October 15, 1990: Original Mac Discontinued

Old school Mac fans can instantly conjure up an image of the original Mac in their minds. The small, boxy machine was regarded as "cute" or "toylike" when it came out, but is now seen as the start of something big.

For all the waves the original Mac generated, the machine was surprisingly underpowered. 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.

Once the lack of RAM was widely known, crafty users came up with hacks to expand the memory of this unexpandable machine,  but even so, Apple discontinued the original Mac only 22 months after it was introduced. The first Mac dissappeared this month in 1985.