Macintosh 128k

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This is the machine that started them all. Its simple, compact design inspired a generation of compact Macs that followed, and we can still detect some traces of its influence in today's all-in-one iMacs.

It is not a very powerful machine (even for its day's standards), neither is it very expandable (probably Steve Jobs' fault in that part, he never liked expandability very much...). A Motorola 68000 processor, clocked at 8 MHz, runs this system, which brought an astonishing 128 kB of RAM as standard, and non-upgradable.

There is no hard drive, the system and all the apps were loaded and run through 3.5'' floppies (a novelty for the time, but eventually replaced the large, 5.5'' floppies!). That was a big issue, since I needed to produce bootable floppies for it in 2010, and neither my iMac nor my Intel notebook have floppy drives. And those floppies need to be formatted as 400k MFS volumes in order to be recognized by this system. Fortunately, getting the actual software images was pretty easy - a simple Google search will give you various system versions, along with copies of MacWrite and MacPaint!

My unit works perfectly, except its internal floppy drive - but that is normal for the original drives that shipped with 128ks. It was, like many 128ks at the time, upgraded to a 512k with a motherboard swap (memory was not directly expandable). It is one of the earlier 128ks (I checked its serial number and it was made around June 1984), since it states "Macintosh" on the back (and not "Macintosh 128k").

Specifications

• Processor: Motorola MC68000 @ 8 MHz;
• Memory: 512 kB (originally 128 kB, motherboard has been swapped);
• Other I/O: single 400k 3.5'' floppy drive, "phone-like" keyboard connector on the front, mouse, serial and external floppy connectors on the back;