History
The Macintosh II was designed by hardware engineers Michael Dhuey (computer) and Brian Berkeley (monitor). A basic system with 20 MB drive and monitor cost about $5200, A complete color-capable system could cost as much as $10,000 once the cost of the color monitor, video card, hard disk, keyboard and RAM were added. This price point placed it in competition with workstations from Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard although it still used the single user Mac OS instead of the Unix of those systems. While the hardware features were comparable to workstation-class systems, the OS features placed it more squarely in competition with i386 based PCs and the Amiga 2000.
The project was begun by Dhuey and Berkeley without the knowledge of Apple head Steve Jobs (who opposed features like expansion slots). Initially referred to as "Little Big Mac", it was codenamed "Milwaukee" after Dhuey's hometown, and later went through a series of new names, including "Reno", "Uzi" and "Paris" (after Jean-Louis Gassee, Apple's then products manager, who protected the semi-clandestine project from cancellation).
Introduced in March, 1987 and 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. All previous Macintosh computers used an all-in-one design with a built-in black-and-white CRT.
The Macintosh II had drive bays for an internal hard disk (originally 20 MB or 40 MB) and an optional second floppy disk drive. It, along with the Macintosh SE, was the first Macintosh computer to use the Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) introduced with the Apple IIGS for keyboard and mouse interface.
The primary improvement in the Mac II was Color QuickDraw in ROM, a color version of the graphics language which was the heart of the machine. Among the many innovations in Color QuickDraw were an ability to handle any display size, any color depth, and multiple monitors. With its pioneering support for 32-bit color Mac II was the first personal computer which could display true color photorealistic images without aftermarket upgrades. Because Color QuickDraw was included in the Mac II's ROM, earlier Macintoshes could not be upgraded to display color, and many early adopters felt betrayed by Apple. After a year or two, Apple changed direction and began shipping Color QuickDraw in the operating system, allowing earlier computers to at least run color programs in black and white.
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