During the 1970s the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was an amazingly productive think-tank which conceptualized and created much of the technology that we are familiar with today. Things like the laser printer, for instance, originated at PARC. The Graphical User Interface was also first developed there.

In the early 1980s both Apple and Microsoft toured PARC and were inspired by the GUI technology they saw there. Xerox had produced the Alto and later the Star GUI based computers with little market success. Microsoft borrowed heavily from PARC to create the first version of Windows which was released to the general public late in 1983. Apple entered the GUI marketplace early in the same year with the original Apple Lisa.

A competing development project at Apple produced the Macintosh which shared many Lisa attributes but which was, in the end, a completely different machine. The Macintosh was a "people's computer" designed to be inexpensive and easy to use.

Ultimately the concepts that the Macintosh brought to market took hold and brought a new era in computing, as envisions by PARC, to reality.

The Macintosh in my collection is, hopefully, merely a placeholder machine. It is complete but non-functional - it boots to a "sad Mac" screen. It is also cursed with a security lock that has trapped the broken parts inside until I can figure out how to remove it without doing significant damage to the machine.

The logo says "Macintosh" which means that this is an original machine and not the later Macintosh 128.