January 24th marked the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer, originally released in 1984. Looking at the bulky box, it’s hard to believe that we’ve come so far in so little time! 30 years ago, computers displayed in black and white, ran programs from floppy disks, and were mainly used by the average person to play games and write documents – now touch screens, complex graphics, and fast multitasking are all expected in our everyday devices, and our phones have more storage than the biggest disks back then.

I’m a sucker for tech history, so it was a real treat for me to get to play on an original Macintosh computer! I was especially amazed to see Microsoft Word 1.00, the original, pre-office suite.

My favourite program to play with was Paint. As an avid Photoshop user, it’s amazing to see how different the image processors of old were. All my photos are edited in Photoshop nowadays (the Photoshop Express app for Windows 8 is amazing), and I thought I’d make a little custom “graphic” for the blog on Paint 1984.

I wonder how many years it’ll take before people are looking at our modern laptops and remarking about how archaic they are! What developments will we have in the next 30 years?