#### Back to index | # Info for macplus

#### Apple Macintosh Plus

History and Trivia :
Introduced on 16th January 1986, the Macintosh Plus was the first real improvement of
the original Macintosh 128k (The Macintosh 512k was just a Mac 128k with 512 kb of RAM). It had
several new features.
The extended ROM held the new version of operating system : it supported hard disk units,
the SCSI bus, and the new file system : HFS (Hierarchical File System), along with many other
new features (Time Manager...). Additionnally, various routines and managers previously located
in RAM (Appletalk manager, RAM Serial Driver, Standard File Package...) had been moved to ROM.
The new floppy disk unit could use double-sided 800 KB disks (compared to only one-sided 400 KB
for the Macintosh 128k). It came with 1 Mb of RAM, and could easily be expanded to 4 Mb, using
standard 1Mb SIMMs. It had an enhanced keyboard with a numeric pad and last but not least, it had
a SCSI 1 interface which allowed to connect several high speed peripherals (maximal transfer rate of
312 kbyte/s on Mac Plus - which is incredibly inefficient) such as hard disks and scanners.
Although the Mac Plus was made obsolete in march 1987 by the new Macintosh series (Macintosh SE
and the Macintosh II), it remained in production as a cheaper alternative until the introduction
of Macintosh Classic on 15th october 1990. This makes Macintosh Plus the longest lived Macintosh
ever produced.

created on Thu Aug 16 22:55:01 2001