Test What You Know About Macs With Mactracker.

I love free applications and no Mac is complete without a little history—for free.

Mactracker brings you information on any Mac ever made. Chips. Features. Specs. Prices. Click. Test your knowledge about Macs.

If you’re a long time Mac user, or a recent switcher, download Mactracker and track your way through the Mac’s history books.

Why? Because the history of the Mac is rich and flavorful. You’ll be amazed at how much Macs once cost and how underpowered they were.

Did I mention that Mactracker is free? Did I mention that you get detailed information on every Mac ever made?

You can’t still want another reason, can you?

The Mac has a history that traces back to the early 1980s, further if you count the PARC days—the computing interface research from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Macs available to the public started life in 1984, so there’ve been over 223 years of Macs since that original 128k. As I understand it, both Ron and Mac360’s founder, Tera Patricks, owned 128k Macs.

That’s what Ron told me. Tera always said he was older than dirt, so knowing about old Macs must be a side effect.

A couple of years ago, before Tera’s death, I put her Mac knowledge to the test by opening up Mactracker and calling her on the phone. You know, just to chat.

So we talked about this and that, about some tweaks to the Mac360 site, chatted about the new Macs with Intel chips, and I steered conversation to older Macs. Tera mentioned she once had a Mac LC (Performa)575.

“What did you like about it, Tera?“ Then I clicked Performa 575 in Mactracker to test her knowledge.

Tera said the most notable thing was the SCSI hard drive on rails which made for easy disk replacement. “How much RAM did it have back in those days?“ I asked.

She rattled off specs about as fast as I could check in the Mactracker stats. “Hmmm. Let’s see, Alex. It was an odd number, like 68 megs, with 512k of video RAM, with those old Motorola 68LC040 chips running at 33 mhz, same as the system bus.“

Tera should have been a history teacher. “OK, Tera, what was the Apple ‘code name’ for that old Mac?“ Who remembers those things?

I could hear the frown on the other side of the phone. Then she blurted out, “It was Optimum. Or something like that.“

Ha! Age gets us all. The Divine Missy T had choked. It was “Optimus, not Optimum.“ But I didn’t tell her I knew what it really was.

See? There’s a lot of Mac and Apple history wrapped up in this nifty little Mac database called Mactracker.

In fact, it’s not just Macs or Apple. There’s details on Motorola Macs, PowerComputing UMAX Macs, and more.

Remember iBooks, eMacs, Newtons, Performas, PowerBooks? It’s in there. Even MacBooks, Mac mini, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro.

Mactraker doesn’t limit the database to Macs. There’s info on Airport Base Stations, Apple’s QuickTake cameras, Displays, ImageWriters, even the old StyleWriter printer.

There’s even information about the Mac OS going back to System Software version 5.0, but that was back to October 1987. Where were you in 1987?

Simply put, if you like Macs and Apple and a little detailed history, Mactracker should be on your Mac.

There’s even details about the iPods going back to generation one, the five gigger from 2001. Click Here for the details and download link.

How about you? How far back does your Mac knowledge go? 10 years? 15 years? 20 years? To infinity and beyond?

Off Topic Note: I’ve updated the Mac360 Store with over 100 new categories—More Macs, more iPods, more Mac books, more software. Click Here and select any category for more detail, or use the handy search function. Whenever you buy from Amazon through the Mac360 Store you help support Mac360. Click Here to save almost $10 on the new version of Photoshop Elements, and almost $20 on the latest version of Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, available now from the Mac360 Store (it’s really Amazon). Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage and more—barely $50 more than Apple’s iWork ‘08. Save money and support Mac360 at the same time.