Here’s a wonderful bit of nostalgia: Steve Jobs (wearing a tux!) introducing the original Mac in 1984. Boasting a 68000 processor that “eats 8088s for breakfast” and two serial ports, the original Mac also had a 3-1/4″ disc drive, all for the low, low price of $2,495.

What’s really fun is hearing Steve boast about the graphics of the 9″ screen, which really was revolutionary for the time not only for the sharpness, but also for the WYSIWYG interface. Those of you who grew up with the GUI interface may not realize that what you saw on your screen back then was often very different from what came out in your printer. If you were word processing, for example, bold text might be indicated on the screen by being in a different color than the rest of the text, and italics would be highlighted.

But as we get ready for a new generation of laptops, one of which will probably have more processing power than 100 original Macs combined, let’s sit back and drink in what used to be the most cutting edge computer that (a lot of) money could buy.

Video after the break.

Every couple of years, I take out my old Macintosh Plus to boot it up and play with it. It is, quite frankly, amazing how many things are exactly the same in OS X today as they were in System 6. For instance, I couldn’t find an OS X Finder keyboard shortcut that didn’t work in System 6, barring of course, those that pertain to technologies no availble in the mid-80s. I just realized that it is amazing that this computer is now 22 years old, and still works. Sadly, it is on it’s last legs. The CRT is going and the floppy drive no longer works.

In this video, you will see a Macintosh Plus with these following specs:

System 6.0.4, Finder 6.1.41 MB RAM30 MB External Hard Drive

You will see it run Shufflepuck Cafe, Control Panel, and Microsoft Word, as well as some of it’s desktop applications like Calculator. Also keep your eye out for the error dialogues that I get. Notice how human the errors are. Its apologizes to me for not finding a file. This is a truly intuitive computer.

Video after the jump.

Not many of us remember the original Macintosh, which was launched way back in 1984 (although you might’ve seen that legendary superbowl commercial). It was one of the first computers which used a graphical user interface and a mouse, compared to the command-line interface that was commonplace back then. Peter Merholz recently managed to purchase more »