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Apple Mac at 40 Years - Nice Article

The Macintosh came out in January of '84, I had mine in November. College purchase program, about $1500, vs the list of $2499. My first box of Apple floppies cost me $40.

That computer cost me ~4300 in todays dollars, the floppies were almost $120. Man, were we crazy. Being young with little value of money.

I would spend far more over time, none of which remains save as faded experiences in my head.

First time I saw the machine was, I think, in February of that year.

It was at a local computer store, and I was with my still, now, best friend. And, yea, it was amazing. I distinctly recall my friend simply mousing over the menus, watching them appear and disappear as they went, back and forth, popping in and out, and just going "Wooowwwww!!".

Here's a bit of trivia, I'm sure not many know regarding those menus.

Now, the way they worked was they took a snapshot of the screen area beneath the menu, and just Bit Blit them back when the menu disappeared. Pretty basic technique.

However, what folks may not realize is at the time, memory being so tight, the software would check if it had enough free memory for the bitmap. If it didn't, then it would simply invalidate the area and force all of the underlying elements to redraw (which would be kind of awful). This NEVER happened. I think I saw it once, but they went through and thought it out.
 
I bought a Fat Mac in the summer of 1985, so a bit later than the original introduction. I have the receipts here somewhere, but I bought it through the "employee purchase program" from NYNEX where my father worked. I want to say I spent over $4,000 after the discount because I literally bought everything that was available with all of my savings. Gross price was $2795 for the Mac, $550 for the ImageWriter, $500 for a 1200-baud modem, $500 for the external disk drive, and I don't remember what else. The numeric keypad was the cheapest thing @$80 after a box of diskettes. I think the gross bill was $5500. I still have the machine, too. I pull it out to test it every year.

Now I can use a $35 Raspberry Pi to emulate it.

Rich
 
RichCini said:
Now I can use a $35 Raspberry Pi to emulate it.
Click to expand...
That's all right. In the movie "2010", sequel to 2001, they had an effects sequence of Jupiter collapsing. It was one of the early example of CGI, and they used a Cray to pull it off.

Think how they feel about the Rasperry Pi today :).
 
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