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by jdblair 1729 days ago
From the article: The damned thing was just too expensive! From Wikipedia “When introduced, a basic system with monitor and 20 MB hard drive cost US$5,498”

I respectfully disagree that price was the issue. The competition was a Sun workstation. In 1990, a sparcstation was $5k without the hard drive, a configuration that only made sense if you mounted the root filesystem using NFS, which meant you had a more expensive machine with a hard drive on your LAN.

Apple could have succeeded in the workstation space, but they were a consumer focused company.

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/16/business/low-priced-work-...
2 comments
philwelch 1729 days ago
I don't even think the Macintosh II was all that unpopular with Mac users. The Mac II family was sold for six years and was discontinued only a year before the switch to PowerPC. I think Apple just didn't seriously commit to selling them as Unix workstations with A/UX.
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Chazprime 1729 days ago
> I don't even think the Macintosh II was all that unpopular with Mac users

I think the Mac II & IIx were a little slow on the sales front, but from what I remember the smaller IIcx and IIci were much more popular.

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classichasclass 1729 days ago
We had a lab full of IIcis when I was an undergrad. They're still my favourite 68K Mac because they stack, they're easy to work on and disassemble, and they can do a fair bit. Just make sure you get it recapped. My "Lisp machine" is a IIci with a 50MHz Daystar accelerator and a MacIvory.
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sneak 1729 days ago
The IIcx was my first computer. It wasn't completely 32-bit-clean for some reason, and needed special software ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MODE32 ) to run apps that expected a 32 bit memory space. I'd have preferred an IIci. :)

I also had a Mac II around the same time. I still have both of the machines, although I haven't tried booting either in 15+ years.

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0xabe 1729 days ago
Any current Lisp projects you’d like to share?
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kevin_thibedeau 1729 days ago
In '87 name brand 386's were going for $4500. The Mac premium wasn't quite so outrageous considering it came with a superior color display when most PCs were still doddering about with EGA and Hercules mono.
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