We all have our most favored machines of yesteryear; in this I assume that most people are like me, anyway. Breaking away from the mundane every-day news of boring (I jest) new technologies such as touchscreens the size of a wall and upcoming operating systems that support graphics cards with 1.5 GB of vRAM, take a walk down memory lane– or “Neurological Alley” as I like to call it– and take a look inside, outside, and in all of the nooks and crannies in between the circuits of the Macintosh Plus and its accompanying System 6, fresh from the splendor of 1986.
Introduction & History
I came a bit after the time when personal computers initially made their debut, so I missed models such as the Commodores that I’ve read many hardened and salty fellows here speak of in comments on OSAlert. I was instated into this life about the time when personal computers they began to take off fervently and the term “PC” still applied to any computer small enough to fit on a desk. My father originally purchased the Macintosh Plus in 1988 for probably around $2,000. This didn’t include the Ericcson ~40 megabyte hard drive, spare floppy drive, and Kensington System Saver that he purchased seperately.
Since then, my entire family of nine lovingly used that machine for the next decade and then some. My older siblings used Microsoft Word 5.0 aplenty to print school assignments out on our StyleWriter II (which my father must have purchased later in the 90’s as it wasn’t sold until 1993; I have no memory of this, though). Though I sometimes made visits to Word to start my career in writing, I mainly used the Mac up until around 2000 to play games that remain my all-time PC favorites today: Arkanoid, MacMissiles, Cairo Shootout, Risk, The New Daleks, and Stratego.
The Macintosh Plus was released in January of 1986 after the original Mac (two years before) and the Macintosh 512k (a year before). The original price tag for this 15-pound hunk of eightiesness was $2599. When I read that the Plus wasn’t quite so popular as Apple might have hoped and often found itself sold in cheaper quantities to educational institutions, I nearly cried. How could anyone dislike such a friendly, warm, and caring machine as the Plus? It may have been the price: $2600 back in the late eighties is equivalent to about $5000 today. Perhaps I was deprived as a youngster, but among the several other Windows 95- and Mac OS 8-powered machines that I used at home and at school, I loved the Mac Plus the most. I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate the advancements that appeared in those later machines such as internet capabilities and CD-ROMs, but all I knew was that the Mac did what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Anyway, what seemingly little appreciation that was held by the public for the Macintosh Plus seemed to go a long way because the Plus still holds the record for the longest Mac to stay in production at Apple with a five-year lifespan.
Hardware Look-Over
The Plus sported a 9-inch 512 by 342 pixel monochrome integrated CRT monitor, an integrated 3.5-inch 800 KB floppy drive, 1 MB of RAM that was expandable to 4 MB (but not without actually clipping two resistors), a Motorola 68000 processor running at a grand 8 MHz, and two SCSI ports; this was the first Mac to include SCSI expansion slots, and these ports remained standard in all models up until the iMac in 1998. The standard package also included the infamous one-buttoned mouse and a standard keyboard; this was the last Mac model to include a keyboard with a phone-cord-esque (RJ-11 to be specific) cable and port.
I found it very interesting that the keyboard sports a capslock key that mechanically remembers whether it’s pushed down or not– no software involved. It’s essentially a shift key with a mechanism to keep it down when pressed (not unlike the capslock key of my old Danish typewriter).
Beige in color and bulky in beauty, the outer hardware was pretty stereotypical of what we think of when we imagine a classic, smiling Mac. In 1987, they actually began shipping “platinum” colored (really just gray) cases. The Plus that I used for this article was of the platinum color. Why monocrhomatic color schemes were so popular back in the day is what I would like to know. I suppose we just needed time to develop the pretty machines of today.
I also own (as previously mentioned) an Ericsson 40 MB SCSI hard drive and a Kensington System Saver, so these will be mentioned here and there as well. The System Saver basically is just a glorified fan to place on one of the top vents and a way to have the power button in the front– I always hated reaching to the back of any Mac to turn it on, anyway; bad designing on Apple’s part, in my opinion. The hard drive is 10 x 11 inches and was designed to be a perfect base for the Plus to snugly sit upon.
System Software 6
I had always thought that System 6 was a very friendly system for its time, and I maintain that even today. I vaguely remember OS 8 and 9 that we had on varied versions of Macs at one of my old public schools, and I always remember them having trouble with the software performing tasks that we students were all supposed to do on assignment. I also remember them overheating perpetually (especially those blueberry Macs). For some reason, the familiar black and white schematic, the smiling Mac at startup, the simple interface, and the system’s ability to do whatever I wanted it to do without trouble (at least with the software that we owned) caused me to love the Plus and hate the Macs of the 90s.
Sentiments aside, the Plus could handle any Macintosh system from 3.2 to 7.5.5 (Wikipedia says it could operate back to 1.1, but I’m really unsure of that fact), but System 6 was the standard during most of the Plus’ lifetime of being sold. System 6 was released about a year after the Plus and discontinued in April of 1991, only six months after the Plus was.
System 6 originally was very buggy with its initial release, and thus 6.0.1 fixed 66 bugs by September of 1988. 6.0.2 was released shortly afterward to fix a screen font spacing bug. System 6.0.2 was the currently installed system on the Plus used for this review. 6.0.8L was the final release before the acclaimed System 7.
The system was small enough to fit on an 800k floppy disk but still supported color (for later color Macs), widely-used multitasking software known as the Multifinder (imagine multitasking actually being a feature to brag about), two gigabyte hard drives, and more. Despite its capabilities, it was still a rather simple system both in looks and in technicalities. Some of its limitations, for example, were that only up to 65,536 files could be on those 2 GB drives, there was no such thing as virtual memory, the trash always emptied when the Finder ended (essentially every time the computer shut down), there was very little customization, and only fifteen Desk Accessories (little useful apps such as a calculator, scrapbook, and even the control panel) could be installed at one time. These would all eventually be remedied in System 7 and OS 8.
In my experience, System 6 coupled with the Macintosh Plus could tackle some pretty useful and entertaining applications. I’ve already gone over the myriad of games I liked to play as well as Microsoft Word; it also ran Excel, Personal Ancestral File, MacDraw II, varied other types of programs. It obviously doesn’t compare in productivity with today’s application offering for even mobile devices, but it was viable enough at least for some people to last the ages; the person I bought this Mac from (my original Plus’ screen died in 2004) was selling it for his mother who had used it from when they bought it until 2009.
HyperCard
Even though it was an almost-dead project by the time I even realized we had the original version installed on our Plus, I began tinkering with HyperCard in the early 2000’s and designed dozens of practice-stacks, most of which were either pure button/text or were simple “fortune telling” stacks. I did end up designing one game that I was somewhat proud of: “Dastroid” (taking after only the name of “Arkanoid) was a simple game in which you used certian weapons ranging from a pea-shooter to a shotgun to take your opponent’s HP down and kill him before he killed you. It even had the ability for human/computer and two-player games.
I was also in the middle of designing “Smellytubby Shootout,” a HyperCard game in which the user chose a Smellytubby character and traversed about Tubbyland, destroying monsters deployed by the Evil Black Smellytubby and his master, Babysun, when the screen on my original plus died in 2004.
HyperCard was a very popular program bundled with the Plus by August of 1987. It came already with a plethora of “stacks,” or predesigned applications, that were all examples of what one could do with HyperCard and HyperTalk (the programming language developed for use with HyperCard). Wikipedia puts it beautifully in words that I needn’t process again:
HyperCard has been described as a “software erector set.” It integrates a software development environment with a run-time environment in a simple, easily accessible way. The tools required to write an application, principally the creation and configuration of screen objects like buttons, fields and menus, are part and parcel with the ability to add programmed functionality to those objects. When designing and programming an application one may contemplate both structure and capability within a single well defined arena. That one could personally design and implement a custom application uniquely suited to one’s own needs revolutionized the very concept of what software was. Instead of trying to force a particular task onto an Excel spreadsheet, for example, a custom solution may be authored, modified and updated as needed, in a very short time, without functional compromise and with a personalized interface. “Empowerment” became a catchword as this possibility was embraced by the Macintosh community, as was the phrase “programming for the rest of us”, that is, anyone, not just professional programmers.
A Look Back in Time
To provide just a glimpse of what running System 6 on the Macintosh Plus was like, I’ve put together this film of the Plus booting into System 6, playing some games, taking a glimpse of Smellytubby Shootout in HyperCard, looking at the customization options in the control panel, typing in Microsoft Word 5.0, inserting and ejecting a floppy disk, and shutting down. The film is in two parts due to YouTube’s 10-minute limit, so forgive me for the inconvenience. System 6 obviously never had any video screen capturing software designed for it, and I didn’t want to use an emulator on my newer Windows desktop, so this is simply a DV camera trained on the screen. Enjoy or skip it.
I also found this highly enjoyable time capsule made by Apple in 1987. The film presents itself as if it was made in 1997; this is essentially what Apple thought (or hoped, or dreamed) the late 90’s would be like for them.
Boy, were they wrong. I personally love the “Vista Mac”, how their outlook of the nineties was sort of opposite of what really happened, and how they seemed to think the “classic” Mac form factor would remain essentially unchanged. Of course, that was probably more or less joking.
Macintosh Plus Quirks
The Plus has also had some interesting history around it. It was featured in a segment of Star Trek, the designers’ signatures are superscribed on the back of the plastic case, and, cooincidentally, the very first manufactured Plus, given to the creator of Star Trek back in the day, has just been listed up for auction online. Bidding starts at 1500USD.
What was also interesting is that the Plus with System 6 can actually browse the Internet (though with limited functionality compared to the modern browser, I’m sure; also see this link). I currently don’t have a modem for it nor do I have an appropriate Internet connection compatible with a modem of that caliber, but I’m hoping to one day satisfy my 80s nerd inside by accomplishing this task and uploading a video of it.
What I’d also love to do is install a Linux distribution on the hard drive of my Plus, but my searches have found that the closest thing to doing this would be to install MacMinix on top of System 6, and even MacMinix seems pretty hard to find. However, the Mac SE and later Macs all are able to run forms of Debian or other distributions.
Conclusion
All in all, I find the Macintosh Plus to be a very friendly computer along with its OS, System 6, despite the sometimes slow drawing of graphics and the very slow floppy drive reading (those were always slow). I suppose my personal appreciation of it is mostly sentimental and nostalgic and that there are other machines from the 80s that were better at the time, but it’s still a great machine to have. I personally believe that if every man owned a Macintosh Plus, the very powers of darkness would have been shaken forever. Long live the Plus.
Do you have memories of using the Plus or similar classic Macs? How about even older computers? Why not share those memories in the comments? Also, if you’d like to write a remeniscing review of some of your old hardware, feel free to submit it to be published here at OSAlert by writing it in our submissions form or by emailing it to us. Everyone loves to look back at the old days.
“I also found this highly enjoyable time capsule made by Apple in 1987. The film presents itself as if it was made in 1997; this is essentially what Apple thought (or hoped, or dreamed) the late 90’s would be like for them. ”
which? there’s no link so maybe you mean this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WdS4TscWH8
Which? The embedded video that says “Time Capsule” under the continuing paragraph.
I only see 2 embedded videos. mac plus part 1 and part 2.
Hm. I’m seeing all three of the videos. I’m using Chrome, but now looking at it with IE, I only see three empty spaces saying that there should be something there. Firefox only shows the two you see– odd. So there is something up.
Edited 2009-09-22 18:47 UTC
They wish. Chop off one zero.
They only used 40000 transistors, but I was told by a professor (or I read in a text; it was 20 years ago) that the name indicated how many transistors Motorola thought they could fit on the chip. Although it wouldn’t surprise me if it was also due to Motorola’s previous 8-bit family, the 68xx.
It was an extremely well designed processor, running the Amigas of the time, too, and later the Palm PDA.
Whoops. You’re right. Sorry about that. Fixed.
And thanks for expounding on the history of the processor. That was very interesting. So if your professor (or the text) was correct, I deem that the processor could have run faster and worked harder if Motorola had built it with all of the transistors that it could have supported. Interesting.
Funny about the mention of the 65535 file limit on the Mac filesystem of the time: it was actually slightly less than that, of course, due to some overhead, but there were no (to my awareness, at least for machines with an OS sold in the US that weren’t Unix mutations) consumer-level machines that had anything better than that limit, though perhaps at some point, OS/2 did, but OS/2 never caught on. Consider: until NTFS, Microsoft (other than perhaps their Xenix platform) with FAT, never had anything better than that same limit, but with more of a limitation than the Mac filesystem (still just HFS at the time) had: every time you wanted to use a larger hard drive that couldn’t be mapped to < 65536 powers of 2 bytes allocation unit, you had to double the allocation unit to the next integral power of 2, providing for huge amounts of waste, as well as some number of files limitation that often more closely approached 32768 if a drive just barely went over that nice easy boundary. Mac HFS, by comparison, allowed you to divide into the maximum 65536 allocation units that were multiples of 512 byte sectors, which made things perhaps a little odd in some respects, but allowed more files on average than FAT16 did.
FAT32, of course, does away with that 65536-overhead number of files, but it also doesn’t use extents (HFS does) and as such, has a horrible amount of overhead required to handle the number of files in the housekeeping department, because like FAT16 and FAT12, the File Allocation Table is a series of intersnarled singly-linked lists that snake through (possibly) the entire FAT. Oh, yes: HFS also supported long file names far before FAT ever did
You forget the Amiga. The filesystem – simply called the AmigaDOS FileSystem (FS) until the Fast FileSystem (FFS) came out, at which point it was called the Old FileSystem (OFS) – had no limit on files beyond what would fit on the media. The root directory started in the middle of the volume and kept expanding until you ran out of space. You also weren’t limited to 8.3 filenames – you could have up to 30 characters (a limitation of Workbench – AmigaDOS supported up to 102 characters… monstrous at the time).
FAT32 also have 65536 file limit.
My company still use a few Win98 PC and sometimes these PC will have runtime error ’67’ – too many files.
If the user use long file name, the file limit is less than 65536.
This is a very well-done article. Besides just facts, it allowed me to “feel” the experience of the Mac Plus.
I sometimes reminisce about my first computer – the TI 99/4A. While the PC was an 8-bit, monochrome, speaker-beeping machine, my TI had a 16-bit processor, 3-voice sound and beautiful color. It still pains me to think that a company as integral to the nascent personal computer revolution as Texas Instruments managed to die on the PC vine. I still believe the home computer world would have been vastly more colorful and user-friendly had TI or Commodore won those early wars against the boring, gray PC. Oh well, I’m old, I better get over it!
I’ve taken a couple of old (the oldest being a Mac SE, which also has MacMinix and some other fun vintage toys on it) Macs online just for sport, without resorting to a dialup modem. The key is an intermediary machine. To attach the old machine to the Internet, one needs (aside from appropriate software on the old machine) a second Mac from the 1991-1997 era that has both AAUI (or Ethernet) and mini-din-8 Apple serial ports on it (I used a Centris 660/AV, and later a Powermac 6100 as intermediary machines. Bonus points if the intermediary box is running A/UX, I never went for it despite having copies of the appropriate install media) . You can attach the intermediary to a modern TCP/IP over Ethernet network (and through it the Internet) over a 10-T transceiver on the AAUI port (or directly through the Ethernet port were possible), and share the connection via a LocalTalk network over the serial ports. There are lots of guides on doing this (and similar, a few of which apparently avoid the intermediary machine under specific circumstances) around the net, as always when playing with older Macs, http://lowendmac.com/ (for information) and http://www.jagshouse.com/ (for finding software) are the best places I know of to start.
The other bonus of this kind of setup is you can share out resources across the age gap, I had an old Personal Laser Writer (300?) connected through the intermediary to use as the household printer until a couple years ago.
(I haven’t done this in a while, I may be misremembering/omitting some details, lately I’ve been using Basilisk][ and a couple disc images for my vintage Mac “needs”, which far more convenient, but not quite as fun)
Thank you for that trip down memory lane. I have a Mac SE that still works! It has a 40MB … YES! 40 MB external SCSI drive.
I loved, nay, I still love my old SE. At the time it came with system 4.1. In fact, I had Arabic and English on the system.
Awesome machine, hypercard, Kings quest, load runner, Dark Castle, Super paint, Mac Paint. ah yes, Falcon F-16 flight sim. 4mb of memory, made all the amiga guys jealous.
You made me remember my Macintosh Classic II… my first computer! It ran Cosmic Osmo (what a weird game…), Arkanoid too (my favorite game that I stoled from the school) and Paint Shop Pro, printable in 4 colors…
I remember reading something about “internet” and how you could connect with a modem… I chose a bike instead for my anniversary…
While I never had anything besides a Apple IIc, I do appreciate trips down memory lane. Old machines (and old programmers) were surprisingly useful. Kids today don’t appreciate how good they’ve got it!
P.S. Ever tried Ardi’s Executor? Well, it’s defunct (as well as Ardi) but Cliff Matthews has put it on Github and ported it to Linux, Mac OS X, etc. (It originally ran on DOS via DJGPP, which is where I first heard of it.)
http://github.com/ctm/executor
“Executor is a Macintosh emulator that is able to run many ancient Mac OS 680×0 binaries (System 6 era, early System 7) without using any intellectual property from Apple Computer.”
The biggest jokes for me have to be…
– Scully smiling happily at the amazing revenue his leadership brought.
– “In other news, Jack Tramiel opened a new restaurant today.”
I still have my Mega2 ST which ran a Mac emulator faster than a real Mac at the time, and now I can run an ST emulator on my Mac that definitely runs faster then ANY current Atari computers.
Of course if the post-Jobs management at Apple had stayed we’d probably all be posting from our Windows (or Linux) boxes, but that brings it back to the first joke.
I’m a big fan of classic MacOS. Someday it would be really great if a group of people wrote an opensource version of Copland that ran on x86.
Something like the Haiku-OS project.
You must be kidding!?! System 6 was the One True MacOS!
MacOS 6 doesn’t have pre-emptive multitasking. Perhaps a solution would be MacOS 6 virtual machines with each app having its instance of MacOS.
No MacOS until OSX had preemptive multitasking. The switch from cooperative to preemptive multitasking was one of the major features of 10.0.
The major feature change from System 6 to System 7 was getting rid of the switcher. System 7 was Mac’s first real desktop OS, allowing easy use of more than one program at a time.
There was an experiment at Carnegie Mellon in the early 90’s to put classic MacOS on top of the Mach microkernel. I ran it on my Mac ][ci in my dorm room and it worked pretty well. Not all software ran successfully, but when it did you could see it with a “ps aux” and telnet into our out of the box. Traditional Mac apps ran cooperatively multitasked in their little box, but BSD apps ran on the protected, pre-emptive kernel.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/mach/public/FAQ/obsole…
The Wikipedia article “History of Mac OS” confirmed my dim memory – System 6 used the high byte of a 32-bit address for flags. Don’t forget, at the time RAM was so expensive, that lots of system routines were in ROM, although the ROM routines could be overridden with patches. Of course on the original IBM pc, RAM was *SO* expensive that a full 640k once seemed like a lot.
This 1m-to-8gb jump, I just spot-checked and upgrading a Dell optiplex-960 to “8GB DDR2 Non-ECC SDRAM, 800MHz, (4DIMM)”, the total price with just that feature is only $938 in today’s dollars, this 8000-fold memory expansion still boggles my mind.
All MacOS up through System 6 used 24 bit addressing. System 7 was the first that could use 32 bit “clean” addressing. OS 8 was the first to require 32 bit addressing.
RAM was expensive, but the price dropped incredibly quick. The first 32 MB SIMM the company I worked for bought cost them $1100. I can get one hundred times that memory for less than one tenth that price.
It brings back a funny mixture of memories. Hypercard was great. And in the eighties, OS Classic was way ahead of DOS and then Windows in usability. The hardware rapidly started to show its age, but there were enough compensations. And Apple’s mania for lockin and control were not yet oppressive or particularly obvious. So I used Macs from close to the original right up to the pastel iMacs.
But gradually, Windows caught up, parity with 98, way ahead of Classic with XP, the PC hardware overtook Mac hardware by miles, Linux arrived, the lockins became more and more strident. As the products recovered from their slump in the nineties, the company became less and less attractive, and the Mac Fanatics became more and more fanatical.
Apple would in the end neither support Hypercard nor open source it, and finally dumped it, leaving everyone in the lurch. This was a kind of turning point – lifestyle marketing had triumphed over the original vision.
The vision had anyway all along been a very strange and unsustainable mixture of empowerment coupled with obsessive control.
And this has continued. The iTunes lockins were bad enough, but the lockins with the app store for the phone are really bad. In the end, for me, Apple is a company you should not do business with, regardless of how good its products may or may not be, because its ethics and business practices are repugnant.
You can get an up to date descendant of Hypercard in the form of Revolution. There is now a free version – look for the alpha version of Media on the runrev site. Its cross platform, though the Linux version has one or two gaps in it. It will seem quite familiar to the Hypercard aficionado, if there are any left. Sadly, you mention HC to the average Mac Head of the new generation today, even the most die hard, and most of them have never heard of it…
Edited 2009-09-23 09:02 UTC
I still have my Macintosh 512k (with signatures on the inside of the box). it’s in the storage room somewhere but still works as far as I know.
“Our” first computer was a 386DX33 (IIRC) that my wife and I bought right after Win3.1 came out. Problem was, I sort of, well, monopolized it. A friend of ours, who worked as a Mac tech in a computer store, had a smoke-damaged Mac Classic that he sold my wife. She gave it to me for my birthday with the intention of getting more seat time with the Windows PC. (Needless to say, it didn’t quite work out that way.)
The only thing wrong with it was its lack of a case (which had gotten melted), so our friend stuck it in a metal terminal case he scrounged up somewhere that reminded me of Darth Vader’s mask. Later on, he found a real Mac Classic case for it, complete with the reset and restart (?) buttons on the left side, perfect for when your ResEdit session went awry.
You could boot into System 6.0.3 (?) from ROM by pressing Command+Option+X+O at boot.
It still works – Motorola 68K CPU, 40MB hdd, 4MB RAM, 9″ CRT, running System 7.0.1 (which, at the time, seemed a lot more advanced than Windows 3.1). Your article prompted me to get it down from the shelf and turn it on. It thinks today’s date is “9/22/9”.