January 24, 1984: Hello

Apple is defined by a secondary project, one that Steve Jobs wanted to kill and later demanded to control. The project is, of course, the original Mac. There isn't much that hasn't been said about the original incarnation of the Macintosh; the machine has been called revolutionary and the OS is the basis of nearly all-modern operating systems. But the original Macintosh was nothing like the computer envisioned at the product’s inception.

The Mac was the brainchild of Jef Raskin, who originally wanted to bring computing to the masses at under $1000. That proved unworkable, Raskin left the project, and the price ballooned to $1999. John Sculley stepped in as Apple CEO. He felt the Mac needed a serious media push and, in an effort to pay for it, pushed the price to $2495.

The cost of the Mac was a huge blow to the programmers who worked on the computer and it hampered acceptance of the machine. Not that they didn't try to hold the cost down. Steve Jobs negotiated the price for the Motorola 68000 down to $9 per chip. High price and low power aside, January 24, 1984 was the day Apple introduced the computer that changed everything. Yet it didn't change Apple's penchant for pricing their computers in the stratosphere.