Mercury News Makes Apple Sunday's Front Page Story

I tis interesting to watch the promenade of Mac history articles bob through news sites like those huge balloons in a Thanksgiving Day parade; all are variations of the same theme and cover similar topics; Steve Jobs as the visionary/innovator, the introduction of the Mac as a watershed event, and Appleis seemingly tireless pursuit of computing excellence and innovation. Each article takes a different tack, however, on how that information is presented; thus, after reading several, a complete picture of the Macis history, with all the gory details, emerge.

The San Jose Mercury News has posted a 20th Anniversary Mac article that takes a different tack. It talks briefly around some of Appleis CEOis, not just Steve Jobs, who steered the Mac to where it is today. Men like John Sculley and Gil Amelio, who, in their own way added a certain distinction to Apple and the Mac. Perhaps more interesting, the article was the lead story in Sundayis edition of the Mercury News. Hereis a bit of the article titled, The Mac that roared:

It changed computing as we knew it.

Twenty years ago, Apple Computer heaved a sledgehammer into the face of the establishment with its revolutionary Macintosh.

It gave birth to our culture of pointing and clicking, desktop icons, and dragging files to the trash. Later the Mac would bring CD drives, candy-colored cases and wireless networking.

But when it first said hello in 1984, it was as if all of Silicon Valleyis technical brilliance and all of its verve had been captured in one plucky beige box.

"It opened the door to people using computers," said Chuck Colby, a local engineer who has created custom computer systems since the early days. "When the Mac came out, here all of a sudden youive got this really powerful machine that you could do everything with -- word processing, drawings, things that people had no way of doing before at that price."

Two decades after Appleis famous Super Bowl ad announced the new computer, the Macis innovative influence has reached far beyond Silicon Valley. More important, it has continually dared its rivals to make computers not just faster, but also better -- easier for real people to use.

Although Macs now have only about 3 percent of the worldwide computer market, todayis Microsoft-based computers look more like Macs than they resemble the old IBM PCs -- and the Mac is still the only computer the world knows on a first-name basis.

The article goes on to discuss how key people brought the Mac to life and kept it alive. We recommend that you stop by the Mercury News and read the full article.