Home > Macintosh 128K

This Macintosh model was not expandable; it was intended as a stand-alone "appliance," to be purchased in the same way that people purchase refrigerators or vacuum cleaners. Its 128K memory initially seemed large compared to the 64K available in some other desktop computers of the time. It had ports only for the mouse, a printer ( ImageWriter or, later, the LaserWriter), a modem, an external floppy drive, and a monophonic speaker--all of which used new, proprietary connectors, different for each device. This was an advantage over previous device connections, which were often the same type for different devices; with the new connectors, an amateur user could connect a device only to the correct port. The disadvantage was that initially only Apple products could be used. (See Macintosh 512K for a photo of the back panel connectors.)

It contained a 400K, one-sided floppy disk drive and had no internal disk drive or storage. At the time, one floppy disk was sufficient to store the System, the application you wanted to use at the time (the choices were essentially MacWrite and MacPaint) and the data files created with the applications. Indeed, the 400K drive capacity seemed large compared to the basic 128K floppy drives in other computers at the time. However, most users write-protected their System/Application disks and found themselves swapping the system and data diskettes interminably. The Macintosh External Disk Drive (also single-sided 400K floppy), was a popular add-on even at $495.

An all-in-one unit, the original Mac had a one-bit, 9" black & white display with a resolution of 72 PPIPixels per inch PPI or pixel density is a measurement of the resolution of a computer display, related to the size of the display in inches and the total number of pixels in the horizontal and vertical directions. This measurement is often referred to as, which was identical to that of several following Macintosh models. The keyboard had no numeric keypad--although later you could purchase just the numeric keypad separately--and the mouse had only a single button. It also had no fan, making it extremely quiet in operation. Steve JobsSteven Paul Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is best known as the co-founder (with Steve Wozniak) and CEO of Apple Computer, and somewhat less so for his founding and leadership of Pixar. He is also regarded as a pioneer in computing for seeing the commercia's insistence that the Macintosh ship without a fan, an engineering goof that persisted until the introduction of the Macintosh SEIntroduced March 2, 1987 MSRP 2900 CPU Motorola 68000 CPU speed 8 MHz Shipped with system version 4. 1 RAM 1 MB, expandable to 4 MB Discontinued August 1 1989 The Macintosh SE was introduced by Apple at the same time as the Macintosh II. It fit in the sam after Jobs was forced out of Apple, was the source of many common -- and very expensive -- component failures in the first four Macintosh models, so much so that Larry PinaLarry Pina is an author of five do-it-yourself repair manuals for Apple Macintosh computers and peripherals. His books, which are all out of print, include: Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets published in 1990 by Hayden Books Macintosh Printer Secrets pub wrote two very successful (and now highly sought-after) how-to repair manuals, The Dead Mac Scrolls and Macintosh Repair & Upgrade Secrets .

The applications MacPaint and MacWrite were bundled with the Mac.