The Macintosh’s (now better known as Macs) are a line of Personal Computers from Apple Inc. (formally Apple Computer Inc.). The first Macintosh computer was launched in January 1984. It was the first commercially successful personal computer to use a Graphical User Interface and mouse rather then simply being Command-line. The project for the Macintosh computer started in the late 70s by an Apple employee named Jef Raskin. He had envisioned making an easy-to-use, low-cost computer that could be afforded by the average consumer. The name Macintosh came about because he had wanted to name the computer after his favourite apple the McIntosh, however due to legal reasons the spelling had to be changed. The first Macintosh board built in the design process contained 64 Kilobytes of RAM using the 5 Megahertz Motorola 6809E microprocessor, capable of a 256x256 pixel black-and-white bitmap display. The design caught the attention of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who realised that the Macintosh was far more marketable then the Apple Lisa. Jef Raskin left the project in 1981 and the final design is said to more closely resembles that of Jobs. After years of decline in the 1990s the Macintosh’s would regain much of its notoriety in 1998 with the launch of the multi-coloured egg-shaped all-in-one iMac line (also the Macintoshs would officially use the shortened title of Mac) and then latter in 2001 with release of the new Mac OS X operating System, which was and still is a highly advanced and state of the art operating system. It is thanks mainly to this that the Macintosh computers have once again become highly popular, a first quarter 2008 report stated that Apple now has a 14% share of the personal computer market in the US and 66% of all computers over $1000.

Ref: wikipedia.org