Apple’s Mac turns 30 today: How Steve Jobs used the chance to change the world

Thirty years ago this Friday, at approximately 9:45am on Tuesday, 24 January, 1984, the Macintosh introduced itself after Steve Jobs unveiled it at an Apple shareholders' meeting in Cupertino's Flint Center for the Performing Arts.

"Hello. I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag," the odd-looking 16.5-pound box said in its robotic text-to-speech voice, based on the Apple II's Software Automatic Mouth, the precursor to MacInTalk.

History is made of such moments – identifiable points in time before which something wasn't, and after which something was, reports The Register.

On the afternoon of Sunday, 20 March, 1983, Jobs famously said to then–PepsiCo headman John Scully, "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" In one moment, Apple changed direction – as did not only the future of the Mac but also the career of Steve Jobs.

A few months later came another pivotal moment: at 10pm on an August Sunday, Mac programmer Steve Capps hoisted a pirate flag painted by Mac icon-designerSusan Kare onto the roof of the Bandley 3 building on Apple's Cupertino campus.

Before that night-time roof raid, the Macintosh division was essentially indistinguishable from other Apple workgroups in an increasingly bureaucratic company, one that was struggling to deliver on its commitment to the costly Apple Lisa and its game-changing GUI, the Mac's precursor. After the Jolly Roger flew, however, it was clear to all onlookers that the team was guided by one of Jobs' maxims: "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy."