I think the original 128k Mac stopped getting OS (then simply called "System," no "Mac OS" until System 7.5) support at version 4.0 in 1987. So, three years, not ten.
The Mac Plus (released in January 1986) did have support in System 7 up to 7.5 in 1996.
The 128k Mac was cool, but the RAM constraints in particular made upgrades to the 512k in 1985 and the Plus (upgraded ROM and 1024kb) in 1986 a no-brainer.
I have a hard time believing that even System 6 would run on the 128K... And System 7 used up a whole MB of RAM. (Memories of juggling OSes and RAM on a Mac Classic with a whopping 2 MB of the stuff).
So think about this...the top-of-the-line iMac display currently supports 2560x1440 (or 3686400 pixels) while the original mac supported 512x384 (or 196608 pixels).
If you spread out that increase over the course of 30 years, you are adding 10.5% more pixels each year, while cutting the price by ~60% (from Macintosh to present iMac)
The later OldWorld-ROM Macs went so far as to have stuff like QuickTime in ROM. The Mac Classic even had a whole System 6 boot disk in ROM you could activate if your harddisk was dead!
I understand that significant parts of the OS code were burned into ROM in order to free up RAM, which was more expensive. Code for things like the window manager, etc. Later versions of the OS patched bugs in the ROM by loading the patches into RAM. A rather inventive design at the time.
The 128KiB of RAM was painfully insufficient even with so much shifted to ROM: text files couldn't be more than a few pages in length. And there was no backing store you could reliably swap OS components into either, because the machine had a single floppy drive and no hard disk, and the floppy disk had to come out to allow disk copying.
This is not unusual for products that existed before a formal support lifecycle was established. Microsoft often uses a 12/31/2001 date for such products.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 76.3 ms ] thread[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#Version_history
The Mac Plus (released in January 1986) did have support in System 7 up to 7.5 in 1996.
The 128k Mac was cool, but the RAM constraints in particular made upgrades to the 512k in 1985 and the Plus (upgraded ROM and 1024kb) in 1986 a no-brainer.
edit: looks like the 128K system info page is wrong, you needed a Plus for System 6 http://support.apple.com/kb/TA33972?viewlocale=en_US
If you spread out that increase over the course of 30 years, you are adding 10.5% more pixels each year, while cutting the price by ~60% (from Macintosh to present iMac)
It's been a crazy 30 years!
not bad.