Three decades ago, in an auditorium in California, Steve Jobs unveiled what was set to revolutionise home computing.
The Macintosh computer had a 9-inch screen, used floppy disks and was powered by a 32-bit processor and 128KB RAM - all for $2,495.
It replaced the need to type in commands with point-and-click menus, introduced drag and drop and launched the type of graphical user interface seen across PCs, phones, and tablets around the world today.
The first Mac also featured a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, at a time when a 5.25-inches was the standard.
The Mac used the smaller drive for practical reasons, as the larger floppies weren't reliable.
By comparison, the iPad has a 9.7-inch screen and the current Mac Pro starts at 12BG of memory - more than 90,000 times as much as the 1984 model.
To celebrate the event, Apple has created a Mac 30 mini site.
The concepts seen in the original Macintosh are so fundamental today, it's hard to imagine a time when they existed only in research labs - primarily Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and his team got much of their inspiration from PARC, which they visited while designing the Mac.
The Mac has had ‘incredible influence on pretty much everybody's lives all over the world since computers are now so ubiquitous,’ said Brad Myers, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute.
‘Pretty much all consumer electronics are adopting all of the same kinds of interactions.’
Apple didn't invent these tools, nor was the Mac the first to use them. Xerox sold its own mouse-based Star computer, and Apple's Lisa beat the Mac by months, but they were relative flops with consumers.
Instead, the Mac prevailed and its success was attributed to the fact Apple engineers took the ideas from these earlier models and made them more user-friendly.
In particular, Xerox used a three-button mouse in its Alto prototype computer, whereas Apple settled on one - allowing people to keep their eyes on the screen without worrying about which button to press.
Its price was also a factor, and the Mac was four times cheaper than the Lisa.
Apple insisted on uniformity, so copying and pasting text and deleting files would work the same way from one application to another. That reduced the time it would take to learn a new program.
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The Mac, pictured, featured a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive - at a time when a 5.25-inches were standard
Apple also put a premium on design. For example, early Macs showed a happy face when they started up and icons and windows had rounded corners.
Such details made computers appear friendlier and easier to use - at least subconsciously - to the user, Myers said.
One of the first applications enabled by the Mac's interface was desktop publishing.
Early computers generated text the way a typewriter would - character by character, one line at a time. Users had a limited number of characters, with no variation in appearance.
The Mac was one of the first to approach displays like a TV - text gets incorporated into a graphic that the computer projects on the screen pixel by pixel.
Initially, many people 'thought it was a waste of time and a gimmick,' explained Dag Spicer, senior curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
He said long-time computer users already knew how to perform computing tasks 'very efficiently with just two or three keystrokes. It might have been more efficient for them than to use a mouse.'
Tim Bajarin, a Creative Strategies analyst who has followed Apple for more than three decades, said he was baffled, yet intrigued when he saw the Mac's unveiling at an Apple shareholders meeting in 1984.
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In 1998, Apple unveiled the iMac, pictured. PCs at the time were typically housed in uniform, beige boxes. The first iMacs looked more like TVs and came in a variety of colors over the years
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In July 2000 Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's 8-inch cube computer the Power Macintosh G4, pictured, during his keynote address at MacWorld Expo in New York. The Power Mac G4 Cube was praised for its design, even though it didn't sell well.
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Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, pictured, unveiled the latest Mac Pro in San Francisco last year. It has 90,000 times more RAM than the original Macintosh
In fact, despite its radical interface, sales were lukewarm. For years, it was mostly a niche product for publishers, educators and graphics artists.
Now the world's most valuable company, Apple nearly died in the 1990s as its market share dwindled.
After a 12-year absence from Apple, Steve Jobs returned in 1997 to head the company.
A year later, he introduced the iMac, a desktop computer with shapes and colours that departed from beige Windows boxes at the time.
Then came the iPod music player in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad tablet in 2010.
In recent years, PCs have declined as consumers turn to mobile devices.
Apple sold 16 million Macs in the year ending 28 September, down 10 per cent from a year earlier. By contrast, iPhones sales grew 20 per cent to 150 million and iPads by 22 per cent to 71 million.
The Mac has aged to the point that it's starting to draw inspiration from iPhones and iPads. Several Mac apps have been refined to look and work more like mobile versions.
Macs now have notifications and other features born on mobile devices. Windows computers, meanwhile, now emphasise tablets' touch-base interfaces.
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