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The Macintosh II is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from March 1987 to January 1990. Based on the Motorola 68020 32-bit CPU, it is the first Macintosh supporting color graphics. When introduced, a basic system with monitor and 20 MB hard drive cost . With a 13-inch color monitor and 8-bit display card, the price was about . This placed it in competition with from Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard.
The Macintosh II was the first computer in the Macintosh line without a built-in display; a monitor rested on top of the case like the IBM Personal Computer and Amiga 1000. It was designed by hardware engineers Michael Dhuey (computer) and Brian Berkeley (monitor) and industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger (case).
Eighteen months after its introduction, the Macintosh II was updated with a more powerful CPU and sold as the Macintosh IIx. In early 1989, the more compact Macintosh IIcx was introduced at a price similar to the original Macintosh II, and by the beginning of 1990 sales stopped altogether. Motherboard upgrades to turn a Macintosh II into a IIx or Macintosh IIfx were offered by Apple.
The Macintosh II project was begun by Dhuey and Berkeley during 1985 without the knowledge of Apple co-founder and Macintosh division head Steve Jobs, who opposed and color, on the basis that expansion slots complicated the user experience and that color did not conform to WYSIWYG, as color printers were not common. Jobs instead wanted higher-resolution monochrome displays such as the ones chosen for his own "BigMac" project begun in 1984 to develop a Macintosh successor.
Initially referred to as "Little Big Mac", the Macintosh II was codenamed "Milwaukee" after Dhuey's hometown, and it later went through a series of new names. After Jobs was ousted by Apple in September 1985, the Milwaukee project could proceed openly (while Jobs' own BigMac project was cancelled).
The Macintosh II was introduced at the AppleWorld 1987 conference in Los Angeles, with low-volume initial shipments starting two months later. Retailing for US $5,498, the Macintosh II was the first modular Macintosh model, so called because it came in a horizontal desktop case like many IBM PC compatibles of the time. Previous Macintosh computers use an all-in-one design with a built-in black-and-white cathode-ray tube.
The Macintosh II has for an internal hard disk (originally 40 MB or 80 MB) and an optional second floppy disk drive. It, along with the Macintosh SE, was the first Macintosh to use the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) introduced with the Apple IIGS for keyboard and mouse interface.
The primary improvement in the Macintosh II was Color QuickDraw in read-only memory, a color version of the Macintosh graphics routines. Color QuickDraw can handle any display size, up to 8-bit color depth, and multiple monitors. Because Color QuickDraw is included in the Macintosh II's ROM and relies on 68020 instructions, earlier systems could not be upgraded to display color.
In September 1988, shortly before the introduction of the Macintosh IIx, Apple increased the list price of the Macintosh II by roughly 20%. AnimEigo notably used the Macintosh II for subtitling their earliest releases, including MADOX-01, Riding Bean, and Vampire Princess Miyu, and Industrial Light & Magic used the Macintosh II for image processing on films such as The Abyss. MacWorld 8906 June 1989
The Macintosh II does not have a PMMU installed by default. Instead, it relies on the memory controller hardware to map the installed memory into a contiguous address space. This hardware has the restriction that the address space dedicated to Bank A must be larger than that of Bank B. Though this memory controller was designed to support 16 Megabyte, 30-pin SIMMs in each available slot (for a total of up to 128 MB of RAM), the original Macintosh II ROMs have problems that limit the amount of RAM that can be installed into each slot to just 8 MB SIMMs. Although the later Macintosh IIx ROMs that shipped with the Macintosh II FDHD upgrade fixes this initial problem, these newer ROMs still do not have a 32-bit memory manager and cannot boot into 32-bit address mode, at least, not without software assistance in the form of "MODE32", thus limiting the total amount of RAM to a mere 8MB. MODE32 (originally published by Connectix, and later licensed by Apple) contains a workaround that allows for larger SIMMs to be installed in Bank B if a PMMU is also installed. With this configuration, the Macintosh II boot ROMs will believe that the computer has 8 MB or less of RAM installed. Meanwhile, MODE32 then reprograms the memory controller on the fly to dedicate more address space to Bank A, thus allowing access to the additional memory installed in Bank B. Since this makes the physical address space discontiguous, the PMMU is then used to remap the address space into a contiguous block.
Display: Apple offered a choice of two displays, a 12" black and white unit, and a more expensive 13" high-resolution color display based on Sony's Trinitron technology. More than one display could be attached to the computer, and objects could be easily dragged from one screen to the next. Third-party displays quickly became available. The Los Angeles Times reviewer called the color "spectacular." The operating system user interface remained black and white even on color monitors with the exception of the Apple logo, which appeared in rainbow color.
The original ROMs in the Macintosh II contained a bug that prevented the system from recognizing more than one megabyte of memory address space on a Nubus card. Every Macintosh II manufactured until approximately November 1987 had this defect. This happened because Slot Manager was not 32-bit clean. Apple offered a well-publicized recall of the faulty ROMs and released a program to test whether a particular Macintosh II had the defect.
The new extensions featured for the Macintosh II at the time were A/ROSE and Sound Manager.
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