newton@prague.dec.com (05/19/89)
I believe the reason that it costs so much to expand a 512Ke is that basically
a 512Ke is an old-style Mac 512 with the 128K ROMs and an 800K drive. The way
Apple expands it is to replace the whole motherboard as well as the back panel
of the machine. This gives you essentially a MacPlus (minus the keyboard; you
must pay extra if you want the MacPlus keyboard as well), with
512K more RAM
the ability to upgrade to 4MB, if the power supply is up to it...
a SCSI port
These days though, you probably want a hard disk and at least 2MB of RAM. The
machine I have at home has 1MB of RAM and no hard disk -- and I find that I am
often using older versions of the System software and applications because the
latest versions aren't comfortable to use wtih 1MB RAM and 1600K of disk space.
-- Thomas Newton