On 09/05/10 17:16, [email protected] (Michael Winter) wrote:
On Sep 4, 2010, at 6:32 PM, Karl Kuehn wrote:
The amazing thing is that the image as you presented it is
pixel-for-pixel what those computers displayed. Looking at it
embedded in a mail window on only a small portion of my
screen's available space brings home the huge changes that
have happened since then.
The days when a big memory upgrade meant going up to 4 MB and the
entire System/Finder fit on a single 800k floppy disk. Many of
today's apps wouldn't even fit on the big-old 20 MB hard drive I
bought for my first Mac.
Newbie. 8^)
My first Macintosh was one of the original 128K Macs. 128 KB
RAM, one 400 KB floppy drive and an 8 MHz clock. Expandability
was two serial ports and a DB-19 port for an external disk
drive. A big memory upgrade was going to 512 KB and then to 1
MB. You could take it to 4 MB, but the official Apple upgrade
path ended at 1 MB and going to 4 MB was a third-party upgrade
that would void the warranty. A disk drive upgrade was an
external 400K floppy to give you 800 KB total disk space. Later,
you could get an 800K drive, and then a double sided drive for
1.4 MB disks. I think the first hard disk that I bought for my
128K was 10 MB, but that was after the it had been upgraded to a
Mac Plus, giving it a SCSI port. The entire original System and
Finder, of course, had to fit on a single 400K floppy since that
was the only storage device that you could count on finding in
any given Mac. In fact, the OS had to fit in 128 KB of RAM and
leave extra memory for apps and data. Disk swapping was pretty
much mandatory in order to do anything useful. I remember being
really excited when System 6 was released because it had the
option of using the Multi-Finder, which gave Mac OS rudimentary
multi-tasking. IIRC, System 6 had Multi-Finder as an option to
the regular single-tasking Finder and in System 7, the
Multi-Finder became the regular Finder. I also remember being
mildly annoyed when System 7 was released because it was the
first Mac OS upgrade that was not free. On the other hand, it
had enough new stuff that it was worth paying for. The young'ns
these days just don't realize just how good they've got it...
--
Christopher Bort
<[email protected]>
<http://www.thehundredacre.net/>
Skype: topherbort
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