A Vintage Computer Museum at Computer Museum at The University of Missouri - St. Louis |
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Macintosh Plus, released on January 10, 1986. It was a great success and remained in production until October 15, 1990. It was on sale for over four years and ten month, it was the longest-lived Mac in Apple's history.
The Macintosh or Mac is a line of personal computers designed, developed, manufactured and marketed by Apple Computer. The original Macintosh was the first commercial personal computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse instead of the ten-standard command line interface. But the original Mac had clear limitations: 1. It had very little memory, even compared with other personal computers in 1984, and could not be expanded easily; 2. It lacked a hard drive and not easy to attach one.
Apple realized that Mac needed improvement in these areas. Therefore, they introduced Macintosh Plus. Mac Plus had several benefit over the original Mac: 1. The extended ROM held the new version of Mac OS. 2. It had enhanced graphic libraries. 3. It offered 1 MB of RAM, expandable to 4 MB. 4. It had revolutionary SCSI parallel interface, allowing up to seven peripherals - such as hard drives and scanners - to be attached to the machine. The SCSI bus on the Mac plus is officially rated at 1.25MBps by Apple, although real world testing showed it to be slightly over 2.1MBps - which is still 4x the speed of Apple's earlier serial port hard drive. 5. It also provided AppleTalk networking and the new file manager. 6. The new floppy-disk unit could use double-sided 800 KB disks
Also, the Mac Plus made a reasonable web server, as the Macintosh Plus Web Server demonstrated until it was retired in October 2001.
Until the air cooled iMac came out, all desktop Macs following the Plus up until "the slot-loading iMacs" have included a fan to reduce internal heat. Because the Mac Plus is convection cooled, you should never block the vents on the side or top of the computer. However, it may also have some problems with the power supply when it was over heated after several years of use.
With other issues remained, particularly the low processor speed and limited graphics ability, Mac Plus was discontinued in October, 1990. Updated Motorola CPUs made faster machine available. Macintosh Plus was replaced by Macintosh II, Macintosh IIX, SE, and so on.
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