Comment by phendrenad2

7 months ago

I always assumed it was a compromise between memory usage, refresh speed, and the GUI that they wanted. Don't forget that the Macintosh was preceded by the Lisa (800x364) and the IIGS (640x200), so they probably had a good sense for what was comfortable given a certain resolution.

3 comments

phendrenad2

dragonwriter 7 months ago

> Don't forget that the Macintosh was preceded by the Lisa (800x364) and the IIGS (640x200),

Lisa was January 1983

Macintosh was January 1984

Apple IIgs was September 1986

sgerenser 7 months ago

The IIGS came out well after the original Macintosh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIGS

wkat4242 7 months ago

The Lisa was also about twice as expensive as the Macintosh which is why it failed hard. So the price limited the hardware and that caused this display bandwidth constraint.