Macintosh:
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Do you hate computers? No I mean REALLY hate computers? Do they scare you? Do you bring new software home and get right to installing it or do you wait for a friend who is wiser in the ways of computers? If so, you are the person the Macintosh was made for. There are two kinds of people who like Macintosh. Those who don't understand computers and like the friendly interface and hardware the Mac offers. The others are the worst techno geeks. The scientists, engineers, programmers and the like, who COULD use a PC but have too much to do. To them a computer is a tool: a means to an end. The Macintosh appeals to them because they recognize the elegance of it's operating system. The fact that a Mac has to deal in binary just like a PC but makes it so much simpler to the user. That my friend is the job of any good programmer: to make their program intuitive and friendly to the newest user, and powerful for the advanced user.
Apple Macintosh. Yes the first Macintosh. Mine isn't actually a 128K model. It's an early 512K which is the same with more memory. It has 512K of memory and a single sided 400K floppy drive. In 1984 your entire operating system, applications, and documents had to run in 128K of memory and fit on a 400K floppy disk. Kinda makes you wonder why Windows 95 needs a 486DX/50 or higher to get anything done.
The original Macintosh was often criticized for it's small screen. In order to understand it, you need to understand the design objectives. When the Mac was introduced computers were HUGE. The idea behind a Mac was to make it simple, friendly, and unobtrusive. That meant ONE case, a small footprint, no switches on the front panel and most of all it had to be as natural on the desk as a telephone.
The B&W screen on that original Mac was just wide enough to display a full width piece of paper, WITH BLACK TEXT, ON A WHITE BACKGROUND! Not a big deal today, but back then we had green displays and you were cool if you had amber. This was the beginning of popular WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs. The Macintosh OS has changed little over the last 12 years and guests are amazed that even in this first OS, they can launch and use MacWrite and MacPaint right off without a manual.
The original Macintosh used the Motorola 68000 processor running at 8 MHz. This was to be the family of chips the Mac OS was to be based on for 10 years (later versions using the 68020, 68030, and 68040). Many people don't realize that this was also the series of chips used in the Amiga computer and I also read that it was IBMs first choice for the PC but legal red tape caused them to go with Intel. What made these computers different was the Apple ROM (read only memory).
In most computers there is a ROM that is used to tell it about itself at startup, to look for disk drives and to test the memory. After that is done it looks for an operating system and turns it over to that OS. In the Macintosh this idea went much further. Apple created a ROM that had all the basic instructions for the on screen graphics embedded into it's ROM. If you wanted a line, box, circle, etc, your program just called one of these routines from the ROM and it would perform it. One line of computer code could call on these programming TOOLS to do complex tasks.Pull down menus, dialog boxes, and windows were all controlled by the Apple ROM. This is the key reason the Mac was never able to be cloned.
This system TOOLBOX as it was called was exclusive to the Mac and without that ROM, you couldn't build a Mac. It's also why the Mac was able to do such complex GUI tasks with so little processor, memory and storage: most of it was built in. This is also why people still mistakenly say the Mac is a good "graphics computer." It is used in the "graphics industry" but that's not what was meant by saying it was "good with graphics."
The original Mac 128 was updated shortly thereafter with a 512 model. Exactly the same computer with more memory. In 1986 the Mac Plus was introduced with a whopping 1 Meg which was expandable to 4 Meg. By far the biggest change was the addition of a SCSI (say SCUZZY) port on the back. Simply put this meant that the Mac had the ability to use an external hard drive and up to 5 other SCSI devices all at the same time. In later years users would be able to add CD ROM, scanners, and tape drives to this port. Today, there are still very few PCs with SCSI. It's considered a high end upgrade on the fastest Pentium yet has been an integral part of every Macintosh since 1986.
To this day I still use a Mac SE (1986-similar size & speed) running System 7.1 and current software. In fact I used it to convert the very old single sided floppies from my 512K to the newer double sided that my Quadra expects. If you look at the Desktop picture at the top of this page you'll see the screen snapshot files of MacPaint and MacWrite (Screen 0 and Screen 1). How many 80088s and 286s are out there running Windows and current software? Before you write a Mac off as too expensive, think about how long you'll be able to use it and factor that into the cost.