How It All Began…
In the early 90’s, 1990 to be exact, Apple released the “Mac Classic” that was meant to be priced for those on a budget at $1500.00. It ended up being a disappointment for many, with some models only coming with 1 MB of RAM and no hard drive. The specifications should put a smile on your face and make you thankful that the computer industry has taken some giant leaps forward!
The Mac Classic had a Motorola 6800 processor running at 8 MHz, and of course It wouldn’t be a classic without the 1.44 MB floppy drive. It ran on Mac OS 6.07 and had a 9 inch diagonal screen.
Apple’s advertising brochure for this machine read something like:
” The new Macintosh Classic is ideal for anyone with basic computing needs. It’s particularly suitable for people who work at home, for college students, and for grade school and high school students. The Macintosh Classic offers you everything that people expect from Macintosh. And it fits as comfortably into your budget as it does into your life.”
When I was in elementary school, these were the computers we had in the classroom. Unfortunately, they were probably more beneficial as a paper weight because they seldomly got used. It was Apple’s first attempt at making an economical computer, and because of it I think many people took the plunge and made this their first computer purchase. This clip of the Mac Classic booting should bring back a few memories.
News Source: TUAW
Despite its age and crappy specs, the interface still appeared to look better than Windows 95 – even if the rest of it was shoddy.
Be glad it had the 3.5″ floppy drive and not a 5.whatever” one
That would be a 5.25″! I guess with the 3.5 floppy drive and the interface it was kinda ahead of it time. I recall we had these in our Student Activities Office back from 1994-1997. I always wondered why they had external hard drives, now I understand.
Dude, I remember when I had my first PC back in the 90’s. It was a Pentium I processor and I can’t remember the MHz but it was like 100 or something, running Windows 3.1 then Windows 95 at some point.
16MB of RAM
4GB Hard Drive
And let me tell you it was awesome… back then… kind of.
Crazy stuff how far technology has come.
Well heck I thought EGA graphics (16 colors!) was great. Anything was better than the 4 color CGA! I think by 1990 I was running a 386 with 4 MB of RAM and an 80 MB hard drive and VGA graphics. 4 years later I would spend $256 to double that RAM. I don’t even think I was using Windows 3.1 yet, hard drive was too small.