Apple Machintosh II
I two have main units, AppleColor High-Resolution RGB Monitor, Apple
Extended Keyboard II, Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II and Apple Color
StyleWriter 1500.
type computer
country USA
year 1987
os Mac os 5.0
cpu Motorola mc 68000
speed 8 MHz
ram 1MB
rom 256 KB
graphic512 x 384
colors mono
sound tone generator
ports rs 232/422 (2),keyboard, mouse, SCSI DB-25, floppy DB-19
The Apple Macintosh II — The Mac Goes Open
Released in March 1987, the Apple Macintosh II was a revolutionary departure from everything the Macintosh had been before. Where the original Mac and its compact successors were closed, all-in-one machines with no colour and limited expandability, the Macintosh II was an open, expandable desktop with six NuBus expansion slots, a separate monitor, colour display capability, and a 16 MHz Motorola 68020 processor. It fundamentally changed what a Macintosh could be and opened the platform to professional users in fields like graphic design, video production, and scientific research who needed capabilities the compact Macs simply could not provide.
Colour Mac — A Creative Revolution
The Macintosh II was the first Mac to support colour display — using a dedicated graphics card that could drive Apple’s new high-resolution RGB monitors with up to 256 colours from a palette of 16.7 million. This transformed the Mac’s appeal to graphic designers and desktop publishers who needed accurate colour representation for their work. Colour Mac rapidly became the standard tool for professional print design throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, establishing the creative professional market as Apple’s most loyal and important customer base.
NuBus Expansion
The six NuBus expansion slots were the Macintosh II’s defining feature for professional users. NuBus allowed a wide range of third-party cards — graphics accelerators, video capture cards, DSP audio processors, networking cards, and additional SCSI controllers — to be added, transforming the Mac II into a customisable professional workstation. This openness was a significant departure from Apple’s previous philosophy and made the Mac II genuinely competitive with Unix workstations for creative professional applications.
The Computer Museum Ata Collection
The collection holds two Macintosh II units with AppleColor High-Resolution RGB Monitors, Apple Extended Keyboard IIs, Apple Desktop Bus Mouse IIs, and an Apple Color StyleWriter 1500 — a complete professional setup as it would have been configured in a design studio of the late 1980s.