Macintosh History: 1994

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

That seems to be the philosophy behind the Houdini card that turned a normal Quadra 610 into the dual-platform Quadra 610 DOS Compatible. At a keystroke, the user could move between the comfortable Mac environment and the dominant, sometimes required, Windows platform.

Also introduced in February 1994 were the LC 550 and LC 575, faster cousins of the all-in-one LC 520. The 550 has a 33 MHz 68030, while the 575 moved to Quadra level with a 33 MHz 68LC040.

But these were just evolutionary developments; the revolution was one month off.

Power To the People

March 1994 marked the beginning of the end for the Motorola 680X0 line of processors, at least as far as the Macintosh was concerned.

Three new models, the Power Mac 6100, 7100, and 8100, moved the Mac platform from CISC chips to RISC chips. But most amazing of all, Apple had so carefully engineered the Power Macs, and so closely worked with Motorola and IBM in designing the PowerPC chip, that the Power Macs tended to be more compatible with old software than the Quadra series had been when it was first introduced.

Apple's wizards had created an emulator which worked so well that even some programs written for the original 1984 Macintosh could run flawlessly, albeit far faster, on the new Macs with an entirely new processor.

Needless to say, Apple sold over a million Power Macs within one year of their introduction.

But Apple didn't immediately abandon the 680X0 chips. One reason was that there was no low power version of the PowerPC for use in laptops.

Portable Power

May saw the introduction of six 68040-based PowerBooks, the Duo 280 and 280c, and the PowerBook 520, 520c, 540, and 540c. The extra power compared with the 68030 made these very popular, as did the color screens on the 280c, 520c, and 540c.

The 500-series laptops, a.k.a. Blackbird, was one of Apple's finest PowerBook designs, and the last to come from the factory with a modem and ethernet port until the PowerBook G3 of 1997.

System 7.5

It seems like we've been using System 7.5 forever, but it was only introduced in June 1994. I can't even recall what was so new and cool about 7.5, only that we quickly standardized on it at work - and still use it for everything from the IIsi up through most of our Power Macs. (Update: The biggest thing System 7.5 introduced as great stability for PowerPC models.)

Fortunately, a reader has contributed the following list:

1. Apple Menu Options with the hierarchical Apple Menu and the recently used items.
2. The Launcher became standard, not just for the Performa.
3. General Controls was enhanced, with the options to protect the System and Application folders, the shut down warning, whether to show the desktop when the Finder was hidden, whether to launch the Launcher automatically, and which window to display when you open and save a document.
4. Stickies.
5. New desktop patterns.
6. WindowShade.
7. A new face-plate for the AppleCD Audio Player.
8. Better Find File, with things like more search options per search, numbers of items to display, and so on.
9. Apple Guide. A lot more comprehensive than the older Finder Help.
10. PowerTalk for things like directories and e-mail services on the desktop.
11. QuickDraw GX.
12. The Documents folder could be created automatically by the General Controls.
13. Menu Bar clock, based on SuperClock.
14. Desktop printer icons. Not much help if you have only one printer.
15. Drag and Drop
16. MacTCP became standard.
17. The Finder is purportedly faster, and is scriptable.
18. FAT. One set of disks, all computers (68K and PowerPC), at least at that time.

Apple Adopts IDE

Apple had a reputation for innovation, and for sticking with their own standards. Hard drives were SCSI, plain and simple.

At least they were until June 1994, when Apple shipped the Quadra 630 (a.k.a. Performa 630, LC 630) with an IDE hard drive, the same kind of hard drive used in the Wintel world.

Put simply, IDE drives were a fair bit less expensive than SCSI drives and offered reasonable performance for entry level computers - and today their descendants offer incredible performance on the Power Mac G3 Pro.

But it took Mac users by surprise to see an IDE drive in a Macintosh. Some viewed it as selling out to the dark side.

A Cheaper PowerBook

The only PowerBook at home is my wife's PowerBook 150, purchased after the price fell below $1,000. Her machine has 4 MB of memory, a 120 MB hard drive, and a 33 MHz 68030 CPU, making it a nice field machine.

Even today Apple seems incapable of selling a PowerBook at the $1,000 mark.

One way Apple kept the 150's cost down was using an IDE drive, just like the Quadra 630.

Power Performa, Power DOS

In September, Apple put the Performa label on the Power Mac 6100. And in November, they shipped a Power Mac 6100 DOS Compatible, again making it easy for Mac users to work in the Windows world when they had to.

The Competition

The biggest computer story of the year wasn't the PowerPC. It was the flaw discovered in the Pentium CPU, which eventually led Intel to recall each and every Pentium on the market.

Personal Perspective

I worked as a book designer when the Power Macs first came out. My specialty was, and remains, academic books with footnotes, which we design in FrameMaker. It's an incredibly powerful program, but it was excruciatingly slow on a IIci. Things improved on the Quadra, where it was just bearable.

But on the Power Mac . . . why, on the Power Mac, FrameMaker could sing! Others may rave about Photoshop speed improvements or smoother gaming, but I know the power of the PowerPC when I ran the PowerPC native version of FrameMaker.

It went from being sluggish to being faster than Quark, the program our other designers used (and continue to use). Suddenly, FrameMaker wasn't just powerful, but it became an efficient tool. (Before that, is was the only tool, so we had to make do with its lackluster performance.)

I'm a late adopter of the PowerPC at home; I graduated from a Centris 610 to a Umax SuperMac J700 in June 1998, mostly because my web work for Low End Mac demanded a lot more horsepower than I had - and the $800 close-out price on the SuperMac matched the cost of upgrading my Centris to twice its current performance.

Instead, for the same money I saw at least a tenfold performance increase.

I may never run Mac OS X on this machine, but I'm very satisfied with 8.1, 104MB of memory, a 2.1GB hard drive, and a fast (compared to my 1x CD-ROM) 8x CD-ROM player. And it's nearly as fast as the 7600/200 I use at work, although that'll change in a few weeks when we drop in a G3 card.

Still, the reason I run Low End Mac is simply that few of us need the latest, greatest computer technology - and when we do buy it, we feel outdated within six months. Instead, Low End Mac grew out of my philosophy of getting the most from what you have and learning to be content with less than state of the art equipment.