In September 1992, the first batch of Macintosh Performas were announced. Last time, I wrote about what Apple hoped to achieve with these computers, so it’s now time to discuss the computers themselves.
In the initial press release about the systems, Apple’s Betty Taylor wrote:
All three Performa models use the powerful Motorola 68030 microprocessor, and share the I/O ports and expansion slots that customers expect to find in other Macintosh family members.
From 1992 to 1997, Apple shipped over 40 Macintosh models wearing a Performa badge. In the years since, the word has become an anathema to many Mac users who were around in that era.1
Throughout August, I will be exploring the world of this computer line in a new series:
And what a confusing world it is!
At its heart, the Performa line is the fruit of badge engineering. This is often found in the car market, perhaps most famously in the Chrysler K-car platform that debuted in 1981. Over 14 years, Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth shipped a dizzying array of front-wheel drive cars, all based on the same platform. Features, options, and prices ranged between them, but under the covers, these were all the same car, more or less.
The Macintosh was intended to be different in many ways. One of them was its file system, which was designed for each file to consist of two forks, one a regular data fork as in normal file systems, the other a structured database of resources, the resource fork.
Resources came to be used to store a lot of standard structured data, such as the specifications for and contents of alerts and dialogs, menus, collections of text strings, keyboard definitions and layouts, icons, windows, fonts, and chunks of code to be used by apps. You could extend the types of resource supported by means of a template, itself stored as a resource, so developers could define new resource types appropriate to their own apps.
Wack0 on GitHub has put together an incredible project: the ability to install and run select versions Windows NT on a handful of PowerPC Macs, including:
A couple of videos showing the process have surfaced:
While working on another project, I came across a Steve Jobs interview that I hadn’t heard before:
I know WebObjects is the butt of jokes these days, but hearing Jobs speak about in 1996 has given me a new appreciation for what NeXT was trying to do with it.
While working on another project, I came across this video of Steve Jobs speaking at Macworld Expo in the fall of 1997. It’s a stunning video for a few reasons.
In it, he announces no products. Instead, he shared some thoughts on how he viewed the mess that Apple had found itself in before it purchased NeXT. In the span of about half an hour, he announced a new Board of Directors and a wide-ranging partnership with Microsoft, complete with Bill Gates making his now infamous appearance via satellite.
While working on another project, I came across this delightful blog post by Jay at The House of Moth, about the Power Mac G5:
How many fans does a Power Mac G5 have? Depending on the configuration this answer varies but you can be almost sure the answer is always one short. Let’s take a look at the Late 2005 Quad in this example.
– 2 intake fans (front inlet fan assembly) – 2 exhaust fans (rear exhaust fan assembly) – 1 fan in the PCI bay (speaker assembly) – 1 fan for the hard drives (media bay fan)
As spotted by Hartley Charlton, Apple has updated its Vintage & Obsolete Products document to include 2017’s iPhone X and 2018’s HomePod.
Back in 2021, Ernie Smith wrote about the curious world of CD caddies:
The first time I ever saw a CD-ROM, I had never seen a regular CD before, and I thought that it came in a giant plastic case. To be fair to me, I was in middle school, and I had little experience with them. It was in a library, and the screen did not display anything related to multimedia, but general reference information—stuff like databases, for example. A couple of years later, I got a home computer, along with an audio CD player, and soon enough, a CD-ROM. But I always thought about that caddy, which I never saw on any of the computer equipment I owned. Why did it exist? And why, when CD-ROMs trickled down to my home, wasn’t there one?
I recently finished Harry McCracken’s excellent article about the CD-ROM’s rise in the mid-1990s, and it made me realize that I had never really explored Apple’s early CD hardware.
Depending on how you count things, Apple sold six SCSI CD-ROM drives, from the “AppleCD SC” in March 1988 to the 600e, which was on sale from 1995 to sometime in 1997. Ahem.
The AppleCD SC utilized a CD caddy and could read CD-ROMs at 1x speed. It could handle discs up to 650 MB in size across five formats:
Matt Evans’ most recent project gave me more “wow, computers have gotten fast!” vibes than I’ve felt in a long, long time. Here is Evans:
This all started from a conversation about the RP2040 MCU, and building a simple desktop/GUI for it. I’d made a comment along the lines of “or, just run some old OS”, and it got me thinking about the original Macintosh.
The original Macintosh was released 40.5 years before this post, and is a pretty cool machine especially considering that the hardware is very simple. Insanely Great and folklore.org are fun reads, and give a glimpse into the Macintosh’s development. Memory was a squeeze; the original 128KB version was underpowered and only sold for a few months before being replaced by the Macintosh 512K, arguably a more appropriate amount of memory.
Filipe Espósito, writing at 9to5 Mac:
Back in 2020, Apple offered selected developers a custom DTK Mac mini with the A12Z Bionic chip inside, so that they could develop apps for the Apple Silicon platform. After the official launch of the M1 Macs, developers had to return their DTK Mac mini to Apple, which scrapped the machines. But one of these scrapped DTKs was successfully restored.
The video is almost an hour long, but goes into great details about this curious little machine: