Apple Macintosh 128k

Never trust a computer you can’t lift!

Overview

The very first Macintosh! The original 128k Macintosh was introduced to the general public in January 1984 (when 1984 won’t be like 1984). The Apple Lisa was also launched at the same time with similar OS.

The original 128k Macintosh was designated M0001 in the US and M0001P in Europe. There was no name on the front of the system box itself. One the rear, you can determine an early 128k by it simply saying “Macintosh”. Later Macintosh machines were labelled “Macintosh 128K” to distinguish them from the Macintosh 512K, which was introduced later, alongside the 128k.

The original Macintosh was equipped with 128Kb of RAM, a 64Kb of ROM, a Sony, single sided 3.5″ 400 KB floppy drive, a 1-bit 512 x 342 pixel b&w monitor, a mouse, and some included applications – MacWrite and MacPaint.

The original Macintosh not only set a standard in modern, friendly, home and office computer design but it established the look and feel of many future Macintosh (including iMac) all-in-one designs.

The stylish and simple Graphical User Interface inspired the overall design of Microsoft Windows, Atari TOS and Commodore’s Workbench.
By comparison of similar machines of the time, the original Macintosh 128k had twice as much memory as the popular Commodore 64, put 2.5 times as much data on a floppy disk as the IBM PC’s single-sided 5.25″ disk, included two serial ports (one which could be used for networking at the then-incredible speed of 230.4 kbps), and a totally graphical operating system, all packed into the cutest, friendliest package the computer industry had yet seen. Apple sold 70,000 during its first 100 days on the market.

If you didn’t crave a lot of speed, you could even add a serial hard drive. In fact, Apple’s argument for a closed box (no slots) was that the high speed serial port was fast enough for anything you might want to add to the Macintosh – this was certainly not true for hard drives.
The Macintosh was supplemented by the 512K in October. (It’s commonly told that the original Macintosh would have had 256 KB of memory if RAM prices hadn’t been so high.)

Details

A machine of many firsts and highly collectable. Known for it’s introduction with the famous ’1984′ advertisement during the Superbowl. Known for it’s appearance in an antique store window, in Back To The Future Part II, 2015. Known for being cream coloured, with a monochrome 9″ 512×342 monitor and perfectly-sized keyboard and mouse.

The Macintosh 128k was introduced at $2495 in the United States and £2999 in the United Kingdom and sold globally around 70,000 units.

The 128k was designed to provide the graphics grunt of machines that otherwise cost tens of thousands of dollars and was immediately something the middle class could afford to put in their homes and in their businesses. It wasn’t very expandable, but it was powerful and it did the job. The heart of the machine was a Motorola 68000 CPU, running at a clock speed of 8Mhz. It’s namesake – the 128kb of RAM was connected via a 16Mhz data bus was also it’s achilles heal – it couldn’t be upgraded and prevented many multimedia applications from running.

Notable Firsts:

The 128k had a 3.5″ 400k Sony floppy disk drive built-in and helped solidify the standard of this format across other hardware in the coming years. Mac OS was stored on Floppy Disk (to conserve RAM) – meaning each disk had to store both the operating system, the applications and the files generated by the application or the user. An external drive was available for $495 to reduce disk-swappage. Hard drives could be connected via the slow serial port or the fast external floppy drive port on the rear of the machine.

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