Macintosh Plus

Introduced:	January 16, 1986
MSRP:	$2599
CPU:	Motorola 68000
CPU speed:	8 MHz
Shipped with system version:	1.1
RAM:	1 MB, expandable to 4 MB
Discontinued:	October 15, 1990

The Macintosh Plus was introduced two years after the original Macintosh. It originally shipped with a beige case, but was later manufactured in the long-lived "platinum" color.

It was the first Macintosh model to include a SCSI port, thus making it compatible with (and boosting the popularity of) the external Apple SCSI Hard Disk 20 (HD SC20), a 20 MB hard drive which was introduced by Apple in 1985.

An all-in-one unit, the Plus had a one-bit, 9" black & white display, common to Macs of the period. The 72-dpi resolution gave the appearance of grayscale. It had one 3 1/2 inch floppy disk drive, using variable speed GCR (incompatible therefore with the PC drives), with a capacity of 800 KB.

The computer included a keyboard (which was not an extended keyboard) and a one-button mouse. It did not have a fan, making it extremely quiet in operation.

The applications MacPaint, MacDraw and HyperCard were bundled with the Mac Plus. Third-party software applications available included Microsoft Word, Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint, as well as Aldus's PageMaker. This was the introduction of GUI versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on any PC.

For those of you who are nostalgic, there is a program called vMac that will emulate a Mac Plus on a variety of platforms, including Unix, Windows, DOS and Mac OS.