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Month: October 2021

Apple Macintosh 512K

In January 1984, Steve Jobs triumphantly unveiled Macintosh. An “insanely great” computer for the rest of us. And while the original Macintosh was amazing, it also struggled to complete basic tasks. Limited to 128K of RAM and a single 400K floppy drive, the computer was a contradiction, with state-of-the-art software and limited hardware. The Apple IIe (with 64K of RAM) was Apple’s most popular product when Macintosh was released. But the Mac’s bitmapped graphics and robust operating system devoured memory. Jobs was committed to keeping the original Mac at 128K of RAM to control costs. Burrell Smith knew it was a trivial matter to replace the 4264 DRAM chips with 41256 chips instead, and he surreptitiously modified the logic board…

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