Macintosh LC

The Macintosh LC ( LC - low -cost color - inexpensive, color- capable) was placed at the beginning of the 1990s by Apple to market the product family for home users. It was built between 15 October 1990 to 23 March 1992, sold. The price was deliberately set low to reach customers who do not have Apple Macintosh used until then, and to make the device, eg for home users and students interesting. In fact, sales in 1990 boosted tremendously.

Together with the Macintosh IIsi was the Macintosh LC, the first Macintosh with integrated audio input. The name " LC " stands in the following years for an entire product line of computers for home users.

Used for the Macintosh LC Apple a very flat housing which earned him the nickname "pizza box" earned that monitors fit exactly under Apple's 12 " and 13 ". The interior offered just enough room for a 3.5 " floppy drive and a hard disk in half-height. Early models were alternatively delivered with two floppy drives and no hard drive. Above the motherboard with the one-time relatively low-performance 16 MHz Motorola 68020 processor finds a expansion board space, the extensibility was thus severely limited. , the Macintosh LC did not have a math coprocessor. the 16-bit data bus and the maximum memory capacity of 10 MB RAM ( factory with 2 MB of RAM on the motherboard) limited the power of the computer.

Otherwise, the incumbent in the Mac environment interfaces were integrated, so the usual two serial ports for modem and printer port ( also called a network port for LocalTalk ), produce sounds and output, a SCSI interface for external peripheral devices such as removable disk drives, an integrated graphics card with its own memory, Apple desktop Bus keyboard and mouse.

It was known the ease of maintenance of the computer, the housing could be opened without the loosening of screws. All components, including the power supply and motherboard, are held by screwless clips.

The Macintosh LC was delivered with the operating system MacOS 6.0.7 and 256 KB of video RAM. For a screen resolution of 512 × 384 pixels so could 256 colors at 640 × 480 pixels are only 16 colors shown. When upgrading the video RAM to 512 Kbytes, the range expanded to 32,768 colors ( 512x384 pixels). Apple offered specifically for the Macintosh LC to a 12 " fixed frequency screen that could display only has a resolution of 512 × 384 pixels.

Even without NuBus slots there were a number of expansion cards for the Processor Direct Slot (PDS ) of the Macintosh LC. It was originally intended to accommodate an Apple IIe emulation card, and should replace the in the vicinity of schools and colleges widespread Apple IIe. For the PDS of the Macintosh LC, a number of accelerator cards, network cards and graphics cards has been developed by third parties. Ethernet cards for the PDS were fitted with its own ROM so that these cards can be integrated without their own drivers in MacOS. Very popular was also the upgrade with a math co-processor of the type Motorola 68882 as a PDS expansion card.

The Macintosh LC sold well and in 1992 was replaced by the Macintosh LC II with Motorola 68030 processor. The name " LC" was used by Apple later for PowerPC models and only disappeared with the introduction of the iMac from the program.

System Profile

Macintosh LC ( " pizza box ", the first model of a new series cheaper computer )

  • Construction period: October 15, 1990 to March 23, 1992
  • Classification: 32- bit Macintosh
  • Main Processor: Motorola MC68020
  • Storage: 3.5 " drive for 1.44 MB floppy
  • Clock Speed: 16 MHz
  • Memory: 4 MB
  • Max RAM: 10 MB
  • Graphics: 640x480 at 8-bit color depth
  • Sound: built-in 8-bit mono system
Pizza box form factor Read-only memory
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