Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jedd | Hacker News Reader

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> The Mac II had millions of colors at 640x480.

The Mac II could display millions of colours, but not at the same time.

From wikipedia:

"The Macintosh II includes a graphics card that supports a true-color 16.7 million color palette and was available in two configurations: 4-bit and 8-bit. The 4-bit model supports 16 colors on a 640×480 display and 256 colors (8-bit video) on a 512×384 display ..."

There were optional video RAM upgrades, but none that gave you 'millions of colours at 640x480'.

Wikipedia also notes: "The video card does not include hardware acceleration of drawing operations."

Also, for comparison, in 1987 when the Mac II came out (two years after the Amiga 1000) you could buy a Mac II for USD$5,500 or the Amiga for USD$1300.

That Mac II cost $14,000 in 2021 money. Its just incredible how expensive computers were back then.

Yes, I'm always surprised when I hear people saying they got an early Mac as a present or when they went to college.

Or later in 1987 an Amiga 500 for 699.

You also need millions of pixels to show millions of colors. 640 × 480 is less than a third of a million.

On the plus side, that makes that “256 out of 2^24” a bit less of a problem.

That dependent entirely on what video card you used; Radius, RasterOps, and others were doing full 24-bit video on the Mac II in 1988-89 on two-page displays. Yes, the video card and monitor each cost about $3000 at the time, to install into your $8000 Mac II or IIx, but they were broadly compatible (not needing drivers for particular applications) and were commonly used in print & publishing.

Sure, but we went from 'as a kid in a computer store in 1987' to 'if you waited a few years, and stumped up an order of magnitude more money, you could buy something nearly as good from Apple and another company'.

That rough timeframe would see the Toaster arriving in the Amiga world, which would put the Apple offerings even further back in comparison.

Woz is / was a legend, but I'm certainly no Apple Inc apologist, so my reaction to a story about what made the Amiga so great is a bit different, I guess.

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