Visit any museum piece by clicking on its picture below.   In This Exhibit: Intro:  Mac development and what made it special.          Our Apple II disk drive         Our vintageApple II plus           Our Apple Macintosh hard drive          Pixel Planes prototype         Return to the Main Hall of the museum.

GALLERY IV Apple and the GUI Revolution QUIZ: By 1972 there was a handheld calculator with a microprocessor inside, so where were the computers? ANSWER:  Computers at this point were getting closer and closer to the machines we know today, but they were used almost exclusively in offices and labs. It's the emphasis on making computers easy to understand and use that made the Apple computers famous and paved the way for computers to be accesible to lots of people in their homes.   Make computers user-friendly!!     Enter the Apple Macintosh.  Photo by Tom Carlson.     Although there was a microcomputer marketed in 1975 as a "personal computer," it looked like this:  this Altair 8800 is part of the collection at System Source Those switches and lights on the front of the Altair were the only way to program it, which was pretty typical of computers at the time.  Computers of the early 1970's  were like the abacus in that using them took a lot of interpretation, so an expert could make calculations quickly while the average joe couldn't even read the answer.  The keyboard and monitor, which seem like basic parts of a computer today, weren't included until a year later when the two-man Apple Computer Company built their Apple I.  But even the Apple required buyers to add these things themselves once the computer was purchased!      In January of 1984 the first Apple Macintosh was introduced, finally taking the leap forward into the realm of GUIs, or graphical user interfaces. This is a  computer in the form we recognize today, with a keyboard, built-in monitor, and mouse!  Computers that support GUIs communicate with the user through pictures, rather than typed commands.  Now, a computer user can enter a command by pointing the cursor at a picture (or "icon") on the screen and "clicking" on it.  Machines of the late 1970's still required users to have some computer programming skills, so people without those skills could have trouble using computers for many things.  But pictures are easy to understand, and make computers accessible to everyone no matter how much -or how little- they know about programming.  Photo by Tom Carlson @ the Obsolete Computer Museum   Click on the door to visit the artifacts in this exhibit !