[Swordmaker]

At that $2495 price the original Mac had 128KB of RAM, two floppy drives, no hard drive, but came complete with a built in Monochrome 512 x 342 pixel monitor. An external SCSI 5 MB hard drive, when it became available, was $1495 extra. The total of cost of a Hard drive equipped Mac 128 would have been $3990. In today's dollars, that Mac/HD combo would retail for $7800.00!

Today, the lowest price "all in one" Mac comes with 512MB RAM (4,000 times more memory), a 160 GB HD (~32,000 times more capacity), no floppies (2 fewer), and a 17" color monitor (53% larger) with 1440x900 resolution (~6.5 Times more)... and it is ~260 times faster than that original Mac... for only $999... or a about 13% of the cost of the original Mac in constant dollars.

[Swordmaker]

Blast from the past (1984) Ping... the original Creative Computing Magazine review of the Apple Macintosh 128.

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[big'ol_freeper]

Ping

[ThinkDifferent]

and it is ~260 times faster than that original Mac

That's actually a large understatement. At 1.83GHz the iMac's CPU at runs 230 times the frequency of the original Mac, but it's tremendously more efficient per cycle. I'd guess it's around 10,000 times faster overall. And that's just for one of the two cores. Go Moore!

[6SJ7]

Good find for an article from the wayback machine. I never had the original Macintosh, but I did get to use one of the 512k machines. Been running Macs ever since.

To go along with the 1984 Macintosh, there is also the famous Superbowl ad '1984' directed by Ridley Scott no less.

[Dont Mention the War]

At that $2495 price the original Mac had 128KB of RAM, two floppy drives, no hard drive, but came complete with a built in Monochrome 512 x 342 pixel monitor. An external SCSI 5 MB hard drive, when it became available, was $1495 extra. The total of cost of a Hard drive equipped Mac 128 would have been $3990. In today's dollars, that Mac/HD combo would retail for $7800.00!

And today you can get one on eBay for as little as $7.00. You may be able to get as much as a few hundred, but it has to be in almost immaculate condition, with all the original packaging, manuals, etc. (Sometimes it almost seems like it's the packaging that's worth more than the machine. I just saw a 128k Mac with a busted floppy drive - usually only worth $35 or so at most - go for a little over $500, because it still had everything, down to the unused Apple stickers that are, of course, always included with every new Mac to this day.)

[martin_fierro]

March 1984 Creative Computing cover

Back cover (I learned word processing on Leading Edge software!)

[RayChuang88]

Actually, for about US$1,000 less than that original cost of the 128 KB Macintosh, you can get the current 20" widescreen display iMac with a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 1 GB of RAM, 250 GB Serial ATA hard drive, an optical drive that plays and records most disc formats, ATI Radeon X1600 graphics, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless data support, and multiple I/O ports. Small wonder why Apple is selling as many as they can make.

[Pharmboy]

That commercial made me angry and turned me against Apple for a long time. I was glad when the lost the war to IBM and its clones. They are a good music company, though...I am an iPoder.

[SunkenCiv]

Single-sided 3 1/2 inch 400K floppy drive, with weirdo 524 byte sectors and MFS (folderless aka non-hierarchical), which was superseded by 512 byte sector HFS and double-sided drives (don't recall when). The 512K "Fat Mac" had a few improvements, such as cursor keys on the keyboard (the late J Raskin was an anti-cursor-key zealot). In 1985(?) the Mac Plus introduced SCSI port, but Lightspeed (if memory serves) had already pioneered an internal hard drive which used (if memory serves) internal connections to the external floppy port and power supply.

Ah, those were the days. Glad I got an Apple IIe instead. ;')

[CheneyChick]

but graphics resolution is a superlative 512 x 342 pixels

ROFLBO!