Apple Macintosh 128K  
Written by AnubisTTP on 2024-02-10  

Description

The Macintosh 128k, released in 1984, was the first device in Apple's line of 'Macintosh' personal computer products.The Macintosh 128k is widely considered to be the first commercially successful personal computer with a graphical user interface... most competing machines of the time were controlled by text commands. The heart of the machine was a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 7.8MHz, which was connected to 128k of onboard RAM. Unfortunately, despite being very easy to use, the Macintosh 128K was pretty terrible at preforming normal computer functions. The lack of an internal hard drive, combined with only a single floppy drive that required an operating system disk at boot, left no room to store applications. 128k of memory was far to small for a machine expected to display full screen graphics with no mass storage, and frequent disk swapping was the norm for the Macintosh user. Despite these limitations the Macintosh 128k sold well, selling 70,000 units within it's first 6 months of production.

Apple alleviated the Macintosh's RAM and drive problem somewhat by releasing an upgraded version of the Macintosh with more RAM, the Macintosh 512K, less than a year later, but the Macintosh would not become a truly useful device until the release of the Macintosh Plus in 1986. The Macintosh Plus included a SCSI port, which allowed for the use of hard disk storage the Macintosh desperately needed.

More

Apple Macintosh 128K Computer
Apple Macintosh 128K, normal operation.

 Return to Digital Computers

©2000-2024 Industrial Alchemy. All rights reserved. | Switch to mobile version | Contact |