Fit at 40: Steve Jobs' revolutionary Apple Mac in numbers

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Forty years ago Steve Jobs revolutionised personal computing by launching the Apple Macintosh, the first PC with a user-friendly mouse and graphical interface that helped the machines enter the everyday lives of people for the first time.

Jobs, playing the showman inventor to perfection in a black suit and silver bow tie, opened a zipper bag in an auditorium in Cupertino, California, on January 24, 1984, and lifted out a lightweight computer that not only operated at the click of a button but also, thrillingly, talked.

Here is a look back at Apple's revolutionary machine in numbers.

- One minute -

It all began two days before the official launch, at halftime during the Super Bowl, with a mysterious TV teaser advert.

The haunting clip shot by "Blade Runner" director Ridley Scott evokes a dystopian world in the style predicted by George Orwell in his classic novel, "1984".

Though no names were mentioned, the all-powerful "Big Brother" in the clip was a swipe at IBM, which dominated the market at the time.

The Mac was represented by an athlete, shown hurling a sledgehammer at that totalitarian future.

Apple paid a whopping $800,000 ($2.5 million in today's money) to air the one-minute ad, seen by 77.6 million TV viewers, according to ratings specialist Nielsen.

But it achieved its aim of creating huge hype around the launch.

- 128K -

The first Mac came with 128 kilobytes of memory space, one million times less than top-of-the-line MacBooks today.

At the outset, a lack of memory was a common problem with PCs. Within a year Apple had replaced the 128K version with the "Fat Mac" with 512K, offering four times the space.

- 7.5 kilos -

The machine's weight, which Jobs boasted at the launch its owners could carry on a plane, was much lighter than the competing IBM model of 11.3 kg (25 pounds).

Both offered a floppy disk drive, but only the compact Mac was all-in-one.

Today's laptops are featherweights in comparison, with the latest MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros all weighing in at under 2