Apple is celebrating the 30th annversary of Macintosh and iFixit decided to gatecrash the party by disassembling the original Macintosh 128K and revealing the internals of the machine.
Apple launched the Macintosh 128K in 1984 and the machine featured a 9-inch CRT with 512 x 342 pixels resolution and support for only black and white colors.
The Macintosh 128K's case is held together with T15 screws, which the iFixit engineers found fairly difficult to open. The case had deeply recessed screws and a tight panel fit. The entire machine can be pulled out from the back case once the T15 screws are unscrewed. Once the machine is out, it reveals the power supply, CRT display, 3.5-inch floppy drive and the logic board. The rear casing has the signatures of Steven Jobs, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld and some other members of Apple's top executives team.
iFixit next removed the 60-watt power supply, which had Apple Part number 630-0102. The CRT was the next to be disassembled. Apple is well known for keeping things tidy within a machine and iFixit found that even the Macintosh 128K was no different. The technicians at iFixit were able to slide the logic board out of the tray with ease.
Notable ICs on the Macintosh 128K logic board included the Motorola MC68000G8 Microprocessor, Fairchild Semiconductor 74LS393 Video Counter and Micron 4264 64 kb RAM (64 kb x 16 chips = 1024 kb, or 128 KB).
iFixit also found that Apple engineers had secretly designed the logic board to facilitate manufacturing a 512 KB version, which was released only after 9 months.
The machine also included Simtek C19728 and C19729 32 KB ROM (32 KB x 2 ICs = 64 KB), Simtek 344-0041-A "Integrated Woz Machine" Disk Controller and Zilog Z8530PS Serial.
The engineers at iFixit were able to remove the keyboard by removing just a few screws. Each button on the keyboard was soldered to the board. Apple offered a single-button mouse with the Macintosh 128K, which was made of plastic just like the keyboard. The ball in the mouse can be easily removed with a simple twist of the outer case.
iFixit gave Macintosh 128K a Repairability Score of 7 out of 10 (10 being the easiest to repair). The teardown did not reveal any glue used in the machine.
"Once you're inside, it's simple and straightforward to replace any of the main components: floppy drive, power supply, logic board, or CRT display," reports iFixit.
The Macintosh 128K offered 400KB of total storage with the option to expand with the help of a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
The original Macintosh 128k had a retail price tag of $2,495, which is $5,594.11 in today's dollars.
