6 ms·
Macintosh 128K: Technical Specifications
- smcl 13y agoThat's sort of impressive that MacOS supported the original mac up to MacOS\System 7 (released 1997 - a full 13 years later)
- praseodym 13y agoNot quite: it supported System 7.0.1P, which was released in March 1992 [1]. That's 8 years; still pretty impressive. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#Version_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#Version_history
- smcl 13y agoOh my mistake, I read the wrong version dates from that very wikipedia page. But yes you are correct, that is still pretty impressive
- nine_k 13y agoAlso "support discontinued in 1998", more than 14 years after introduction and nearly 13 years after the product has been discontinued.
- scelerat 13y agoI think the original 128k Mac stopped getting OS (then simply called "System," no "Mac OS" until System 7.5) support at version 4.0 in 1987. So, three years, not ten. The Mac Plus (released in January 1986) did have support in System 7 up to 7.5 in 1996. The 128k Mac was cool, but the RAM constraints in particular made upgrades to the 512k in 1985 and the Plus (upgraded ROM and 1024kb) in 1986 a no-brainer.
- kalleboo 13y agoI have a hard time believing that even System 6 would run on the 128K... And System 7 used up a whole MB of RAM. (Memories of juggling OSes and RAM on a Mac Classic with a whopping 2 MB of the stuff). edit: looks like the 128K system info page is wrong, you needed a Plus for System 6 http://support.apple.com/kb/TA33972?viewlocale=en_US http://support.apple.com/kb/TA33972?viewlocale=en_US
- MBCook 13y agoI just love that it lists the BTU/hour that the machine generates.
- theatrus2 13y agoIt is however not needed as the wattage is also available.
- iambateman 13y agoSo think about this...the top-of-the-line iMac display currently supports 2560x1440 (or 3686400 pixels) while the original mac supported 512x384 (or 196608 pixels). If you spread out that increase over the course of 30 years, you are adding 10.5% more pixels each year, while cutting the price by ~60% (from Macintosh to present iMac) It's been a crazy 30 years!
- acqq 13y agoAdd to that that the starting bit depth was 1 vs 24 bits today (you miss the factor of 24). The memory was expensive then.
- joezydeco 13y agoThe original Mac had a screen buffer of 24KiB, which isn't enough to even hold half of a Retina-scaled iOS icon.
- eschaton 13y agoThe original Mac's display was 512x342, not 384.
- Zardoz84 13y agoWhat does the big 64 KiB ROM chip ?
- gjm11 13y agoThe whole OS, including e.g. the "QuickDraw" graphics routines.
- kalleboo 13y agoThe later OldWorld-ROM Macs went so far as to have stuff like QuickTime in ROM. The Mac Classic even had a whole System 6 boot disk in ROM you could activate if your harddisk was dead!
- pdevine 13y agoI understand that significant parts of the OS code were burned into ROM in order to free up RAM, which was more expensive. Code for things like the window manager, etc. Later versions of the OS patched bugs in the ROM by loading the patches into RAM. A rather inventive design at the time.
- Someone 13y agoNot only later versions. The original ROM already was patched: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Cut,_Paste_and_Crash.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story.... Mac OS was the only OS I know of that had a system call for replacing system calls.
- pornel 13y agoAmigaOS had "library vectors" (see Exec.library SetFunction) for patching ROM libraries too.
- leoc 13y agoThe 128KiB of RAM was painfully insufficient even with so much shifted to ROM: text files couldn't be more than a few pages in length. And there was no backing store you could reliably swap OS components into either, because the machine had a single floppy drive and no hard disk, and the floppy disk had to come out to allow disk copying.
- ghshephard 13y ago"Last Modified: Apr 19, 2012"
- bobowzki 13y ago"Support Discontinued 9/1/98" not bad.
- acmiller 13y agoYou could run System 7 on a 128K Mac? That's crazy.
- scelerat 13y agoOnly with a ROM and RAM upgrade (effectively making it a plus). It wasn't cheap, as these components were soldered to the motherboard.
- sirkneeland 13y agoAmazing to compare what fit into 128k back then vs how much memory it takes simply to run the Calculator app now...