One January day not all that long ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs stepped on stage and introduced a new product to the applause of 3,000 people in attendance. If you’re thinking about the iPhone, think again: Monday marks the 27th birthday of the Macintosh.

TUAW is reporting that January 24 marks another anniversary for the Macintosh, which debuted 27 years ago, in 1984. Introduced as simply the Apple Macintosh, the diminutive personal computer set the stage for nearly 30 years of innovation from Cupertino, all leading up to today’s wildly successful mobile products.

“The original Apple Macintosh was the first personal computer to be powered by the Mac operating system, then lovingly called System 1.0,” TUAW reports. “The all-in-one beige case included a nine-inch greyscale monitor, a convenient handle and an accompanying keyboard and mouse. It also featured a 8MHz processor with 128KB DRAM, 16-bit data bus and non-upgradeable internal components.”

With a price tag of $2,495, the original Macintosh shows us just how far technology has come -- a base model Mac Pro currently sells for the same money, featuring a 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor with 3GB of memory.

For those of you too young to remember the debut of the Macintosh, we’ve embedded a five-minute YouTube clip of the event below -- but don’t be too surprised by what Steve Jobs is wearing, since the mock black turtleneck look hadn’t quite arrived yet.

Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter

(Image courtesy of BirthdayPartyBabble.com, Video courtesy of YouTube)