Mac at 30: how the PC transformed office life

It was 1984 when Steve Jobs released the Apple Mac into the world. Little did we know at the time it would turn out to be the first incarnation of an item that would go on to change our lives at work and at play.

Long before that, typewriters first came into the lives of our ancestors back in the 1860s, and they quickly became the must-have item for businesses and professional writers. They weren’t used at that time for personal correspondence, and for more than a century, the hand written letter remained king. The electric typewriter was first produced at the turn of the 20th century, though it wasn’t until the 1970s that these were commonplace. By the 90s, most businesses had switched to PCs, and individuals were starting to come round to the idea of using them in their personal lives, not least for gaming. Email came later, followed by music downloads and social media. The manual typewriter officially died in 2011, when the final factory that produced them – in Mumbai, India – finally shut up shop, and one feels that the end of its electric counterpart can’t be too far away.

When the Apple Macintosh started life, it was amid murmurings that it was just a toy, and many believed that the notion of a personal computer was just unnecessary, and one that would never catch on. But the PC - of which, the Mac was the first aimed at a mass market – has transformed the way we do business, consume media, and, well, do pretty much everything else. It’s now hard to imagine life without these bundles of technology, such is the extent to which we rely on them.

I was watching an old Bond film the other day, and as James and Miss Moneypenny were exchanging pleasantries in her immaculate office, I caught myself thinking about the latter’s filing system. I mean, the days without computers must have been full of paper records, and such a place where they were stored would be full to bursting. If only Miss M had a hard drive to store in on; just think of the space she’d save. Yes, I really was thinking that. Sad, isn’t it?

Sometimes, though, a lot of us pine for the good old days, when we didn’t have to worry about computers going wrong all the time. You can’t go wrong with a pen and a piece of paper. But in many ways it has simplified our life, allowing us to store more documents more effectively. Things are easier to find, and you can back up important files multiple times so they’re never lost.

From an employee point of view, it can be tiring and even monotonous to stare at a computer screen all day, but employers wouldn’t have it any other way. In the US, worker productivity increased at between 1% and 1.5% every year between the 70s and the 90s. Since the mid 90s, that rate has shot up to 2.9%. Similar figures can be applied to British workers.

So we’re getting more done, and though a lot of technology can be complicated, it is making a lot of our tasks easier. But how things have changed. 30 years ago, could you have imagined a world where we’d be able to tap away on our touchscreen tablets and PCs and bring up any documents from our files in seconds? That once fanciful idea has become a reality, and it all started with the Mac.