Apple has its share of critics, some more legitimate than others. But none can deny its impact on consumer computing long before it brought us the i-Products. Steve Jobs always envisioned a truly “personal” computer, accessible to the average user, and that required an interface built around not textual commands, but a visual desktop where users could interact with aspects of the machine represented by icons. In other words, the world’s first graphical user interface.

On this day, January 24, 1984 Apple debuted its revolutionary Macintosh, the first computer ever to feature a GUI. Complete with Adobe systems’ newest acquisition Aldus Pagemaker, it enabled users to create and print documents on their machine for the first time.

True to their visionary form, Apple introduced the Mac in a now-iconic Superbowl television commercial directed by Ridley Scott. In it, a lithe, athletic blond woman hurls a mallet at a screen in front of a mesmerized crowd, a reference to George Orwell’s novel 1984. The stern face on the screen, evoking Orwell’s Big Brother character, talks about a “unification of thoughts,” variously interpreted to represent conventional thinking about computers, or Apple’s then-rival IBM.