An additional factor may have been speed, since it was doing things with graphics that may have been too slow if they had to manipulate larger blocks of data.
To give you an idea how tight that is, 64KB (code in ROM) is just 12 paper pages (60 lines of 80 columns) of text. Yes, some of the code had to be stored on a boot floppy disk, but still. To say it was an amazing piece of software engineering is, IMO, an understatement.
When I saw my first Mac at the university store it was like seeing the future. That so many of my peers denigrated it as a "toy" left me mystified. Instead of buying a car with the money I saved up, I bought myself a Mac.
Same here. I bought a Lisa too because you had to have a Lisa to write code for the Mac back then. My Lisa had a 5 MB hard drive (no I didn't omit any zeros).
Wow. I knew they did a lot of optimisation, but this seems to reach the compressed levels of that <500B chess engine (BootChess).
To be fair, this is machine code, so it's what, 4-10 bytes for an instruction and two or three of these per line of high level code? So it's probably comparable to a few thousand "pages" of C code.
But it's still pretty amazing.
Of course, density can also be abysmal with current toolchains and practices.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000#Example_code
As I recall from my brief experiment, you could get a pseudo 50% gray where the corresponding pixels on the two buffers were opposites (one buffer with a black pixel, the other with white).
The IBM EGA card came out in 1984, same year as the Mac, and supported 640x350 with 16 colors, but I think the cost of the monitor + card was somewhere around $1K, and the 640x350@4bpp mode was only supported if you also bought a RAM expansion daughterboard. The Mac’s launch price was $2,500, for comparison.
Adjusting for inflation, the EGA card was something around $2,500 in 2020 dollars, and the Mac was around $6,200.
The Apple II was not capable of high-resolution color, with or without the 80-column card. You would have used the 80-column card with a monochrome monitor. I don't remember whether I ever used it personally.
I couldn't find any pictures of Kaypros with color screens. Was it uncommon?
Ahh, yes, the parent of your post..."The memory resources must have been tight, because the original Mac had like a 512x342 pixel display, not even enough to display a full page width of text."
My thought was, “Why didn’t the Mac have color?” and I was comparing it to color systems that had similar or better resolution than the Mac… and I think that’s only EGA, and maybe some workstations I don’t know about.
The year before, someone demonstrated a Lisa at my college, and of course I was excited by what I was reading in Byte Magazine (though it was over my head), but the early Mac was just out of my reach. The Sanyo seemed like a step above my mom's Apple II.
The IBM PCjr also came out the same year as the Mac and the 128KB model supported 640x200 with 4 colors (and up to 320x200 with 16). A lot less expensive than a PC with EGA.
It didn't.