Massively Speeding Up Apple's First Power Mac!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ม.ค. 2023
- In the fast-paced tech scene of the 1990s, computers were often obsolete after just a few years. As such, Apple's first-generation PowerPC-based computers from 1994 were definitely feeling their age by the end of the decade...but in the case of this Power Mac 7100, third-party manufacturers had other plans.
Sources:
"Battle for the Desktop," PC Magazine, May 31, 1994.
"The Power Mac Arrives," Macworld, May 1994.
"Sound and Vision," MacUser, October 1993.
"AV Cyclone and Tempest," Macworld, September 1993.
PowerPC 601 chip photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
"Long Road to a Native OS," Macworld, April 1995.
"Cosmos Carl," The Mac Bathroom Reader by Owen Linzmayer.
Carl Sagan photo: olinuris.library.cornell.edu/...
"The Missing Links," New Scientist, July 2, 1981.
"Cold Fusion," Popular Science, August 1993.
Carl Sagan photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
"Letters," MacWEEK, January 10, 1994.
"WYSIWYG," Computerworld, January 10, 1994.
Carl Sagan v. Apple Computer, 1994: scholar.google.com/scholar_ca...
"Code Names Uncovered," Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen Linzmayer.
Apple campus photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
"G3 Upgrade Cards," Macworld, March 1999.
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lol an upgrade from 601 to G3 is so absurd, the 90s were a wild time
Turns out Apple's love affair with dongles goes back farther than I thought.
Dongles started out WAY before these machines. Look at the PowerBooks with HDI-20 and HDI-30.
@@RichsRandomRetroReviews The first PowerBooks came out 3 years before these computers.
@@masterkamen371 That was my point. Dongles have been around much longer than people think.
Well, let's consider the PC industry at this point. There wasn't really a "standard" -- there was just "what IBM was doing" until the PC clones snapshotted IBM's architectural decisions at some particular point and carried on using it as a de-facto standard from then on.
But over that time, we had both 9- and 25-pin serial; XT and AT keyboard protocols; AT and PS/2 keyboard connectors; MDA, CGA, and EGA on 9-pin digital connectors; analog VGA on a 15-pin connector; MFM, RLL, ESDI, IDE, and SCSI hard drive protocols, on ribbon cables with card-edge connectors, ribbon cables with IDC connectors, and board interfaces with card-edge connectors; floppy drives with board-to-board and ribbon cable interfaces with card-edge and IDC connectors, single- and double-sided 5.25" disks, double-density and high-density 3.5" and 5.25" disks, 8 or 9 sectors per track for double density, 18 sectors per track for high density, 300 or 360 RPM, FM and MFM encoding; FAT12 with no BIOS Parameter Block, FAT12 WITH a BPB, FAT16 with a 32MB limit, FAT16b with a 2GB limit; ISA vs MCA vs EISA vs VLB vs PCI...
But sure, silly Apple for not getting it right with that all-in-one connector. ;-)
The shadows betray you because they belong to me
Funny how many times "Apple created a software emulator" has come up in their history to handle processor changes.
True, but how many times did somebody's entire software library just not work any more after a complete underlying processors ISA change? In most cases, you didn't even have to know that anything was different.
Contrast that to how long it took Microsoft to shift from 16-bit real mode to 32-bit protected mode, or 32-bit to 64-bit. Just contemplate for a moment the existence of "Internet Explorer" and "Internet Explorer (64-bit)" in your Start menu, and whether your grandmother had any idea why there were two, how they differed, and why you would choose one over the other.
Built-in, transparent emulation is a pretty good strategy from a UX perspective. Even if it hobbled the performance of apps, and even the OS itself, until they got around to re-writing it all. You weren't inherently stuck with poor performance (just needed software updates to unlock the potential), and/or you didn't have to clean the slate and start over with your software investment.
three. wait, how is that funny?
it could have been worse, imagine they had a card or clip-on device or dongle containing a 68040 for ppc macs to continue compatibility a la the Apple //e PDS card.
Same as Windows on ARM
@@gluttonousmaximus9048 Who uses Windows on ARM?
@@orangejjay no one yet, but it'll almost certainly replace the entire low end PC market within the next few years. Potentially the high end, if someone bothers to make something suitable to the workstation/gamer market, and legacy compatibility issues are sorted out.
LOL The Carl Sagan thing was hilarious. Oh, man.
And the LAW a perfect end 😂
My dad had the original 66MHz model without the internal CD drive. Mainly used it for CAD work for his civil engineering business. First computer I played Doom and Wolf 3D on. Also the first computer I remember using the internet on. Shame he trashed it years ago.
F
Absolute shame. 👎
I really enjoy your Mac history, especially all these upgrade cards and machines you feature. I never paid any attention early apple computers, so it's always fun to see what was going on outside of PC land.
I think it's starting to get a bit tiresome
You should also check out action retro
@@achannelhasnoname5182 Then why are you here?
Ahh, chasing performance bottlenecks. The money I poured into my LAN party rig through the late 90s and early 2000’s to battle this, well - I’d prefer not to think about it.
But processor upgrades like this, in todays retro scene certainly have a huge cool factor, so finding a couple to show us is certainly appreciated. Especially with the added commentary about its history and what was happening when it first came out.
Right in the feels. Our first ppc Mac was a 7100/66. We had upgraded from a Mac plus so it was a huge boost. I day dreamed about those cpu upgrades for years while I was in high school. We eventually replaced it with a 400mhz G4 sawtooth after I had already gone off to college.
I had a 6100/66 in the late 90s and got a G3 accelerator in '99. It made a massive difference. I did a lot of 3D rendering on that thing. And Marathon, of course.
I recently brought an SSD upgrade for my 2012 iMac and was surprised to see the same newer tech logo on the box! They're still in business!
Fun fact: As you mentioned, while Apple did gradually rewrite more and more of the classic Mac OS with PPC code (especially in Mac OS 8.5, the first PPC-only version of Mac OS), some parts of even Mac OS 9 were still using 68k code, although one of the goals of the Copland rewrite was to be fully PPC native, but I think we all know what happened to that project. It took until Mac OS X for a fully native PPC version of Mac OS to be released.
I enjoyed this video, you went to great lenghts in telling a quirky story. But this is the story of many of us late gen-X'ers that read about these things in the mags but couldn't dream of buying them. I like to think you were in a similar boat - totally aware but miles away from doing these wild things during their relevance. Love this kind of content. Looking forward to a 486SX/26 to Am5x86/133 upgrade lol
I got a Power Macintosh 6100 myself last year, and was extremely lucky to find it came with a Sonnet Crescendo G3 in the PDS slot!
This is quite literally the computer I grew up with! Very unusual to see the 7100/80 second revision being acknowledged, in my experience, but quite welcome. I even installed a processor upgrade to keep it running, though in my amateur hands it meant we couldn't fully close the case afterwards. The sound of its built-in CD drive struggling to load games is burned into my memory even today.
The hardware ageing was crazy in 90s. In the world of IBM PC - if your machine is 2 years old, it become hard to run newer games and after ~3 years new games refuses to run at all. There was endless itching to buy a whole new machine.
And now I sit in front of PC I built back in 2018 - it runs all new games (not in highest settings, though), it runs VR and it does not cries for any immediate upgrades. And I still use digital camera from 2012 (sic!) which still produces decent pics in 4K resolution.
My main PC is on a platform from 2010 (P6X58D-E, overclocked 6c/12t Westmere, 24GB RAM and a 2015 GTX 960) and my camera is a Canon EOS 650D from 2012 with a 18mp APS-C sensor
Very interesting video! Compared to those times computers were more fun then our experience with todays Macs.
Also, very good background music was used in this video! Makes this video truly a high quality production!
Nothing more hilariously awesome than having an early woeful PPC being upgraded to a 500MHz G4. I have one in my PM 7800.
My first classic mac was a 7600. Beautiful machine, and quite powerful. I dropped a G3 in it and it was definitely an improvement
Thank you so much for a great video! I used to have one of these particular Macintoshes, and would look enviously at the incredibly expensive upgrade kits. To think how far things have come today is quite mind boggling! Keep up the good work. It is much appreciated.
7100/66 was my first Mac that I bought. Shortly thereafter I got a snap-on oscillator that bumped it to 80mhz... Worked great! Awesome video and overview! Thanks
To be honest, Apples' trolling with the codenames was funny as hell.
Agreed. I'm a bit of a Sagan fanboy, but he really overreacted here.
@@DannyBeans I think it's probably because he thought Apple would be releasing a computer with his name, and it seems nobody bothered to correct him. It's definitely an overreaction for a development name, but it wouldn't be for a commercial product.
@@dominateeye Yep. That's why I said he overreacted.
I bought an 80 MHz 7100 about a year ago for the heck of it. I was strictly PC in the '90s, so it's been an interesting machine to explore. Although I remember sometimes passing through the Apple section in stores like CompUSA or Computer City and admiring their designs; I thought they were pretty handsome, even if they were just beige.
Just beige happened to be the common color of pretty much every Windows computer too, you know. They were often times even worse.
At least Apple hade bright and white computers. They stood out from the true ugly beige Windows PCs.
Wow, the production quality of your videos just keeps going up every time. Love the interesting tidbits you always scatter in, like here with the one about Sagan vs Apple. Very cool!
This was my first PC, and I had one of the Newer 300MHz cards too. I don't remember that video adapter though, I bought an educational bundle, 7100/66 with monitor and a StyleWriter printer for $2700. I agree 8.6 was the sweet spot, 7.6.1. was also a good one. I'm sure I didn't pay anywhere near $700 for the upgrade though, I never had that kind of money in those days. It must have come way down after a year or so.
I was an Amiga user back in the day, and with the fall of Commodore, I was resigned to moving over to the PC. My employer bought a PowerMac 8100/80 and my life was changed… sort-of. I spend a lot of time in both worlds. The 8100 was an interesting introduction to the Mac world. I prefer the Mac, but I thank the Amiga for teaching me the tools to work in both environments.
Thanks for the memories - I had a 7200/90 back in the late 90s which I treated with a Sonnet Crescendo G3 upgrade card, it was my main Mac well into the 00s when I replaced it with a G4 MDD.
Interesting video as always... I have two 6100s currently, one with a DOS card running a 5x86 processor upgrade and the other running a Newer G3 400/1m with an AV Card. I love the pizza box versions but definitely like all the first gen PMs. Keep up the great content!
Loved these upgrade vids!
Very accurate history of the era. The cpu upgrades for Macs were two thirds of the price of a new Mac and offered two thirds of the benefit. But the new Mac's could often be bought at a big discount right after new models replaced them, while the cpu upgrades never could be bought at a discount. Hence, few were sold. And few are available today.
I used a used 7100/ 80 as my main Mac for about a year and felt it was a good machine. It worked well with an external modem for viewing the early Web. Any of those Power PC Macs I bought, I always used the so called "AV Card" which offered more resolution and more importantly meant avoiding that thick adapter cable. Which tended to be a mechanically flaky connection.
That Mac AV monitor was a nice Tritron (flat top to bottom curved left to right), by the way, but I used standard VGA monitors.
Any time you can combine things like speakers, computer, and monitor into one unit, you have an advantage in selling to schools.
It’s always cool to see these 90s upgrades in action! I’m sure that upgrades like these helped out ancient (for the time) Macs. Crazy to think that a 5 year old machine was obsolete when nowadays you can use more modern but even older machines without a problem.
Sweet memories… thanks for the awesome video! 💜
I look forward to your uploads every week and haven’t missed one since I subscribed years ago. I was even a Patreon before the recent economic downturn. Keep up the good work!
Woo, finally a video on something I have. I've got the 80/av with a scsi2sd in it.
At my first job at an ad agency I had one of these, my colleague did have a G3 tower and it flew in comparison, huge nostalgia !!
I had the Mac IIci and was geeked when the Daystar PPC chip came out. It was so fast (relatively). Went to college where there was a T1 internet connection and I was blown away downloading South Park Christmas special in less than 5 mins. Archaic but revolutionary to me.
Good overview, thanks!
I miss those days. I recall upgrading my PowerMac G4 Digital Audio with a dual 1 GHz CPU from a G4 QuickSilver model. Apple decided it was unthinkable for people to do it even though the CPUs were pin- and electrically-compatible. So they designed the QS CPU daughter card to sense the presence of 12v on one of the screw posts. Easy enough to rig up, but just needless anti-consumer shit that we've often seen from Apple over the decades.
Very well researched. Bravo!
Digging your play with focus, especially in the static scenes. Gives a nice visual past while keeping the narration "in focus"
Coincidentally, I'm working on a PPC 7200 and I have the Sonnet Crescendo G3 7200 400MHz card to go into it. Thanks, Colin, for pointing out the slower drive speeds. Since I have PCI slots in my system, maybe I'll add a PCI SATA card into the mix to remedy that issue.
Personally, I’d go with something period accurate-ish and use newer, larger and faster SCSI drives, which stays within the “spirit of the machine” for me.
But I can totally understand why you’d go with a PCI SATA card (for a SSD at a guess?)
this channel deserves more subs
Interesting story about the Sagan saga. Thanks for sharing.
I fondly remember these days of upgrades. I had A LOT of fun spending company money to keep old machines in service longer.
I had one. It was a great machine. Loved it!
We added a Sonnet G4 card to our 9600. This allowed us to keep our expensive Avid Media Composer systems for 10 years and in the end we had OSX on them as well.
Friend, you have created a near-exact clone of my very first Mac. Thank you for the nostalgia!
These macs are way older than I am but for some reason I feel a bit of nostalgia hearing you talk about them
I miss the retro Windows/ThinkPads content this channel used to do semi-regularly.
Beavis „I am cornholio!”
- or when scientists need TP for their bunghole
Oh the good old days, when you could truly tinker and upgrade your computer...what fun :)
I gotta give you a hand for the camera work against that CRT. Those shots are so sharp and lovely. :)
I still miss those old systems and apps!
I wanted a 7100 bad in college, so bought one right after graduating, when I didn’t need one anymore. It ran up to MacOS 8.6 back in the day, and was eventually upgraded with a 400 MHz Sonnet G3 and Sonata Pro graphics card. That’s fast enough to play StarCraft, but these days it runs System 7.5.5, which is a blast on a system so fast. That Sagan story always reminds me even that your heroes are one kind of asshole or another.
I had forgotten about the Sagan BS. At the time, he had been trying for 15 years to get his screenplay "Contact" fully realized. An astronomer with a penchant for publicity stunts.
I sora wish tech still moved as fast as it did back then, cause I wasn't even born until the start of the 2000s, but it also means that you'd have to buy a new computer every few years, which would get expensive. The biggest boost in performance I was around for, and new enough about computers for was when Alder lake came out, but even that was only about 20-50% gains. When Ryzen came out, I was aware of it, but was still new to my love of computers, and therefore didn't understand just how much of a leap it was.
I remember installing about 20 of these during the summer of 1999 when I worked at the general purpose computer lab at my university. They had a bunch of 7100s that had been there for years, and it was a lot cheaper to upgrade them this way and keep them going for a few more years than to buy 20 new G3 models.
I can see it being more appealing in bulk.
I have one of these Macs with that special monitor ports.. it's a pain to find/use an adapter for it... alas... but still these old Macs are fun to play with...
For those of us who couldn't afford the upgrades, there was always the temptation of RAM-doubler and Speed-doubler (connectix)
The story about the code name was hilarious! I have a deep respect for Carl Sagan, but ultimately he proved himself a real BHA with that lawsuit! :P
I've read that most 603e based machines were actually slower than 601 based ones due to the fact that they used the same chipset as 68040 based systems. They even used the same BIOS as the Power Macintosh Card.
God I I wish I NEVER got rid of my Quadra 610 or 8500 g3 upgrade. I miss those machines.
I found one on the curb last year & later then sold on fbm local pickup. Same model!
I still have my 7200/90 powerpc.. it’s casing is in a very bad shape.. it’s still run ok but every time I open the case I broke some plastic part..
It’s my first mac so.. I’m going to look for a good replacement casing. If I can find one..
Thank you for the video.. it gave me hope…❤
I think it was one of these models they used as a prop when Kitty bought a computer in That 90's Show but I could be wrong, the first season on Netflix was set in the summer of 1995
History of the Mac never ceases to amaze me. This is basically the equivalent of upgrading a P5 Pentium to a late Pentium II class machine. But there were even cross-architecture (68k to PPC) upgrades in that era. Overall, the Mac survived 4 processor architectures, 4 system bus types (changed at times different to the CPU type), and a replacement of the OS - all while somehow remaining a consistent product range on the business level. That's both impressive and weirdly fascinating.
Imagine if they had offered a PPC->Intel upgrade or Intel->M-series upgrade.
I suppose you could call it 5 architectures if you count the Apple IIe card, but then you could call it 6 if you count the DOS card.
Intel did make a Pentium 2 upgrade for the socket 8 Pentium Pro’s, ran up to 333mhz and had all the improvements that a Pentium 2 brought, plus a pretty big advantage compared to the standard Pentium 2’s, 256k of on die, full CPU speed L2 cache, unlike the normal Pentium 2’s which had 512k of L2 cache, but only running at half CPU speed.
Those smart-ass engineers at apple were so hilarious!
It looks like apples management, at the time, was very supportive for trying new things and tweaking them as they went; socially and within their products. Love it!
I was was at university when the G3 started coming along. They absolutely blew the Power PC’s we had like this out of the water. Like night and day.
I'm a Sagan fanboy, but Apple's "BHA" response is absolutely classic.
In the 90s, this was a grandiose upgrade. Back then, systems were outdated after 2 years. That the rest of the hardware is partly limited is not surprising. I like these old times with Overdrive, AMD 586, Amiga 1260...... etc where incredibly outdated systems were suddenly upgradeable. Today, Intel e.g. gives new sockets every few years and something like Overdrive no longer exists.
I think the most upgraded Mac I ever had was a Performa 6400. It had an Orange PC co-processor which could run Windows 95 or 98, or a PCI ethernet card (couldn't take both at once), maxed out RAM and eventually a Sonnet G3 in the L2 cache slot. Took ages to boot up, but it saw me through Marathon and OpenDoc. Remember Cyberdog?
The last sentence is perfect. 🍀
I love old macs only used one in fith grade back in 09 it was a color classic, the teacher had it for kids to use when we where done with are work and we where good that day/week , I want a mac but I'm so used to windows that I don't know if I should start with a older model or a newer one
This remembers me my first edition B&W PowerMac with the 300mhz G3, i overclocked it to 350mhz and that didn't done much difference, as the bus run at 100mhz until i found out that the bus speed in those is limited by the RAM, so i installed 133mhz ram and that increased the bus speed to 133mhz, together with extra 50mhz i was happy as i could play my games now haha
Ah I kinda remember that from the Cinema Display days that it wasn't the first time they tried to make an all-in-one display connector that flopped. I forget what the later one was called... something generic like Apple Desktop Connector? I too used a dongle on my G5. :)
I imagine Steve Jobs would've been proud of those engineers' codenames.
I'm always fascinated by 90s Mac tech. I was a PC kid but my good friend always had macs and even though I knew PCs were better for games, I had a weird jealousy of his macs. Including his 68k processor laptop, with black and white monitor.
I had a PowerMac 9600 that came with a 300mhz PPC 603e but later upgraded to a G4 from Sonnet. The cpu was on a daughter card that could be swapped.
Around this time a third party also sold a pci expansion with an intel cpu so you could run windows/dos natively. Eventually VirtualPC came out and you could emulate windows.
Funny to think how much faster the state of the art seemed to change back then. Today, you can easily use a 5-year-old PC for average computing tasks and not notice much of a performance difference over a new one. That was not at all the case in the 90s through the 2000s.
Apple's hardware focus shows most clearly when it transitions processor architecture.
I was wondering but what do you do with all your computers?
I had a 6100 I ran Linux on, it was used as a shoutcast server for a internet radio station I helped run.
There have been many specialized very expensive NuBus upgrades, especially in the audio realm. If you had several 10-thousand $ in such expansions, you would laugh at 1K. The CPU acceleration would help to recoup the investment for another few years until there was an alternative. The upgrades had their niche.
Our first home computer had a 486/66 in it and I managed to snag a 100 MHz processor to put into it a few years later. It was definitely nothing special but that plus the 32 MB of RAM we had in it was fairly good for what it was.
I have a g4 in my 7100/66 with the same basic design but under Daystar.
I sold these NewerTech upgrades back in the 90s - the bang for the buck was incredible IF you had a hefty investment in your current systems - memory wasn't cheap, drives weren't cheap, monitors weren't cheap. Good times!
Ah yes the 7100, the machine that is best described as neat. Especially with the Guitar for a chime.
If you had a great Nubus video card Like a Radius or Supermac Thunder series or were running specialty equipment which used a Nubus interface card, These upgrades were a life saver. I used to work a lot with Imagesetters from companies like Agfa, ECRM, etc. and they told the users when the PCI macs came out that PCI interface cards were 1-2 years out.
Was about to say the same thing, at a company I worked at we had $1000s of nubus mpeg and audio editing hardware in an nubus Mac, adding a sonnet card made the workflow much more efficient
This was an exciting era for Mac users :-)
By the way: PowerPC does not mean Personal Computer. It was the IBMs abbreviation for Performance Optimazation With Enhanced RISC Performance Chip and RISC means Reduced Instruction Set Computer. So, both reduced and enhanced 😉
That's an incredible jump in performance for an add-on upgrade. I wonder how far you could take it, could you fit a modern day processor to that slot?
I'm going to the flea market in an hour , hope I can get one of these
BAM THERE IT IS!!
13:40
I seriously thought you were not gonna make a dollars U.S quote but yet of course you did!!!
Foolish me
hopefully a decent SSD setup, BlueSCSI etc, can address some of the IO speed issues, there's a limit of course of how much an SSD can help of course but good thing its an option :)
That Sagan story is hilarious!
Upgrades like these kept Macs from ending up in landfills etc
I really think classic Mac OS held back the line for many years and needed to be put to rest years before OS X came out. I am interested in a PowerPC processor card for an even older Amiga big box system I am putting together!
I remember someone telling me USB would eventually replace firewire. I laughed out loud, not exaggerating.
Boy was I wrong.
here im rocking a 10700k, and funny enought a Core 2 Quad Q9650 will still perform ok for everyday tasks with an SSD boot drive and a GT1030
Where do you put all your upgraded max? I have a bout 100 and I have them in a storage unit but I need to move them out because I paid $323 a month or do you sell them later on down the road or do you store them? I’m curious about that. I enjoy your legacy Mac discussions because I have a lot of those that you have.
I could not get my freakin Sonnet G3 upgrade card to work on my 7200!! I did not know about the L2 cache chippy problem!!! BLAST!! heh
The lawsuit story reminds me of when Mattel sued Aqua over Barbie Girl, where the judge responded with "The parties are advised to chill".