The 1984 Apple Macintosh — How does it look today?

Everybody knows MacBook or iMac. But when the first “Mac” was released, and what did it look like? Let’s test it and figure it out.

Hardware

In 1984 the Apple company was not a beginner on the market. The previous Apple II model had been on sale for several years. It had a sort of primitive OS, based on the BASIC programming language and the minimum ability to work with disks and files, but the computer was cheaper than its competitors and, unlike CP/M machines, had the ability to display graphics. The next model, Apple Lisa, was too expensive ($ 9,995 price in 1983, or $ 25,811 equivalent nowadays). It did not become popular but probably allowed Apple developers to tune and improve their new graphics-based UI. And finally, in 1984, the hero of this article, the Apple Macintosh was released.

© https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

The computer had a $ 2,495 price ($ 6,140 nowadays) and had the following specs:

• 7.8 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU
• 128 KB RAM (512 KB in later models)
• 9" 512x342 monochrome display

It’s hard to find the Apple Macintosh now in working condition, but everybody can easily investigate how it works using the emulator. And I actually recommend readers, who are interested, to do so— booting the real system from the real disk image will get you a much better experience than watching any video or reading an article like this one.

Emulation Setup

There are several ways to test Apple Macintosh on your PC. The easiest one is to use an online emulator that can run directly in the browser. It actually works good, but the web browser obviously does not allow to install of any other software, different from a choice by the web page author. Those, who want more, should use the full-fledged simulator on their PC. There are several emulators available, and the easiest to use, in my opinion, is the Mini vMac. To run it on the PC, several components required:

• The simulator itself.
• The Apple Macintosh ROM image (file with the name “vmac.rom”, it has about 128 KB size). The author of the simulator did not include it for legal…