The first ever image on a Mac was Scrooge McDuck on a stack of money. That seems pretty random, so why did it happen? You might guess that an Apple employee was just a huge fan of the character or Disney, and you would be right…partially.
There was an employee that loved Disney character art, and he had been working on slide shows on floppy discs at the time when the first Mac was more concept than computer. He wasn't the one that brought up the first image, though. Instead, the person who first tested the graphics, Andy Hertzfeld, needed something to test it with and that disc just happened to by lying around.
It was a bit of a gamble to get Mr. McDuck up there. When working late to try out the graphics, Hertzfeld noticed that the machine didn't have a disc controller in it, meaning it wouldn't read the floppy. He couldn't turn it off and restart with the part added because he didn't know how to get the Mac to work, and the one man who did was already home.
One man who was there was Cliff Hudson. He saw what Hertzfel was struggling with and came over to help. He said that you could just insert the disc controller without messing up the machines as long as you did it the right way. With one swift move, he inserted it, and soon after came Scrooge McDuck with the title of first image on a Mac.
