It was 30 years ago today that Apple debuted the Macintosh, the iconic and expensive computer that has hugely influenced the personal technology we take for granted today.

Apple had already popularized computing in the late 1970s with the Apple II, but 1981's IBM PC moved the needle from hobbyists to laypeople everywhere. The Mac was Apple's answer to the PC -- and what an answer it was, as InfoWorld's first Macintosh review (on March 26, 1984) showed!

What follows are the key technologies that the Mac brought to everyone, technology that became widely adopted and now forms some of the very essence of personal computing.