March 2, 1987: A Modular Mac…Now with Color!

The original Mac had several shortcomings. The best way to address these shortcomings was left to Jean-Louis Gassee. Starting with the file server from the announced but never shipped Macintosh office, Gassee gave his engineers the task of making a completely expandable, updated Mac.

The result of all the hard work was the Mac II. Unlike the original Mac, the Mac II was expandable, modular, supported color and up to six monitors. The early Mac IIs featured a speedy 16 MHz 68020 chip coupled with an FPU that let it run circles around the compact Macs. On the downside, from the outside the machine resembled the standard PC form factor.

The Mac II originally shipped in two configurations: a floppy disk model retailing for $3,898 or a model with an expansive 40 MB hard drive that would set users back a mere $5,498. The Mac that redefined the Mac first appeared on March 2, 1987.