The Apple Macintosh II was launched in 1987 at the same time as the Macintosh SE. It was considered "revolutionary" because, for the first time, the Macintosh was expandable thanks to its internal slots and had colours (the previous Macintoshes all had monochrome displays). The Mac II also marked Apple's entry into the realm of serious computing.
It used a more classic keyboard (which looked like a PC keyboard) and proprietary RGB monitor (see 'Read more' section). The internal SCSI hard disk could be replaced with an 80 MB disk. It could run under A/UX (The Apple version of Unix System V version 2).
The Macintosh II was followed in September 1988 by the Macintosh IIx. The IIx had the same specifications as the Mac II. It used a 68030 CPU and a 68882 FPU instead of the 68020 and the 68881, an 1.44 MB 3.5" floppy drive and removable system ROMs for easier updates.
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The first Color Macintosh of the lab. It drived a double-line CCD sensor for astronomical applications.
Saturday 20th August 2016
Régis Schmidt (France)
i need to talk to a macII owner about software copy
Wednesday 16th November 2011
mike brohez (United States)
To Wally from Ohio, I think your statistics are a bit skewed. I would like to know how a 15Mhz difference in CPU speed (25Mhz of the A3000 to 40Mhz of Mac IIfx) would result in a 10 fold performance increase.
I could go on at length as to why the Amiga was superior to the Macintosh. The Amiga 3000 started at just over $3000, while the Mac IIfx started at $9000 and went up to $12000. For less than half the base price of a Mac IIfx I could have added a few extras to an A3000 that would run circles around even a higher end Mac IIfx.
Hardware aside, even the AmigaOS was superior to MacOS. The first AmigaOS supported true pre-emptive multitasking since it''s initial release in 1985. A feature that Mac didn''t get until OSX was released in 1999.
While Mac and Amiga did at times play leap-frog with each other capability wise, Amiga held it''s lead for the first 2+ years of it''s release and continued to release hardware that would outstrip a comparable Mac at a fraction of the Mac''s price tag.
Saturday 15th October 2011
Ernest
NAME
MACINTOSH II
MANUFACTURER
Apple
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1987
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
None
KEYBOARD
Full stroke 81 keys with numeric keypad and cursor keys Optional extended 105 key keyboard with 15 function keys ($229!)
CPU
Motorola MC 68020
SPEED
15.66 MHz
CO-PROCESSOR
Motorola 68881 (numeric coprocessor)
RAM
1 MB, up to 8 MB on board and 2 GB via NuBus add-on slots
ROM
256 KB
GRAPHIC MODES
640 x 480 (The MAC II uses a NUBUS video card, this card could be replaced with any other more powerful one).
COLORS
16 or 256 among 16.7 millions
SOUND
Apple sound chip - 4 voices 1 channel. Can drive external stereo equipment
