You may not realize it, but Apple Computer is celebrating its 30th birthday. The company that brought the graphical user interface to the desktop was founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It’s interesting to go back in time and see what Time magazine had to say about Apple in 1976.
I must say that Apple had a tremendous impact on my use of computers. During my four years of undergraduate work at Ohio State University, I started with punched cards and graduated to an Apple Macintosh. I remember my amazement when the first seeing the graphical user interface on the Mac. It was such a groundbreaking change, that it really opened the marketplace to consumers. I recall going with my brother in the early 1980s to buy one of the first Macs with its fantastic Imagewriter printer (in fact, I still have a Mac LC II in my basement). While the marketplace, technology, and Microsoft eventually overtook the Mac’s dominance, I really can’t think of any computer technology in the last 20 years (including the Internet) that had this type of tide-changing impact.