On January 24, 1984, Apple Computer Inc. (now Apple Inc.) introduced the Macintosh personal computer, with the Macintosh 128K mode. The Macintosh is often credited with popularizing the graphical user interface. Steve Jobs and several other Macintosh team members had previewed. Apple made a bold move, thinking different long before it became an ad slogan. And the rest, as they say, is history, a history Low End Mac examines in a series of articles, each covering one year in the life of the Macintosh.

The Macintosh project started in the late 1970s with Jef Raskin. The Macintosh project started in the late 1970s with Jef Raskin. Smith's first Macintosh board was built to Raskin's design specifications: it had 64 kilobytes (kB) of RAM, used the Motorola 6809E microprocessor. Raskin finally left the Macintosh project in 1981 over a personality conflict with Jobs, and team member Andy Hertzfeld said that the final Macintosh design is closer to Jobs' ideas than Raskin's. Apple improved Macintosh computers by introducing models equipped with newly available processors from the 68k lineup.