Macintosh IIfx
Adam Banks remembers when the Mac went pro
Back in 1984, the Mac was launched as a personal computer for everyday tasks. By the decade’s end, it was the basis of industries, thanks to apps like Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress for publishing, Macromind Director for multimedia, Mark of the Unicorn’s Performer for music sequencing, Pro Tools for digital audio, and 3D modelling and animation tools from Silicon Beach and Strata. Then, in 1990, Photoshop was released.
Much of this would have been impossible within the original all-in-one design. Steve Jobs had been unwilling to depart from the vision of a computer that just worked; users shouldn’t have to open the box. But the Mac was opening up too many possibilities to stay closed.
Quietly, engineers Michael Dhuey and Brian Berkeley were working on an IBM-like two-piece system. After catalysing the boardroom coup that ousted Jobs, their manager, Jean-Louis Gassée, took over the Mac team, and in 1987 the Macintosh II appeared.
The modular interior allowed for various memory and storage options, and of the six NuBus expansion slots, one came occupied by a colour graphics card, making this the first personal computer to display photographic images as standard.
The iconic Macintosh 128K had promised a new age in computing. The Macintosh II delivered it. The series peaked with the IIfx, released in 1990 at a starting price of $8,970 in the US. (For comparison, the average price of a car in that year was $8,691.)
A 40MHz Motorola 68030 32-bit CPU with floating-point coprocessor arrived with up to 128MB of memory and an 80 or 160MB hard disk. NuBus cards from the likes of Radius, RasterOps, SuperMac and Pro Tools added video and audio input and output.
There was nothing a IIfx couldn’t do, and designer Hartmut Esslinger’s neatly grooved cuboid became a staple of the creative workplace. With a IIfx on your desk, you knew you’d arrived.