Some may remember the original Mac. It was nicknamed the ‘128K
Mac’ because it literally had only 128K of memory (RAM). To
imagine that a computer could run on so little memory is
unthinkable today, especially when your cell phone has 1000
times, or more, the memory. To put it into perspective, 128K of
RAM is 128,000 bytes, or 0.128 megabytes, or 0.000128 gigabytes.
Today’s iMac ships with a minimum of 1 Gigabyte of RAM. That’s
over 1 billion bytes, or 8000 times an original Mac. The first
Mac had no hard drive, only a floppy drive that used 400K
3.5-inch disks. Powering the first Mac was a Motorola 68000
processor running at 8Mhz, nowhere near a gigahertz. The screen
measured only 9 inches diagonally but displayed a high-
resolution black and white image (remember, the Mac OS was one
of the first to use a Graphical User Interface – a GUI – and
brought about the desktop publishing revolution). Included in
the package was a small keyboard, without a numeric keypad, and
a single button mouse (one of the best App