UPDATE: B. Durbin adds the following fascinating observations:

1. As of yesterday, the Macintosh is old enough to
drink.
2. Steve Jobs is adopted. (I found this out
yesterday.)
3. Steve Jobs is also the most famous American of Arab
extraction. (Likewise yesterday.)

On that third point, it's so obvious when you look at
his picture twenty years ago, that classic "sheikh"
profile. Apparently, his birth sister is a novelist
named Mona Simpson, and his father an "unknown"
Egyptian.

Wow.

UPDATE: The original link stopped working, so it's been mirrored and updated.

UPDATE: And since this is essentially a Mac Birthday celebration, Chris M. has this to say:

I do remember the first time I saw the Mac and read the quote "insanely
great"--if I'm not senile, it was in the big cover story in Byte in
1984. That was the story that sold me then and forever on the Mac.

Here's why: as you know, back then computers had two display
modes--Text Mode and Graphics Mode. Text Mode was driven from firmware
(I think) and it had one font. In fact, the word "font" was then
unknown to most computer users. Graphics Mode, if it existed on one's
computer, was of course a function of the special graphics card one
bought at great expense to run games and such like.

In the Byte article one of the programmers (Burrell Smith? Andy
Hertzfeld?) said something that got my attention for the century.
Something to the effect that the Macintosh didn't have separate modes
for these two forms of data, because everything on the display--text,
graphics, what have you--was ultimately a pattern of pixels and
therefore could be represented by a bitmap. Everything. And once they
realized this, the ability to put different fonts on the screen and
WYSIWYG and programs like MacPaint were just different exploitations of
the same core idea. The same core, liberating idea.

I don't know how others reacted to this, but for me it was as if someone
had turned on a 1000 watt lamp. I was awestruck at the simple elegance
of this idea. From then on, no matter what came afterwards, I didn't
care--I would be a Mac loyalist now and forever. That was it, for me.

To this day, whenever you turn on a Windows machine, the boot up screen
is in Text Mode. And then, if the monitor is a CRT, there's often a
loud click. That's the sound of the circuitry switching to Graphics
Mode. In the year 2005.

And that's the difference between insight and imitation.

How long before PCs abandon the floppy drive, you think? What's the pool up to by now?

And why is it so easy to imagine the Wintel machines of the year 2018 still booting up in text mode?

Backward-compatibility is the PC's great advantage—and the huge ball chained around its ankle. Whereas Steve Jobs thinks nothing of breaking everyone's third-party software with every major OS release just because the engineers have reworked some key library from scratch, Microsoft cannot countenance disrupting the vast infrastructure of computers all across the world—from PCs to servers to embedded point-of-sale kernels—by changing anything. Any attempt to modernize Windows is ultimately hamstrung and converted into a skin-deep simulacrum of the change they'd originally yearned for. They can't afford to do the kinds of ground-level architectural redesigns that are par for the course in the Mac world.

That's why Apple will never replace Microsoft as the dominant platform in all the humdrum installations of the world... but it's also why there will always been a demand for an Apple to exist.