The Macintosh 512ke was introduced on April 14, 1986 as a "cheaper" alternative to the top-of-the-line Macintosh Plus (Yet the price was not substantialy different), and was discontinued on September 1, 1987. It featured an 8 MHz 68000 processor, 512k of RAM, and a 400k disk drive. The Mac 512Ke was shipped as 2 seperate versions, the beige and the Platinum. The latter featured Mac Plus updated roms and an extended Apple keyboard. The 512k of RAM allowed these Macs to run System 4.1 with Finder 5.4.
The true draw of the 512ke was that it could be purchased as a ROM upgrade for the Mac 128k and Mac 512k, allowing these computers to operate as a Mac Plus for a fraction of the price of buying a new computer. The upgrade was also bundled with the external floppy drive for a time. The downside to buying the ROM upgrade by itself is that the upgraded Macs still only contained 400k internal floppy drives.
Software included with Macintosh 512ke
- System File 3.0
- Finder 5.1