Last week, many people through the Web celebrated the 25th birthday of the personal computing revolution with the introduction of the first Macintosh by Steve Jobs.
I watched a countless number of times this famous introduction by Master Steve: great introduction speech, grandiose "something-special-is-happening" music from Vangelis and crowded room applauding like in rock concerts.

Digging inside the gazillions of reports and history look-trough, two facts stroke me:

1) Many's been happening in the computer

Comparing original and state of the art desktop Macs is a wonderful demonstration of the forces induced by Moore's law that brought endless improvements on the internals of the computer.

comparing_Macs.JPG

Basically every important one in the computer has been gigantically improved for half the price! No other industries have ever been able to maintain over a so long period a systematic skill to improve a concept. Thumbs up!!!

2) Few's been changing between the computer and us.

The Macintosh was finally bringing to mainstream the revolutionary GUI and mouse invented in the late 60s and 70s by brilliant minds mainly in Xerox's PARC.
Comparing original and state of the art desktop Mac's UI

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Basically nothing's been changing!! Same old "it's on a desk" metaphor, same annoying process to save, name and classify in a tree, that's forcing us to think about one the computer should be able to do alone, same way to go to the content...

3) Computer will have to change outside while keeping on changing inside

Following the looking backward, most of people are looking forward for the next 25 years.
For me,
The Mac that has already shrinked to the pocket with iPhone will continue this trend beyond wearable computing.
The Mac interface, as illustrated by the iPhone or by the new Palm's webOS, will have to go beyond 30 year-old "manipulating files on a desktop with a mouse" world.
That's the biggest challenge and I hope a soon-to-come MacBook Touch to show the way forward in the coming months.