!pr0
So That's a Macintosh!..............................Bill Morgan

Well, now we know.  The rumors were basically correct:  68000 processor, 128K RAM, 3.5 inch disk drive (but only one), portable, Lisa descendant, about $2500, and no expansion slots.

That last "feature" still has me a little shaken.  I thought that if anybody knew better, it would be Apple, whose whole fortune is based on the expandability of the Apple ][.  My first reaction was totally negative:  who wants to bother with a dead-end machine?  A total of 128K of RAM, and the screen memory occupies over 20K.  Now that I've read a little more about the internals, and about the design objectives, things look a lot brighter.  The on-board memory will be expandable to 512K when the 256K chips get more affordable.

System expansion will take place via the high-speed RS-422 serial ports.  One of the designers pointed out that at 1 million bits per second (which can be reached with external clocking) you can transfer the entire memory image of the machine in one second.  A couple of manufacturers (Davong and Tecmar) have already announced hard disks.  Tecmar also announced an IEEE 488 interface.  Macintosh designers also speak of "virtual slot" protocols for the serial ports, and "multi-drop (party line) capability".

There's another departure from usual Apple practice:  no programming language is resident in the machine, or included in the purchase price!  Several options will be available, including Pascal, Mac Basic, Microsoft Basic, Logo, and an Assembler/Debugger.  The prices for the above packages will run in the $100-$150 range, not too bad.  One article also mentioned C, about six months from now.  It wasn't clear whether that was from Apple or an outside vendor.  All of the above languages are scheduled for release in the next few months, except for Microsoft Basic.  Russ Weaver, at Simtec/Quest, tells me he received that yesterday.

There is also 64K ROM (two 23256's) in the Mac, which holds the key to most programming.  That ROM contains the code to support the "desk top" environment of mouse, icons, etc., the disk I/O, and the serial I/O.  That is supposed to be 64K of the most tightly coded 68000 machine language around (as opposed to Lisa's compiled Pascal operating system code).  I am told that there are over 400 entry points available to the programmer, with complete documentation coming soon from Apple for $250.

Several information sources have already popped up.  If you haven't seen the February issue of Byte, go get it.  There is a large section on Mac, including the best technical data so far.  There are already two magazines specializing in Macintosh:  Macworld, from the publishers of PC World, and ST.Mac, from Softalk.  (Saint Mac?  Come on.)  Macworld looks very good, especially for evaluation and demonstration of software.  I haven't seen a copy of ST.Mac yet, but Softalk is about the best of the "general" Apple magazines so I expect good things from their entry.  You can pay $2495 for a Macintosh serial number and get a year's free subscription to ST.Mac.
