Innovative 32/16 bit hardware in early 1984 ... when PC's were old fashioned

History of the first Apple Macintosh computers:

Steven Jobs wanted it as early as it can. A true innovation, compared to the computers sold in 1984 - a star was born, the Apple Macintosh.
Not only the hardware was years ahead, the true revolution was the operating system. It supported a graphical GUI, which can be controlled with a mouse.

The very first "Mac" model was the Apple Macintosh:

Technical data:

CPU:
- Motorola 68000 @ 8 MHz 16 bit data/24-bit external address
RAM:
- 128 KB or later
-  512 KB
Display: 9" monochrome 66Hz
Resolution: 512×342
Sound: mono, 8 Bit, 22 kHz
Drive:
- SS 3½" floppy disk drive, 400 KB capacity
Ports:
- no ADB yet
- 2 RS-422 serial ports for modem and printer
- extra disk drive port (DB19)
- mouse port (sub-d 9-pin)

An external/separate floppy drive with 400KB (SS/DD) was sold as a companion for the above mentioned first Mac model.

Later (in 1986) an upgraded version with an integrated double sided floppy, the Macintosh Plus was introduced.
Although it had almost the same hardware specs, it offered 1024 KB RAM (4 SIMM sockets for max. 4MB RAM total) and the already mentioned DS/DD 3.5" floppy drive, plus a (problematic) SCSI interface.

It goes on with the evolution into the Macintosh SE (1987), which has now (optionally) a harddisk build in, but also the famous ADB ports for mouse, keyboard and some other slower periphals. The SE series had an internal expansion port, which made it possible to upgrade even the processor. Also, they could have a HD (1.44MB) floppy drive, which was able to read PC floppy disks also...


A revival happened with the Macintosh Classic models (1990-1994). The Macintosh Classic and Classic II had a build-in monochrome screen, the Macintosh Color (Colour) Classic and Color Classic II had a Sony Triniton color tube. The Classic models own a "LC slot", which offers a great expandability not only again with processor upgrades, but also for network cards etc.

Also, the Macintosh Color Classic were upgradable with an Apple II card - very nice for such vintage computer junkies.


Some nice modifications for an upgrade of the maximum screen resolutions were published for the Color Classic, see >here< or in detail >here<.
Also, the main logic board was exchanged with a board from a LC/Performa 575, called then "Mystic upgrade", see >here< for a pictured overview...

I will not focus my pages on 68k Macs without a build-in screen, and I also will never mention later / newer models like Power Macs etc.