Macintosh 512K

The Macintosh 512K shipped on September 10, 1984, eight months after the original, and it existed to answer one complaint. The first Mac did not have enough memory. This one had four times as much, 512 kilobytes, which was finally enough to hold a complex document, run more demanding software, and keep a couple of desk accessories open without the machine falling over. Nothing changed outside. Same Manock case, same 9-inch monochrome screen, same single 400K floppy, same 7.83MHz 68000. Press and engineers both started calling it the Fat Mac, and the name stuck because the difference was entirely internal and entirely about how the thing felt to use. Bigger third-party applications became possible once the memory was there, among them early Microsoft Word, and the Mac turned into something you could do a day's word processing or page layout on rather than a very good demonstration. The old frustrations stayed put. No internal hard drive, one floppy slot, a sealed case that made upgrades somebody else's business. Reviewers mostly treated it as the machine Apple should have shipped in January, and Apple more or less agreed by pushing 128K owners hard toward an upgrade. Around the same time the company worked out that the Mac needed networking and real storage to be taken seriously in offices, which is where AppleTalk and the hard-disk machines came from. It sold better than the 128K had, helped by a software library that was finally growing, and it carried the Macintosh through a rough stretch when Apple's leadership was tearing itself apart and nobody could say where the company was heading. Apple kept selling it until the Macintosh Plus arrived in January 1986.