![]() ![]() Anyway, what seemingly little appreciation that was held by the public for the Macintosh Plus seemed to go a long way because the Plus still holds the record for the longest Mac to stay in production at Apple with a five-year lifespan. I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate the advancements that appeared in those later machines such as internet capabilities and CD-ROMs, but all I knew was that the Mac did what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. Perhaps I was deprived as a youngster, but among the several other Windows 95- and Mac OS 8-powered machines that I used at home and at school, I loved the Mac Plus the most. How could anyone dislike such a friendly, warm, and caring machine as the Plus? It may have been the price: $2600 back in the late eighties is equivalent to about $5000 today. ![]() When I read that the Plus wasn’t quite so popular as Apple might have hoped and often found itself sold in cheaper quantities to educational institutions, I nearly cried. The original price tag for this 15-pound hunk of eightiesness was $2599. The Macintosh Plus was released in January of 1986 after the original Mac (two years before) and the Macintosh 512k (a year before). Though I sometimes made visits to Word to start my career in writing, I mainly used the Mac up until around 2000 to play games that remain my all-time PC favorites today: Arkanoid, MacMissiles, Cairo Shootout, Risk, The New Daleks, and Stratego. My older siblings used Microsoft Word 5.0 aplenty to print school assignments out on our StyleWriter II (which my father must have purchased later in the 90’s as it wasn’t sold until 1993 I have no memory of this, though). Since then, my entire family of nine lovingly used that machine for the next decade and then some. This didn’t include the Ericcson ~40 megabyte hard drive, spare floppy drive, and Kensington System Saver that he purchased seperately. My father originally purchased the Macintosh Plus in 1988 for probably around $2,000. I was instated into this life about the time when personal computers they began to take off fervently and the term “PC” still applied to any computer small enough to fit on a desk. I came a bit after the time when personal computers initially made their debut, so I missed models such as the Commodores that I’ve read many hardened and salty fellows here speak of in comments on OSNews. Breaking away from the mundane every-day news of boring (I jest) new technologies such as touchscreens the size of a wall and upcoming operating systems that support graphics cards with 1.5 GB of vRAM, take a walk down memory lane– or “Neurological Alley” as I like to call it– and take a look inside, outside, and in all of the nooks and crannies in between the circuits of the Macintosh Plus and its accompanying System 6, fresh from the splendor of 1986. We all have our most favored machines of yesteryear in this I assume that most people are like me, anyway.
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