[Macworld]

Post your comments for The Macintosh II celebrates its 25th anniversary here

[JamesPetersen]

I had the first Mac IIci. At the time, ca 1990 and for a long time following, it was in my opinion, the best machine one could have. It opened doors for me and I still remember it fondly. (What's not to love about 4 mb of RAM and an 80 mb hard drive?)

[hayesk]

Also worth noting that the Mac II allowed multiple displays to be used system-wide, in a plug and play fashion a decade before PCs could do it.

[jpmhughes]

I still have my original Mac II sitting in my closet. You know it will be worth something someday right! : )

[simdude]

If I'm not mistaken, the Macintosh II line, at least up through the IIci was still made in America too. The IIci's were built like tanks (as were the original IBM PC's). I think in time, we realized that computers get obsoleted so fast, they don't need to be built to last more than 3-4 years. Seems so wasteful, but I suppose it's the price of progress. At least many of the components are recyclable now.

[Philistine]

JamesPetersen, on 07 June 2012 - 11:24 AM, said:

I had the first Mac IIci. At the time, ca 1990 and for a long time following, it was in my opinion, the best machine one could have. It opened doors for me and I still remember it fondly. (What's not to love about 4 mb of RAM and an 80 mb hard drive?)

I have one sitting on my desk right now. It still works great, running a 68040 processor card, ethernet card (big deal at the time), maxed out with 32MB RAM, and has a 1.2GB HD (the last of several upgrades). It was a fantastic computer for its day.

[joekewe]

I've still got my Mac Plus and Apple ][, but I'm particularly fond of my Mac II and Mac IIx - both with Radius Rocket accelerator cards with dual 68040's. Very zippy for their time. PageMaker and Freehand would scream! Of course, I'd rather have my trusty 17" MBP now -- with 50 times more RAM than their old hard drives stored.

[RobLewis]

68MB of RAM? I don't think so. IIRC, my IIcx, a later design, held a maximum of 8MB.

[eteen]

RobLewis, on 07 June 2012 - 12:45 PM, said:

68MB of RAM? I don't think so. IIRC, my IIcx, a later design, held a maximum of 8MB.

The IIcx were not 32 bit clean machines if I remember correctly.

But the max was was 128 mb according to everymac.com
With 32-bit addressing and the MODE32 system extension this model is capable of supporting 128 MB of RAM (16 MB SIMMs in all eight slots).

This post has been edited by eteen: 07 June 2012 - 01:04 PM

[bastion]

RobLewis, on 07 June 2012 - 12:45 PM, said:

68MB of RAM? I don't think so. IIRC, my IIcx, a later design, held a maximum of 8MB.

No, it could, in fact, go up to 68MB.

FWIW, the IIcx could actually get up to 128MB *if* you used a 3rd-party product to supplant the original dirty ROM. No trouble addressing the space, but some parts of the ROM abused the high bits of pointers.

This post has been edited by bastion: 07 June 2012 - 01:10 PM

[pawhite524]

Thanks for this well written and entertaining article. I ca see by the thread of commenters you brought out some good memories for many of us.

[Bubowski]

Cool. Hard to believe it's been that long. One of my first freelance projects for Apple was working on the developer docs for the color video card. Got to hang out on the second floor of the Mariani building with one of the first functional prototypes with alpha plastics (i.e. fully transparent). Not easy coaxing the proper color spaces out of the machine in those days, but I felt really privileged getting to work with the new beast at that stage of it's lifecycle.

[Raymondo17]

I worked on a IIcx when they first came out. Great machine, even if I now work on Photoshop files larger than its entire hard drive. I also had a grayscale monitor (can't remember the manufacturer) that could flip its orientation from landscape to portrait. My boss would bring clients through my cubicle just to gawk at it. For years I begged my boss for a color monitor. He just couldn't see the point of it. The day I quit that job, I found out he was color blind. :/

A toast to the Apple II and the good times had on them!

[Jasonmwa]

pawhite524, on 07 June 2012 - 01:37 PM, said:

Thanks for this well written and entertaining article. I ca see by the thread of commenters you brought out some good memories for many of us.

I agree. As someone who's early Apple years capped at the original Mac and returned with the iMac, these reminders of non-Jobs Apple products, the ones that did keep the company alive, are informative and interesting.