Macintosh - 20080704

The Macintosh Classic is a personal computer that was manufactured by Apple Computer from October 15, 1990 to September 14, 1992. It was the first Apple Macintosh sold under US$1,000. Production of the Classic was prompted by the success of the Macintosh Plus and the SE. The Classic was very similar to its predecessors but, due to limited technological advances, it used the same 9-inch (23 cm) monochrome CRT display, 512×342 pixel resolution, and its performance was hampered by the same 4 megabyte (MB) memory limit of the older Macintosh computers. Nevertheless, the Classic featured several improvements over the Macintosh Plus, which it replaced as Apple's low-end Mac computer. It was up to 25 percent faster than the Plus and included an Apple SuperDrive 3.5" floppy disk drive as standard. The Classic was an adaptation of Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama's Macintosh 128K industrial design, as was the earlier Macintosh SE. Apple released two versions that ranged in price from $1,000 to $1,500. Reviewers' reactions were mixed; most focused on the slow processor performance and lack of expansion slots. The consensus was that the Classic was only useful for word processing, spreadsheets and databases.