This week: The Quadra 700
Apples Quadra series of Macs were designed to be graphics work horses, with cutting edge power, speed and storage. The first Quadra out of the gate was the box like 700. A Mac that MacUser magazine was so taken by that they (spectacularly erroneously) said of, "You'll never need a faster Mac". Yes, indeed. Luckily while time has proved that we did in fact need faster Macs, they were right about how good the 700 was for its time.
The name Quadra was an indicator of the chip powering the machine. All quadras used Motarola's new 68040 processor, with integrated floating point unit (dude!). The 700 ran at a blistering 25MHz!!
On the outside the 700 was pretty plain looking, being an old 2cx case tipped on its side to give a mini tower look to the Mac. See that thin slot in the front? That's a floppy disc drive. 1.44Mb of raw storage. If you needed to move more than 1.44Mb of data the 700 could do it via built in ethernet. Which was nice as inside was a whole 80MBb (yes Mb) of hard drive, although power crazy designers could spec up a massive 800Mb drive. A truely awesome 64Mb of RAM could be installed if you really needed to.
The 700 weighed in at a cool £2500 when new, but offered a new league of power for that price. Designers everywhere soon learnt to love their 700's. I know because I used to work on one and indeed a 700 was the first Mac I bought with my own cold hard cash. And you never forget your first Mac.
- Original OS - System 7
- Maximum OS - OS8.1
- Introduced - October 1991
- Discontinued - September 1994
DHM rates the PowerMac 6300 series as 4.75 out of 5
