???? – 1990retired
ARPANET
“The first network hung up so the whole world could log on.”
“Aged to Platinum gray, expanded to 4MB, and loved right up to the last beep.”
Introduced on January 16, 1986 at $2,599, the Macintosh Plus was the third model in the Compact Macintosh line and a steady evolutionary step up from the 512K. It shipped with 1 MB of RAM, expandable to 4 MB, and brought the higher-speed external SCSI bus to the party. It even got a glow-up midlife, trading the original beige case for the warm gray Platinum finish.
The Plus lingered long after the Macintosh SE arrived, staying in production as the lower-cost option until October 15, 1990 — and schools got their own discounted version, the Macintosh Plus ED. Three years past its successor's debut is a long retirement party, and this one earned it. It left behind SCSI ports, warm gray memories, and a generation of fans who never quite let go.
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“The first network hung up so the whole world could log on.”
“Gone in 1990, remembered longer.”
“It quadrupled memory capacity and quadrupled the future along with it.”