Anticipating the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh — unveiled by Apple (AAPL) in a Super Bowl ad on Jan. 24, 1984 — AAPLinvestors has assembled some choice quotes from the first wave of critical reviews.

Below, a sample from their collection, to which we’ve added a few of our own (from Owen W. Linzmayer’s Apple Confidential 2.0).

Our favorite: John Dvorak’s blistering critique of that newfangled pointing device called a “mouse.”

Byte, Gregg Williams, February 1984

The Macintosh brings us one step closer to the ideal of computer as appliance.

Creative Computing, John Anderson, July 1984

In its current form, the Macintosh is the distilled embodiment of a promise: the software can be intuitively easy to use, while remaining just as powerful as anything else around. It is now time to lay out the “bads”:

• The Macintosh does not have enough RAM.

• Single microfloppy is slow and inadequate.

• There are no internal expansion slots or external expansion buses.

• MacWrite has some severe limitations.

• The system is monochrome only.

• MS-DOS compatibility is ruled out.

• The Mac