Nine inches of black and white, and the whole world fits inside.
Five hundred and twelve pixels. They do so much with five hundred and twelve pixels. A mere three hundred and forty-two down. Nine diagonal inches of glass. No color. No grayscale. And they do it with five hundred and twelve pixels.
A wonderland: small enough to hold in your head all at once, sharp enough that you can count the pixels, honest enough that what you draw is what you get.
People build their livelihoods on this little screen, and would not trade it for anything bigger. And they do it in five hundred and twelve pixels.
| Model | Year | Notes |
| Macintosh 128K | 1984 | The original. 128K of memory, one floppy. |
| Macintosh 512K ("Fat Mac") | 1984 | Four times the memory. |
| Macintosh Plus | 1986 | SCSI, a proper keyboard, a full megabyte. |
| Macintosh SE | 1987 | An expansion slot and room for an internal hard disk. |
| Macintosh Classic | 1990 | The last of the line, and the cheapest. The same nine inches. |
Dotted patterns stand in for gray. Dithering fakes every shade. Chicago font and crisp one-pixel rules win the day.
A sample of what lives on the little screen:
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MacPaint -- Bill Atkinson's canvas. The first thing anyone draws on a Mac, and still one of the best things you can. Download (.sit) |
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MacWrite -- the other half of the original box. What you type is what prints. Download (.sit) |
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HyperCard -- stacks of cards you wire together in a few lines of plain English. Download (.hqx) |
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Microsoft Excel -- the spreadsheet, on the Mac before anywhere else. Download (.sit) |
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ChemDraw -- every molecule a chemist draws, drawn here first. Download (.sit) |
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THINK Pascal -- where Mac software is written, on the Mac it runs on. Download (.sit) |
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Aldus PageMaker -- a print shop on a nine-inch screen. The reason the Mac sits in every newsroom. Download (.sit) |
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Dark Castle -- rocks, bats, and a stairway that wants you dead. Download (.sit) |
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Glypha -- Joust in a pharaoh's tomb. By John Calhoun, who also gives us Glider. Download (.bin) |
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Shufflepuck Cafe -- air hockey against a gallery of cartoon hustlers. Download (.sit) |
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Cap'n Magneto -- Al Evans's freeware space adventure, 1986. Ships vanish; you go looking. Download (.sit) |
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Glider -- the paper airplane, in its own house. (See the Glider tribute.) |
Everything above arrives stuffed, binhexed, or both. StuffIt Expander unpacks the lot -- and it is a self-extracting archive, so it opens itself.
This shelf only scratches the surface. For thousands more, visit Macintosh Garden.