We're Not Hackers! We were always dealing with memory limitations September 1983 From the beginning, the Macintosh was conceived as a very low-cost, high-volume personal computer. It was important for the design team to keep manufacturing costs as low as possible. Since memory was relatively expensive, we were always dealing with memory limitations. One of the most clever parts of Burrell Smith's original, 68000-based digital board was the "bus transformer" logic that multiplexed the data bus, allowing him to hook up the 68000-- which demanded a 16-bit data bus--to only 8 memory chips. He also included a single, byte- wide 64 kbit ROM chip, so that the first Macintosh, circa January 1981, had a total of 64K bytes of RAM and 8K bytes of ROM. But as we started to get software running on the prototype, it became increasingly clear that we didn't have enough RAM for the kind of graphic intensive applications we wanted to build; after all, just the frame buffer for the bitmap display took up almost one third of the available memory. And furthermore, Bill Atkinson's graphics routines had recently exceeded the size of the 8K ROM. So, when the digital board was redesigned to incorporate the SCC chip in June 1981, Burrell added another row of 8 memory chips, doubling the RAM size to