Macintosh 512Ke - Official Upgrades

Official Upgrades

A Macintosh 512K could be upgraded to a 512Ke by purchasing and installing Apple's $299 Macintosh Plus Disk Drive Kit. This included the following:

  • 800 KB double-sided floppy disk drive to replace the original 400 kB single-sided drive
  • 128 KB ROM chips to replace original 64 KB ROM
  • Macintosh Plus System Tools disk with updated system software
  • Installation guide

One further OEM upgrade replaced the logicboard and the rear case (to accommodate the different port configuration) with that of the Macintosh Plus which essentially added built-in SCSI functionality and up to 4MB RAM. As Apple's official upgrades tended to command a premium, many third party manufactures offered add-on SCSI cards as well as RAM upgrades to achieve the same functionality. The new ROM allowed the computer to run much newer system and application software and though it loaded more data into RAM it only slightly decreased the amount of available memory by 1.5K, leaving well over 370K available for applications.

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