984 Mac was a big deal, that doesn’t mean we fully understand it. I’m still gaining new appreciation for all the ways it mattered, despite following its progress from the start and being a Mac user—off and on—since 1987….
The most celebrated part of that original Mac was its software interface, which brimmed with new ideas, despite the lazy conventional wisdom that it merely imitated work done at Xerox’s PARC lab. But at the moment, I’m most fascinated by its industrial design. That petite all-in-one beige case, created by Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama, was unlike anything anyone had seen until then—at least outside of a kitchen. Jobs is said to have latched on to the Cuisinart food processor as design inspiration.
Harry’s also right about the classic Mac being both iconic and not particularly influential from a hardware standpoint. That classic Mac silhouette wasn’t really knocked off by competitors and only lasted in the Mac line for about a decade.