Steve Jobs introduces the Mac

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.