History
"And lo, the world did quake at the sight of Macintosh!". Actually that's a bit on the dramatic side but on January 24th 1984, the world did get a glimpse of something new and the course of desktop computing was changed pretty much forever. For the first time users had at their fingertips an affordable machine with a graphical interface that would do away with cumbersome command line prompts and would redefine how people looked at computers. To run this graphical interface though we needed a new type of machine and the original Macintosh wasn't that machine. In fact Apple's Lisa had already been released and it sported the interface that we know and love (and with it changed not only how we used computers but how we looked at computers). The Lisa system wasn't selling well though and Macintosh was released alongside the revised Lisa in an attempt to tempt the buying public.
The impact of the original Macintosh is difficult to understate now but when originally released it actually didn't set the world alight and took several revisions before it became the 'must have' machine that we know and love. We're interested in that original box though today: The box with a 'whopping' 128 Kilobytes of memory, a monstrous 400 Kilobyte floppy disk drive, a built in 9" screen and a strange little box with a ball in the bottom of it.
The history of the Mac is a typically long and winding one and it's far too detailed to cover fully here...but we'll do our best (and hopefully cover the very basics at least). The Mac actually started life as nothing more than Apple's wish for a $500 games machine. In 1979 Apple approached one of its development staff, Jef Raskin, to sound out the possibility of such a project but Raskin showed little interest, instead discussing his own ideas for a project. Raskin envisioned an easy to use machine that would appeal to home users, be self contained (stopping users from having to delve into a mass of wires as was the case with the Apple II) and would be, most importantly, affordable. Breaking with the then standard Apple naming convention, he called his dream machine 'Macintosh'.
The Macintosh project was very much shunned by the rest of Apple (the project was on the edge of being closed down several times during its life) but Raskin and his small loyal team continued development and the machine started to slowly take shape. It also started to evolve and Raskin's original $500 machine was now starting to look more like a $1000 machine such were the ever 'improving' specs: colour graphics, programming languages on ROM, more memory, more storage, a built-in printer. Some ideas were little more than pipe dreams but everything went through the same process of comparing price with performance: colour would be nice, but B&W would do...
Outside of Raskin's cosy little world though Apple was changing and thrown into the mix was Apple founding father Steve Jobs. After being sidelined by Apple's board, Jobs found himself taking over the Macintosh project much to the annoyance of those already involved with it (especially as Jobs himself had called for Macintosh to be stopped in favour of the Lisa project). Jobs was a hard taskmaster and would regularly demand more from his staff, irritate those team members who had been with the project since day one and generally take a lot of credit for other people's hard work. He clashed with Raskin and thank God no-one listened to such ideas as renaming the project 'Bicycle' (although he did make the decision to go with the mouse rather than Raskin's preferred light pen or joystick). Jobs was a man with a mission though and his the sole aim was to strike back at those that had treated him badly. Apple's then 'flagship' project was the ill-fated Lisa and Jobs went all out to build a better machine.
The Lisa was revolutionary for many reasons but its visible impact came in the shape of its graphical interface. Apple had 'appropriated' ideas from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) and in the intervening years developed what would later come to be known as System 1. With its graphical interface, buttons, windows, icons, mouse and pointer, the software did away with the clumsy command line interface that required a degree in computer science to understand and a manual 6 inches thick containing all of the commands to use. Instead users had the desktop and brand new ideas such as 'clicking' and 'dragging'. Jobs decided that to make Macintosh unbeatable, it had to have System 1.
The Macintosh spec was for a competent machine, but to run System 1 a lot of redesign was needed. Hardware specs and components changed endlessly: more memory was needed, a bigger and better floppy drive was essential (the original design called for the same 5.25" disks as used in the Apple II, but their 143 Kilobyte capacity simply wasn't big enough for the finder and system software, enter the 400 Kilobyte 3.5" disk by Sony), the screen and video hardware needed improving to handle the high volume of data being thrown through it, and the Lisa's 68000 CPU was deemed far more suitable than the Mac's then 6809E. All of this had a severe effect on Raskin's vision of the 'affordable' computer and the eventual street price would be $2500 - hardly an insignificant sum even now (it's rumoured that the price might even have been higher if the team had been able to go with the much wanted 256Kilobytes of RAM). But the Macintosh team were not stupid and they 'borrowed' many elements from the Lisa project.
Both machines shared the same processor, the same B&W screen and, obviously, the same OS and user interface but despite this, the Lisa and the Macintosh weren't compatible (in fact the Mac wasn't compatible with any existing Apple machines and Jobs was steadfast in his decision to make Macintosh and Lisa deliberately incompatible) and this further led to the ultimate downfall of the Lisa.
Note: It is possible to expand the Mac 128K to 512Kilobytes using 150ns chips but Apple don't recommend it in the slightest and it does involve being pretty handy with a soldering iron.
People bought the Mac though. Ok so people didn't buy the Mac by the bucket load but they bought enough for Apple to hail it as a triumph, and for Jobs to gloat over the ill-fated Lisa (especially when the revised Lisa II was launched alongside the Mac), which, retailing at $9995, offered similar specs and features for a mere four times the price. Steve Jobs was hailed as a hero and the saviour of Apple with his invention while Raskin (who had already resigned from the project following one too many bust ups with Jobs) got next to nothing.
The Macintosh allowed many concepts to become reality and started a product line that thrives even to this day. Yes the original Motorola 68000 processors may have been superceded by the PowerPC, the G3 and G4, and now the 64 bit G5 but they still retain the same principles that epitomise the original Macintosh - ease of use.
The original Mac may have had its flaws and problems and, when viewed now, has a pitiful specification: the pathetic 128Kb of memory (which was twice the nearest competition, the Commodore 64, when released), the puny 8MHz CPU etc. These were all that was available at the time though and through ingenuity and inventiveness, the original Mac team squeezed the basis of everything that would underpin the Mac world for more than 15 years to come (before the switch to Unix based OS X) onto a single floppy disk.
It's a revolutionary machine that is packed with personality and there's obvious pride in the work of Raskin and his team (early models even had the development team's signatures engraved on the mould for the Mac's case and this mould was used up until it physically wore out and was replaced by a non-signature version).
Note: Really old Mac 128K's are in fact just 'Macintosh' without the '128K' extension. This 'extra name' was added following the introduction of the Mac 512K so that they could be differentiated.
If you've read my comments on the Mac 512 then you'll know that Mac 128s turn up very seldomly on eBay Uk. The situation changed recently with two machines appearing shortly after one another. The first went for a staggering £133 but the second went for a more modest £50 - I now own that second one.