Macintosh Plus

Template:Mac specs The Macintosh Plus computer was the third model in the Macintosh line, introduced two years after the original Macintosh and a little more than a year after the Macintosh 512K. It originally had a beige case, but in 1987, the case color was changed to the long-lived "platinum" color.

Overview

It was the first Macintosh model to include a SCSI port, which launched the popularity of external SCSI devices for Macs, including hard disks, tape drives, CD-ROM drives, printers, and even monitors. External SCSI became the norm for Mac peripherals from 1986 through 1987, when Apple began to phase out SCSI in favor of less expensive technologies such as the IDE interface used for PC-compatible computers.

It had a new 3.5" double-sided 800K floppy drive, offering double the capacity of previous Macs along with backward compatibility. Like the 400K drive in earlier models, the drive used variable speed GCR, making disks written with it incompatible with PC drives. The 800K drive had two read/write heads, enabling it to simultaneously use both sides of the floppy disk and thereby double storage capacity.

The Mac Plus was the first of many Macintoshes to use SIMM modules for its memory. It came standard with 1MB of RAM (four 256K SIMMs) and could be upgraded to 4MB of RAM. It had 128K of ROM on the motherboard, which was double the amount of ROM that was in previous Macs; the new System software and ROMs included routines to support SCSI, the new 800K floppy drive, and the Hierarchical File System (HFS), which used a true directory structure on disks (as opposed to the earlier MFS, Macintosh File System in which all files were stored in a single directory, with one level of pseudo-folders overlayed on them.) For programmers, the fourth Inside Macintosh volume detailed how to utilize HFS and the rest of the Mac Plus's new system software.

An all-in-one unit, the Plus had a one-bit, 9" 512 by 342 pixel black & white display with a resolution of 72 PPI, identical to that of previous Macintosh models. Unlike earlier Macs, the Mac Plus's keyboard included a numeric keypad, and, as with previous Macs, it had a one-button mouse and no fan, making it extremely quiet in operation.

The applications MacPaint and MacWrite were bundled with the Mac Plus. After August of 1987, HyperCard and MultiFinder were also bundled. Third-party software applications available included MacDraw, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as Aldus's PageMaker. This was the first time GUI versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were introduced on any personal computer platform.

The Long Life of the Mac Plus

Although the Mac Plus was made obsolete in March 1987 by the new Macintosh series (Macintosh SE and the Macintosh II), it remained in production as a cheaper alternative until the introduction of Macintosh Classic on 15 October 1990. This makes the Macintosh Plus the longest-produced Macintosh ever. It continued to be supported by versions of the Mac OS up to version 7.5.5.

There is a program called vMac that will emulate a Mac Plus on a variety of platforms, including Unix, Windows, DOS and Mac OS.

Trivia

A Mac Plus made an appearance in the 1986 science fiction movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. In the scene, engineer Scotty, having travelled to the 1980s from the late 23rd century, tries to use the Mac to demonstrate the formula for a material known as transparent aluminum. However, he is perplexed by its failure to respond to his voice commands. Scotty is handed the mouse, which he holds up to his mouth like a microphone and cheerfully says, "Hello computer!" The machine's owner directs him to the use the keyboard, which he calls "quaint" but quickly accomplishes the task.de:Apple Macintosh Plus fr:Macintosh Plus it:Macintosh Plus