
Macintosh 128K: Technical Specifications - shawndumas
http://support.apple.com/kb/SP186
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smcl
That's sort of impressive that MacOS supported the original mac up to
MacOS\System 7 (released 1997 - a full 13 years later)

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praseodym
Not quite: it supported System 7.0.1P, which was released in March 1992 [1].
That's 8 years; still pretty impressive.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#Version_history](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#Version_history)

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smcl
Oh my mistake, I read the wrong version dates from that very wikipedia page.
But yes you are correct, that is still pretty impressive

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bobowzki
"Support Discontinued 9/1/98"

not bad.

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yuhong
This is not unusual for products that existed before a formal support
lifecycle was established. Microsoft often uses a 12/31/2001 date for such
products.

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iambateman
So think about this...the top-of-the-line iMac display currently supports
2560x1440 (or 3686400 pixels) while the original mac supported 512x384 (or
196608 pixels).

If you spread out that increase over the course of 30 years, you are adding
10.5% more pixels each year, while cutting the price by ~60% (from Macintosh
to present iMac)

It's been a crazy 30 years!

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joezydeco
The original Mac had a screen buffer of 24KiB, which isn't enough to even hold
half of a Retina-scaled iOS icon.

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sirkneeland
Amazing to compare what fit into 128k back then vs how much memory it takes
simply to run the Calculator app now...

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acmiller
You could run System 7 on a 128K Mac? That's crazy.

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scelerat
Only with a ROM and RAM upgrade (effectively making it a plus). It wasn't
cheap, as these components were soldered to the motherboard.

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MBCook
I just love that it lists the BTU/hour that the machine generates.

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theatrus2
It is however not needed as the wattage is also available.

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ghshephard
"Last Modified: Apr 19, 2012"

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Zardoz84
What does the big 64 KiB ROM chip ?

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pdevine
I understand that significant parts of the OS code were burned into ROM in
order to free up RAM, which was more expensive. Code for things like the
window manager, etc. Later versions of the OS patched bugs in the ROM by
loading the patches into RAM. A rather inventive design at the time.

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Someone
Not only later versions. The original ROM already was patched:
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Cut,_Paste_and_Crash.txt).
Mac OS was the only OS I know of that had a system call for replacing system
calls.

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pornel
AmigaOS had "library vectors" (see Exec.library SetFunction) for patching ROM
libraries too.

