In spite of the general trend by AMUG members toward newer and faster hardware, I suspect that there are a lot of members who have older Macs in their original form. When AMUG was founded in 1984, all Macs had single-sided floppy drives, 64K ROMs, and a scant 128 KBytes of memory. Although these Macs were not very powerful by today's standards, there was one advantage- everybody had the same hardware. This meant that what would run on one machine would run on everyone's machine. Today, this is not the case. A great deal of the commercial and non-commercial software available today will not run on the original Mac, for one or more of the following reasons: 1) The 128K of available memory is not sufficient; 2) the program requires a newer version of the System software than will run with
-- part contents for card part 2
----- text -----
the "old" 64K ROMs; and 3) the program is too large to fit on a single-sided floppy. Apple quickly came out with a procession of new models, each of which addressed these limitations. Here is a chart that summarizes the features of the earlier models:
Macintosh 128K 64K Single-Side no
Mac 512K 512K 64K Single-Side no
(Fat Mac)
Mac 512KE 512K 128K Double-Side no
Mac Plus 1 Meg 128K Double-Side yes
If you have an older Mac, you have no doubt noticed that a lot of the software AMUG gives out won't run properly on your machine.