The graphical user interface in a 1984 Macintosh was pretty impressive, considering Microsoft Windows wasn’t even out yet, and computers were basically command-line interfaces at this time. So having a graphical desktop environment was pretty remarkable.
The graphical interface in a 1984 Macintosh is black and white, and runs at 512 x 384 resolution — it was designed for a Mac with an 8 MHz Motorola 68K processor and 128 kB of RAM. It has the menu bar — this is something that has been in every version of the Mac OS, even today. That hasn’t changed. The Apple menus go to the far left, and the commands go towards the right.
Another thing that we’re used to now is the desktop — this was the metaphor for an actual desktop in your office where you may have pieces of paper or a folder with documents inside of it. This was the metaphor used back in the day, and it’s just so common nowadays that we don’t even think about it. To navigate files and organize everything, we had the Finder — something we still use today in the Mac OS. But the system, much like the first iPhone in 2007, didn’t have multitasking.
The Macintosh file system didn’t have a hierarchy. In fact, everything was stored in a single file, but the illusion was that we had sub-folders that we could drill into. The Finder helps us to ignore the fact that everything was basically on one level. There was no hierarchy of directories or folders, or anything else in the filing system. It was all in one plain. Today we don’t have to worry about those file system restrictions because we have NTFS or HFS + (the H stands for hierarchical), so those modern technologies allow the system to have sub-folders and sub-directories.
Another thing we take for granted today is fonts. The Macintosh was one of the systems that started pioneering fonts. Now we can choose different fonts in every computer.
