Reply to post: Wrong in so many ways

Wrong in so many ways

Users became quickly accustomed to swapping floppies in order to do what little useful work the pitiful 128K would afford.

Many/most users got an external floppy drive, either Apple's (expensive) one or a 3rd-party unit. I purchased a Mac 128 with an Apple external floppy and an Imagewriter (note: that's 'Imagewriter', it didn't get InterCaps until the ImageWriter II, be advised that the Wiki article is full of shit even for Wiki.). Because I got it literally the last day before I graduated, and my uni was a member of the Apple University Consortium, I got the whole bundle for under US$1500. I did have to wait three weeks for the Mac to show, another week for the Imagewriter, and two more for the external floppy. Apparently Apple couldn't make the things fast enough to keep up with demand. As very few applications required three floppy drives, I did very little floppy swapping. And, as I had two drives, most of the floppy swapping I did was much simpler than you imply. The Mac shipped with MacWrite and MacPaint, and as an early adopter and member of the AUC I qualified for free copies of MacDraw and MacProject. I used all four to good effect, with minimal floppy swapping, in my first job out of uni.

Third parties eventually launched hard drives for the machines, which had to be attached via the serial port.

External floppy and some early external hard drives attached via the (slow, and annoying) external floppy port, not the serial port. There was a hack for an internal hard drive. That, and some external drives, used the serial port, as it was a 'virtual slot'. Floppy port hard drives weren't particularly fast. Serial port external drives were faster, but that's not hard. There were external hard drives for both the floppy port and the serial port by the end of 1984, so 'eventually' translates to 'within 8-10 months from go'. The internal drive hack, which was much faster, arrived before the Mac 128's first anniversary. By the time that Apple got around to offering hard drives, multiple 3rd parties had been there before them, and had faster, cheaper, drives with more capacity. There would be a reason why the Hard Disk 20 wouldn't sell well. Several reasons, actually.

Hard drive support (and Finder 5.0) turned up in September 1985's System 2.1

I was using a hard drive well before Sept 1985.

While visually flashy, with menus, windows and a funky mouse-pointer, System 1.0 could only run one application at a time (let's face it, that 128K would have struggled with much more)

I was using a 3rd-party Finder replacement on the hard drive noted above which allowed me to run multiple applications. In particular, I would usually run MacWrite or Word at the same time as MacProject.

Even with a woeful amount of RAM, and only a limited line-up of productivity software at launch – although Microsoft was quick to support the thing with Word and Excel

Incorrect. Word 1.0 didn't show for several months, and was quickly (very quickly) replaced by Word 1.05, as Microsoft was, as usual, unable to get it right the first time. Excel did not appear until 1985. What was available from Microsoft was Multiplan and Chart, Excel's ancestors. They were available before Word. I got a copy of Multiplan, and one of MS Basic, the day I ordered my Mac, so I actually had them for several weeks before I had a computer to run them on. I also got database software. I used MS Basic until I got MacPascal in 1985.

Jobs, however, left the company in 1985.

Jobs was kicked out by John Scully & Co., who had been brought in to bring 'modern business management' to Apple. The first bit of modern business management they did was to get rid of Jobs. The second was to ride Apple into the ground, paving the way for the Return of the Steve in wrath and gory... ah, 'glory', I meant 'glory'.

Early adopters of the original Mac were offered what was effectively a motherboard replacement at a cost of $995 to make their 16.5lb plastic boxes more useful.

It was a motherboard swap. I held off until the arrival of the Mac Plus, did a motherboard swap for that, and got an internal 800 kB floppy drive as part of the deal. I also bought an external 40 MB SCSI drive. Total cost: under $1500. Getting extra RAM was expensive: two 1 MB sticks at $600 each. Six months later two more 1 MB sticks at $300 each, RAM prices had tumbled. I used that configuration for seven years, except that I added external SCSI drives. The supermini at work had a 5MHz 24-bit CPU, 2 MB of RAM and 300 MB of storage (CDC disk packs, US$10,000 each. No, I'm not exaggerating.) I had a 8 MHz 32-bit CPU, 4 MB of RAM, and a total of over 200 MB of storage.

Assuming their pockets were deep enough.

You _do_ know what IBM PC-XTs and _ATs cost at the time, don't you?