Home > Macintosh Plus

1 Overview

It was the first Macintosh model to include a SCSI port, which launched the popularity of external SCSI devices for Macs, including (at that time very expensive) hard disks, tape drives, CD-ROM drives, printers, and even monitors.

It had a new 3.5" 800K floppy drive, offering double the capacity of that of the previous Macs, with backward compatibility. Like the 400K drive in earlier models, the drive used variable speed GCR, making disks written with it incompatible with PC drives.

The Mac Plus was the first of many Macintoshes to use SIMM modules for its memory. It came standard with 1MB of RAM (four 256K SIMMs) and could be upgraded to 4MB of RAM. It had 128K of ROM on the motherboard, which was double the amount of ROM that was in previous Macs; the new System software and ROMs included routines to support SCSI, the new 800K floppy drive, and, importantly, HFS, the Hierarchical File System, which used a true directory structure on disks. (This as opposed to the earlier MFS, Macintosh File System, which was used on 400K disks, in which all files were stored on the root of the disk, and the folders that the user saw were an illusion maintained at great expense by the Finder. The illusionary folders disappeared when the user rebuilt the Desktop file.) For programmers, the fourth Inside Macintosh volume detailed how to utilize the Mac Plus's new System software.

An all-in-one unit, the Plus 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 previous Macintosh models. Unlike that of earlier Macs, the Mac Plus's keyboard included a numeric keypad, and, as with previous Macs, it had a one-button mouse and no fan, making it extremely quiet in operation.

The applications MacPaintMacPaint is a bitmap-based image editing computer program that was produced by Apple Computer for bundling with their Macintosh personal computer. After being "forcibly ignored" for some time due to developer backlash, Apple eventually formed Claris to ma, MacWriteMacWrite was a word processor application released along with the first Apple Macintosh systems in 1984. It is historically important as it is the first such program that was widely available to the public to offer WYSIWYG operation, with multiple fonts a and HyperCardHyperCard is an application program and a simple programming environment produced by Apple Computer which runs only in Mac OS versions 9 or earlier. It most closely resembles a database application in concept, in that it stores information, but unlike tra were bundled with the Mac Plus. Third-party software applications available included MacDrawMacDraw was a vector-based drawing program much in the style of MacPaint and MacWrite on the early Macintoshes. While MacPaint worked with bitmapped images, MacDraw would work on drawing objects that could be placed independently of each other. Apple soft, Microsoft WordMicrosoft Word is a word processor program from Microsoft. It was originally written by Richard Brodie for IBM PC computers running DOS in 1983. Later versions were created for the Apple Macintosh ( 1984), SCO UNIX and Microsoft Windows ( 1989). It became, ExcelMicrosoft Excel is a spreadsheet program written and distributed by Microsoft for computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system and Apple Macintosh computers. It is overwhelmingly the dominant spreadsheet application available for these platforms, and PowerPoint, as well as Aldus's PageMaker. This was the introduction of GUI versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on any PC.