20 years of Macintosh
Twenty years ago today, on Jan. 24, 1984, Apple introduced the first Macintosh. Let’s look back at the first Mac and how it evolved.
I bought my first Macintosh, an original 128k (it was simply called “Macintosh”, not “Macintosh 128k”), serial number F4040USM001 in Feburary 1984. By today’s standards, it was a primitive machine, with only 128k of RAM, no hard drive, a built in 400k floppy drive, a tiny black & white screen, and a blazing fast 8 MHz 68000 processor. At that time, most systems had 64k of RAM and a 4 MHz or slower processor.
The only non-Apple software available on the first day was Microsoft Basic & Multiplan (an early spreadsheet). In those days, a Lisa was needed to develop software, and the only language available was Pascal. Microsoft Basic couldn’t produce stand-alone applications and didn’t allow any access to the Mac toolbox. The first language that could actually produce true Macintosh applications was MacFORTH. Eventually Apple’s Macintosh Development System (MDS) assembler and Consulair C became available, which made it possible to build full stand-alone applications on the Macintosh itself.
An external floppy was a rare luxury and a few companies like Tecmar even made hard drives that connected to the serial port. Finally GCC introduced the HyperDrive, an internal 10M hard drive (followed by the HyperDrive 20). The HyperDrive had to be installed by a dealer, since the original Mac couldn’t easily be opened by users and had no internal expansion capabilities.
Finally, Apple introduced the 512K Macintosh the following year and several memory upgrades were available for the original Macintosh. The Mac Plus was a huge improvement, with 1M of RAM, an 800K floppy drive, and a SCSI port whcih made it easy to connect an external hard drive. However, it still used the same 8 MHz processor.
The Mac II was the first expandable Macintosh, the first one that supported color, and the first one which used a faster processor, a 16 MHz 68020.
Finally, Apple put it all together with the SE/30, one of the most popular Macs ever, which combined a 16 MHz 68030 CPU with an internal hard drive & expansion slot in the convenient all-in-one design of the original Mac. It sold for the same $2600 the original Mac sold for, which gave it the best performance for the price of any Mac up to that time.
System 7 was the first major overhaul of the original Macintosh OS. For the first time, multitasking was supported and many new system services were introduced which made it possible to write much more powerful applications that cooperated with each other and shared data.
Today, even a basic G5 system sells for less the price of the original Mac and is many times faster, yet it still retains the essential Macintosh personality.
October 23rd, 2004 at 9:08 pm
ive own macintosh’s since i wus 10 now im 13 years old my first ever mac was a 5260/120