You could have also opted for a Kaypro, or an Apple II with an 80 column card. I believe both were significantly cheaper than the Mac. Sounds like maybe you already had an IBM though, and so bought the EGA setup?

I had nothing at all, my parents had the Mac :-)

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?

Sorry, don't know if I replied to the wrong thread maybe, or maybe something got edited? I swear there was something there that had me thinking 80 column editing was the driver...matching the Mac's resolution. The Kaypro and the Mac used roughly the same monochrome CRT, in the same size. You can even swap them if you make the right cross connects.

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."

Don’t worry about it, everyone’s following a different part of these threads.

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.

Indeed, in my case, I bought a Sanyo MBC-550 computer with MS-DOS, a Zenith monochrome display, and an incredibly slow daisywheel printer, for almost exactly 1000 bucks. My use case was pretty narrow -- word processing and programming.

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 EGA card came out in 1984, same year as the Mac, and supported 640x350 with 16 colors,

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.

I was excluding it because 4 colors is pretty rough looking, so I’d assume that the people making the Mac would go for 1 bit or 4.