type of interface was later adopted by Niklaus Wirth in his Lilith project, and then released by Apple one year before the Macintosh with the Lisa. The Macintosh however, was the first machine to popularize this type of user interface.The Mac, while being somewhat of a technological breakthrough, was not without its shortcomings. First, 128K of memory was nowhere near enough memory for significant business applications. 128K itself was actually a deceptive figure. With the amount of system overhead required to support the user interface, far less free memory was really available to the user. Another commonly cited fault was its lack of expansion capability. With no internal expansion slots and no provision for a second internal floppy disk drive the machine was short on flexibility. The lack of color display capability was another oft cited failing. Finally, the inability of the Macintosh to run MS-DOS kept the machine out of the mainstream of business application software.Well, since 1984 the Mac has evolved quite a bit from the original 128K machine. The machine progressed over the years to the Fat Mac, Mac Plus, Macintosh SE, Macintosh II, various Power Macs and the latest incarnation, the iMac. Through this advancement all of the previously mentioned deficiencies have been redressed.1984 saw the introduction of another major new machine as well, this time from IBM. By the fall of the year the IBM PC AT (for Advanced Technology) had hit the market. While not as technologically innovative as the Macintosh, the AT offered significant advancement of the standard IBM had established three years before.The salient features of the AT included a true 16-bit Intel 80286 microprocessor operating at 6 MHz, a 1.2Mb high-density floppy disk drive, 256K of memory that was expandable to 3Mb and eight expansion slots. The basic machine listed for $3995.00.The AT offered greater performance while still maintaining software compatibility with the ex...
