Macintosh Plus





The Macintosh Plus was Introduced:                  January 16, 1986
introduced two years
after the original     MSRP:                        $2599
Macintosh. It          CPU:                         Motorola 68000
originally shipped     CPU speed:                   8 MHz
with a beige case, but
was later manufactured Shipped with system version: 1.1
in the long-lived      RAM:                         1 MB, expandable to 4 MB
"platinum" color.      Discontinued:                October 15, 1990
It was the first Macintosh model to include a SCSI port, thus making it
compatible with (and boosting the popularity of) the external Apple SCSI
Hard Disk 20 (HD SC20), a 20 MB hard drive which was introduced by Apple in
1985.

An all-in-one unit, the Plus had a one-bit, 9" black & white display, common
to Macs of the period. The 72-dpi resolution gave the appearance of
grayscale. It had one 3 1/2 inch floppy disk drive, variable speed
(incompatible therefore with the PC drives), with a capacity of 800 KB.

The computer included a keyboard (which was not an extended keyboard) and a
one-button mouse. It did not have a fan, making it extremely quiet in
operation.

The applications MacPaint, MacDraw and HyperCard were bundled with the Mac
Plus. Third-party software applications available included Microsoft
WordExcel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, as well as Aldus's PageMaker. This was
the introduction of GUI versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on
any PC.

For those of you who are nostalgic, there is a program called vMac that will
emulate a Mac Plus on a variety of platforms, including Unix, Windows, DOS
and Mac OS.