The Macintosh turned 21 yesterday, and thanks to some archived video now available online, you can revisit Steve Jobs’s original introduction of the Macintosh. The applause of the crowd when the word “Macintosh” first scrolls onscreen is a reminder of what a revolution it was to have bitmapped text and graphics on a consumer-grade computer. (The price of that consumer-grade computer? $2495, in 1984 dollars.)

Back in my pre-law-school days, I actually sold a few of these early Macs — always with an extra disk drive (about $500, or so I recall), if the customer could afford it, to avoid that pesky disk swapping. (I later made a living selling and supporting later Macs and Laserwriters as desktop publishing systems.) My artistically inclined girlfriend of the time decided pretty quickly she wanted to buy a Mac because it was the first computer she could enjoy doodling on. Even though I’d learned and used a bunch of other computers before I sat down at a Mac, the Mac was the first computer whose design I learned to love.

There are two must-read accounts of the early Mac — Steven Levy’s INSANELY GREAT, and Andy Hertzfeld’s new REVOLUTION IN THE VALLEY. Both books argue persuasively that, in some real sense, every personal computer we use nowadays functions a lot like that original Macintosh.

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