Comment by bane

The answer is something that's harder and harder to do these days with all the layers of abstraction -- set a performance target and use arithmetic to arrive at the specifications that you hit and still achieve your performance goal.

It's a bit of work, but I suspect you can arithmetic your way through the problem. Supposing they wanted 60 Hz on the display and a framebuffer you need 196,608 bits/24,576 bytes/24 kbytes [below] on a 1-bit display at 512x384.

The Mac 128k shipped with a Motorola 68k at 7.8336 Mhz giving it 130560 Hz per frame @ 60 fps.

IIR the word length of the 68k is 32bits, so imagining a scenario where the screen was plotted in words, it's something like 20 cycles per fetch [1], you can get about 6528 fetches per frame. At 32-bits a fetch, you need 6144 or so fetches from memory to fill the screen. You need a moment for horizontal refresh so you lose time waiting for that, thus 6528-6144 = (drumroll) 384, the number of horizontal lines on a display.

I'm obviously hitting the wavetops here, and missing lots of details. But my point is that it's calculable with enough information, which is how engineers of yor used to spec things out.

1 - https://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=68k_instructions_...

below - why bits? The original Mac used 1-bit display, meaning each pixel used 1-bit to set it as either on or off. Because it didn't need 3 subpixels to produce color, the display was tighter and sharper than color displays, and even at the lower resolution appeared somewhat paperlike. The article is correct that the DPI was around 72. Another way to think about it, and what the Mac was targeting was pre-press desktop publishing. Many printing houses could print at around 150-200 lines per inch. Houses with very good equipment could hit 300 or more. Different measures, but the Mac, being positioned as a WYSISWYG tool, did a good job of approximating analog printing equipment of the time. (source: grew up in a family printing business)