Talk:Macintosh 128K

Untitled

What was the display resolution of the Macintosh? - Furrykef 05:04, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

according to the measurements of the display and resolution it seems reasonable to assume a 480x360 or 512x384 resolution, but that's just a guess --Deelkar 05:24, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

a quick google search turns out this: Macintosh 128K--Deelkar 05:30, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The built-in monitor itself displays 512×342 pixels (cf. A screenshot taken from a real M0001.)

Wrong image!

Anyone else notice that the computer pictured isn't a 128K but a 512K "Fat Mac"? Look at the info in the window on the screen, which clearly shows 512K of installed RAM. Anyone have a more accurate pic to contribute? ⇒ BRossow ^T/_C 22:10, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

There's no way to tell whether that's a 512 or an upgraded 128 (or a 512e, for that matter). I think it's a pretty trivial point, and that photo is a *very* good one, but if someone comes along with one of equal quality that doesn't have the obvious reference to 512K RAM, I'd be all for the change.--chris.lawson 06:32, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

It would be pretty trivial to 'shop, if it really is that important. It's only a display on the monitor, after all. -- grm_wnr Esc 08:35, 9 February 2996 (UTC)

The chip at row 10, second column is a 4164-15 dram, a 64kbit chip with a CAS of 150ns so it is indeed a 128Kbyte board. 2600:1006:B034:E48E:0:37:C122:7901 (talk) 22:52, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

The first Macintosh? Well, not really...

I remember those days quite well since I was living in the US at that time and owned one of the first 1,000 128Ks to come off the line, but I also seem to remember that the Apple Lisa was really the first Macintosh and was even marketed as the "Macintosh XL". The Mac 128 wasn't really the first MacIntosh since the Lisa (Macintosh XL) was around for some time before the Mac 128 appeared. Terence 15:19, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

The Lisa wasn't marketed as the Macintosh XL until after the 128 debuted. Furthermore, the OS that ran on the 128 doesn't run on the Lisa, and vice versa.--chris.lawson 18:21, 25 February 2006 (UTC)

Merger suggestion

I do believe that there needs to be some technical details on the main article page but have a more technical page for the detailed specs. --Kyle G 12:58, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I think the technical data is way to detailled to be included in the main article, so I'm against a merger. Peter S. 19:37, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Against mergerTrevorLSciAct 00:13, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

I think that level of technical detail may be too much for Wikipedia at all. WP is an encyclopedia, not a tech manual. There are specialized wikis where that info would be more appropriate. ⇔ ChristTrekker 21:18, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

...on eBay

An original 1/1984 Macintosh is selling for "$1,984" dollars on eBay. It includes a keypad.

AppleMacReporter 02:03, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Trivia

I noticed while watching the movie Back to the future Part II that when Marty goes into the 80's shop there is displayed a 1984 antique computer and low and behold there is a Macintosh.

Aerialvendetta 11:18, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

The Macintosh's place as a prop in film and TV is quite well-documented, and this individual instance isn't particularly notable. (I could rattle off at least ten more appearances of early Macs in TV or film without even looking it up.)--chris.lawson 15:11, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

"Macintosh 128K"?

This article needs to be more clear that the Macintosh became the "Macintosh 128K" only through hindsight. At the time, it was called simply "Macintosh." (I think the Macintosh 128K article title is fine, though. It's as good a way to specify the original Macintosh model as anything else.) --Steven Fisher 18:22, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I should specify: I know it's in the first paragraph. It's good there. :) However, the first name listed should be Macintosh not Macintosh 128K. I'm not sure how to reword this or I'd do it myself. --Steven Fisher 18:23, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I thought the original Macintosh and Macintosh 128k were the same. AppleMacReporter 17:38, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

You didn't read the first paragraph of the article. Potatoswatter 03:08, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Changing the title name is easy to do using the "move" tab. However, you cannot rename the page to something which already exists as does "Macintosh". While on some level I agree the title should simply read "Macintosh" and "Macintosh 128K" should be a redirect page, given that "Macintosh" already exists as a broader category, I would accept the page titled as-is with the excellent first paragraph delineating the name history. The only other option is to create a disambiguation page for Macintosh which I think would be a mistake. Woodwynlane 03:36, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

There is macintosh (disambiguation) with such gems as the name for a raincoat. I added a phrase clarifying the 128k's presence on that page. Potatoswatter 05:55, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

The opening sentence should identify the Macintosh 128K as simply the Macintosh, with the paragraph concluding as it does to identify the article title with the page actual computer name. This helps delineate the name. If I had a somewhat rare Macintosh 128K case label picture in the GFDL, I would upload it for actual comparison to hammer the point home.--Mac128 (talk) 05:03, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

I deleted the first 128K. Potatoswatter (talk) 05:23, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Credits

This article is vague about this, and I think it's noteworthy to mention. Which of the original Macs had the signatures on them?

• Macintosh
• Macintosh 128K (post-512K production)
• Macintosh 512K
• Macintosh Plus

Thank you! --Evil Eccentric 22:28, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

To be accurate, the signature mold persisted through the introduction of the SE, possibly even the SE 30, with some additions and omissions due to case changes, architecture and participants. Some say they made a reappearance in the Classic series. However, I can only testify to seeing them in my SE. There does not seem to be any concrete evidence or documentation to support when and on which models the signatures were included past the Mac Plus and early SEs (much less changed), so it's best to crack your Mac open and see for your self. FYI, this applies specifically to the Compact Macintosh only as different signatures were also included in other Macs as well.--Woodwynlane 18:11, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Sorry if this is in the wrong place, I'm a newbie. But it might also be more correct to say that the original Mac did not have any floppy drive except the internal one. The external 400 kb drive was not available until months later (summer 1984). Previous to this, it was necessary to swap disks very frequently to perform the often Herculean task of copying files from one disk to another. The external floppy drive was a huge improvement. There were no hard disks available for the winter of 1984. They were advertised in the first issues of MacWorld but none were available in the stores (at least where I was in NY). Not sure when the first hard disks were really available although I remember I did have a third party SCSI port installed in my 128 K Mac along with it being upgraded to 512 kb of RAM. Big time heavy computing power! Jerry Freilich (talk) 00:21, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

The 400K External drive was available May 9, 1984, at least 60 days after Apple said they would be available (per http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HymXnNjyaKU ) Also, the Numeric Keypad was not in stores until September. --Mac128 (talk) 08:03, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Software Entry Multiplan & Excel

I changed the second paragraph under SOFTWARE discussing the name change following the introduction of the 512K to better fit in this section. However, I question whether that information belongs under software at all. My change involved moving the first paragraph references to Microsoft Multiplan which was never available for the Macintosh, but rather became Excel which debuted on the Mac and required a minimum of 512K (in fact it was long overdue when released, most likely because Microsoft couldn't make it work on the 128K). —Preceding unsigned comment added by Woodwynlane (talk • contribs) 17:16, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

System & Finder Software

I'm going to add the System & Finder info under Software section to provide a historical framework and link to the Mac OS for discussion. However, I think this should follow suit for all other Macintosh pages in that the Mac Specs box should detail the OS range which a particular Mac can run, or the OS it debuted with, or the first and last OS, while the article can expand on the details. This is important information to maintain since it is contested around the internet (including Apple). So a collective focal point like Wiki would be invaluable for folks still using this hardware. --Woodwynlane 17:22, 4 December 2007 (UTC) It would be good to clarify the earliest software for the Mac from Microsoft. It is incorrect to say that Multiplan did not exist for the Mac. It did exist and I (and many others) used it for several months before Excel arrived. Multiplan would sometimes take 5-10 minutes to add a column of say 30 numbers. Copying and pasting (if they occurred at all) would often take even longer, requiring 1/2 hr, for example to copy and paste two columns of 100 numbers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jerry Freilich (talk • contribs) 00:14, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Jerry Sienfeld's Mac

I thought that on the show Sienfeld there was a mac 128k. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.162.162.142 (talk) 00:37, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Nope the very first one was an SE/30 in 1989, followed by a Duo Dock & 20th Anniversary Mac.--Mac128 (talk) 04:57, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Mouse

Maybe it's worth noting this is not the first computer using a mouse. Almost everyone seems to think this Mac was the first to use one, well that is, when they don't think Microsoft was the first. 93.125.198.182 (talk) 20:48, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Commercial cost conflict

This article's lede states, "now famous US$1.5 million television commercial ", but the 1984 commercial article shows a budget of $900,000. – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 04:21, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Software included

Didn't the 128K up through the SE (and possibly a few others) include software to help teach people how to use a mouse, including point-and-click, click-and-drag, double-click, and so forth? It also came with some pretty fun mazes. These computer "actions" are almost instinctual now, but just remembering that Macs used to come with a computer "how to" is both amusing and probably worth throwing into the article(s). – Kerαunoςcopia^◁_galaxies 04:23, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

"... and two others?

Anyone we know?

If you're going to list the other 30+ people who signed the case, why not list these "two others" by name as well? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.92.174.105 (talk) 18:48, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Video Resolution & frambuffer

How the video frambuffer of 22kBytes can display à grayscale image? 512*342=175104bits ~= 22kBytes, but, as the pictures show it there is grayscale images! with 4 levels of gray (black, dark gray, light gray, white) the video frame buffer needs 2 bits per pixels, so 44kBytes! What's wrong in the page?

109.221.197.145 (talk) 07:21, 26 January 2014 (UTC) Stéphane

The Macintosh 128K could not display grayscale (each pixel was either black or white). It is hard to tell from the photograph, but the levels of gray you are seeing are actually the result of dithering. The standard desktop background, for example, was actually composed of alternating black and white pixels (which makes it appear gray at a distance). -- Foogod (talk) 23:43, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

$100,000?

No mention of $100,000 in either of the citations offered. No mention anywhere of what those £100,000 systems where. It reads like a number plucked out of thin air. Particularly in view of the fact a Mac classic has nothing like the graphics performance or style of any $100,000 computer of the day. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.152.218.181 (talk) 13:03, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

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Features

As an unidentified person commented above, the features section is wildly inaccurate and I've added the relevant tag, which took me awhile to find. Neither of the two sources cited even mention anything about this ridiculous claim:

"The Macintosh was designed to achieve adequate graphics performance, which had previously required hardware costing over US $100,000, a price inaccessible to the middle class."

What is the origin of this? As well, it should be noted that one of the sources is a chronology from a webpage that does not appear to be a proper source, and the other is an email or Usenet posting which I would assume would be considered as "original material", which I believe is inappropriate per Wikipedia's standards. Mort Minsky (talk) 14:14, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Audio capabilities

Many early Macintosh games boldly used PCM sound which was not usually heard during that time. Why there isn't anything about audio capabilities? --84.249.133.143 (talk) 09:21, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Fundamental misunderstanding of CPU clock speed vs RAM speed access, 6MHz vs. 8MHz

The cited Byte article, https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1984-02/1984_02_BYTE_09-02_Benchmarks#page/n33/mode/2up, states that the CPU accesses RAM at 6MHz. The CPU does not use every clock cycle to I/O to memory, otherwise it wouldn't be doing any actual processing. To use a more recent example, the P5 Pentum 200 had a system bus (which it used to access RAM and every other external to the CPU part of the system) of 66MHz, but ran at 200MHz. At the time the Mac 128K was introduced, the bus to RAM was clocked the same as the CPU. Over time, the system/RAM bus could not keep up with CPU clock speed, and was therefore decoupled. There's nothing here that makes the Mac 128K CPU run "effectively" at 6MHz because of RAM access. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.88.59.121 (talk) 04:49, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

No. The description of how the memory is handled is correct.The 68000 takes four cycles to access memory. The video controller also takes four cycles. Code that requires regular access to memory effectively runs at half speed during he video display interval as the CPU and video controller take turns accessing the shared RAM. During vblank and hblank, though, the 68000 has unrestricted access and never has to wait for memory. Typical code runs as though it were on a 6MHz cpu but this is just an average between full unrestricted access and the shared access periods over a whole video field display period. It also depends on the code that's running. Code full of DIV instructions would tend to run closer to full speed as DIV does internal operations and rarely accesses memory. An instruction like MOVEM, however, would spend a lot of time waiting for memory. 2600:1006:B034:E48E:0:37:C122:7901 (talk) 22:44, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

My old id 333641197005707

Plz clash of clan I’d opan 42.106.8.78 (talk) 19:31, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

RAM size

What is the RAM size of a Macintosh computer 129.0.103.1 (talk) 19:19, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

16 64k drams?

From the article: The RAM in the Macintosh consisted of sixteen 64k×1 DRAMs. The problem is that adds up to 1MB (1024k), and this Mac only has 128k of RAM. Is the number of RAM sticks wrong, or is it the size of them?--2600:6C51:447F:D8D9:998B:6234:C9E5:E190 (talk) 10:41, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

There are no 'RAM sticks' in an original macintosh -- in fact such RAM modules weren't even standardized until some time after the original mac was released. What the article refers to by 'a DRAM' is a single DRAM chip. DRAM chips of that era were generally one-bit devices, which is to say that a single 64k DRAM contains 64k bits of storage and you need eight of them working in parallel to get 64k bytes. (64k * 16) / 8 = 128K bytes 73.161.124.28 (talk) 23:43, 12 February 2023 (UTC)