It happened 20 years ago today - Apple introduced the first Macintosh computer! In many ways, it was to operating systems what the PC was to computers: The start of something that would change the world forever... The Personal Computer (PC) had been around for several years, but was still far too complicated for most people to use easily... With the Macintosh, Apple introduced a simple icon-base user interface and (believe it or not) the mouse - the first time these two things were part of a computer generally available to the public... In fact, many newspaper stories at the time had to include a definition! The The San Jose Mercury News, for example, described the mouse as "a handheld device that, when slid across a table top, moves the cursor on the Mac's screen."

And it went from there - The Macintosh was the first platform to introduce many of the user interface and operating system features which we now take for granted... And much like the PC, once people saw that it could be done, and that people liked it, everyone started doing it...

So why is the company still stuck with, as Bill Howard from PC Magazine wrote in a column last August, a "market share three points away from being a rounding error"? There may be many reasons: the computers are more expensive than PCs, the performance has not matched PCs for many years, Apple refusal to let other manufacturers use the OS, etc... Regardless, this is one case where the tail wags the dog - almost all of the things Apple has pioneered to make using the computer easier has made its way into PCs everywhere...

So happy birthday Mac!