Classic (1984–89)

The Mac's founding era begins with the ill-fated Lisa in 1983 and the world-changing Macintosh 128K a year later, the machine that put a graphical interface and a mouse in front of ordinary people for the first time. It's a story told largely in kilobytes: the original 128K's memory was so tight that the 512K 'Fat Mac' released later that same year felt like a different class of computer entirely.

By the end of the decade the Mac had grown up considerably, adding color with the Macintosh II, internal hard drives and expansion slots with the SE, and enough processing power with the SE/30 to earn a reputation as a genuinely capable workstation rather than just a clever interface experiment. Everything that made the Mac recognizable — the desktop metaphor, the menu bar, the Finder — was locked in during these five years.