A HANDS-ON FIELD GUIDE · 1984 → 2024
Hello, Macintosh.
Forty years of thinking inside the box.
Turn it around. Take it apart. Make it do something.
THE ORIGINAL MACINTOSH
One small box, endlessly curious.
CHOOSE YOUR COMPUTER
Same big ideas. Very different machines.01 / THE WHOLE PICTURE
Little bits.
Big possibilities.
This picture lives in RAM. Click anywhere on it to choose a patch, then flip the bits beside it. Your edits change the same memory displayed inside the Macintosh.
One picture uses 16.7% of the Mac’s 128 KB of RAM.
Click to draw. Arrow keys to move. Space to flip a bit.
Flip a bit. Watch the picture change.
FORTY YEARS. A FEW BIG IDEAS.
Different machines.
Connected ideas.
The original Macintosh shared its RAM between programs, the screen image, and sound data. Its 68000 had no on-chip cache or memory-management unit. The floppy was its built-in mass storage; much of its interface machinery lived permanently in ROM.
These are educational 3D models with interactive peripherals and guided signal stories. Shapes, component placement, and signal timing are illustrative. The working monochrome bitmap is an original Macintosh study, shown in a study window on later machines. This project does not run macOS or emulate a CPU.
The architecture & original sources ↗ Selected machine specifications ↗