Conner

I’ve decided that I want to do my research paper on the History of Apple. I am going to go back and look at how the company shaped the consumer world of technology and try and make sense of why they are now a 700 billion (and yes thats billion with a “B”) company.

LC 575 and LC 550

I found an article in Proquest by a woman named Holly Brady where she discusses the launch of two Apple computers- the LC 575 and the LC 550. The article is “Apple introduces two new education computers” from March of 1994 and goes on to explain in a good amount of detail the basics of the two computers.

Macintosh LC 575

At the time Brady believed that these two computers were on the forefront of technology for educational purposes. She goes on to describe the LC 575′s aspects saying it has a “ built-in CD-ROM drive, 160Mb hard drive, 14-inch Sony Trinitron color monitor, stereo speakers, and an internal microphone.”

160 MB hard drive- that is what this computer had. Its CRAZY to think about that. If you were to go and browse a consumer website to check and see what sort of hard drives are out there nowadays, you would see how drastic these numbers have changed in 18 years. Here is a good website to take a look at  http://www.newegg.com/Store/Category.aspx?Category=228&name=Desktop-PCs

If you scroll down you can see that a few computers have 500 GB hard disk drives and some have 1 to 2 terabytes. To put something like that into perspective just know that 1 TB is equal to 1,048,576 MB. That is a bit of an increase.

These two computers also had ethernet slots which could be used to network computers together. Not to say Apple invented this but the innovation was crucial to the shaping of the technology world.

The LC 550 at the time was priced around $1,199 which is a hefty sum of money if you take into account two things: 1. inflation 2. With increased technology $1,199 today will give you a much better bang for your buck.

The next part of the research shoudl be to figure out the hardware competitors to Apple. I would be curious to know what this company was doing at the time:

Yeah, Microsoft was a software company, but they did have a connection to these LC 550 and LC 575 computers. Microsoft was also into marketing to the educational world. More to come on that later…