Macintosh History

            On January 24, 1984, *Apple* announced the Macintosh to it's Board of Directors and to the world. And the computer world has never been the same.

A year earlier, Apple had unveiled the $10,000 Lisa, the first business computer with a  graphical user interface and a mouse. The Lisa never caught on, but Apple was enamoured of the concept.

It was an era of conformity. Although you could still buy an Apple II, TRS-80, Commodore, or CP/M computer, MS-DOS watch the de facto standard. 

Apple made a bold move, thinking different long before it became an ad slogan. And the rest, as they say, is history, a history Low End Mac examines in a series of articles, each covering 1 year in the life of the Macintosh.

In January 1985, Apple announced Macintosh XL, which was the new name for the wildly unsuccessful Lisa 2. In April, Apple discontinued the model. Sun remarketing purchased about 5000 in 1987, which day upgraded and bundled with Mac works, and in 1989 the remaining Apple inventory was buried in a landfill in Utah for the tax write off.

After a whole year without new model, Apple announced the Macintosh Plus, the first expandable Macintosh, on January 16, 1986. Unlike earlier models designed with only  128 KB or 512kb of memory and no expansion Path, 30-pin memory modules that were much easier to work with than individual chips the industry had used in the past.

In the 21st century Apple entered with a solid line of products and remarkable growth. The only thing holding Apple back was Motorola-they just could not seem to get the G4 running fast enough for apple to appear a contender in the MHz war.

Apple addressed that in three ways: dual processor power Mac's for power fiends, faster G3 models for the rest of us, and a more powerful efficient OS, Mac OS X. They finally broke the 500 mhz mark in early 2001 currently offer a single-processor/867 and dual processor G4/800.