October 15, 1990: Original Mac Discontinued

Old school Mac fans can instantly conjure up an image of the original Mac in there minds. The small, boxy machine was regarded at the time as "cute" or "toylike" is now seen as the start of something big.

For all the waves the original Mac generated the machine was surprisingly underpowered. It wasn't the Motorola chip at the heart of the machine, it was the amount of memory.

Failing to anticipate the falling price of RAM, the Mac team specced the machine with only 128 K, an amount that meant that once the OS was loaded there was precious little RAM left for programs to use. The error was apparent, crafty users came up with hacks to expand the memory of the unexpandable machine, and Apple discontinued the original Mac only 22 months after it was introduced. The first Mac was gone this month in 1985.