Macintosh History: 1995

In early 1995, Apple announced that they had shipped one million Power Macs within one year of their introduction, showing an overwhelming acceptance of the new technology.

Faster

In January, the Power Mac 6100 was bumped from 60 MHz to 66 MHz, the 7100 went from 66 MHz to 80 MHz, and the top of the line 8100 moved from 80 MHz to 100 MHz.

Slower

The first Power Mac for the education market was released in April. The 5200/75 put the new PowerPC 603 processor in a case similar to the one used for the LC 575. The all-in-one design was a natural for schools, since it meant less cables to come loose and fewer parts to set up.

Unfortunately, although the PowerPC 603 was a match for the earlier, more expensive PowerPC 601, the 5200 and several subsequent models were hobbled by some very poor design decisions on the motherboard. These are covered in general on the Road Apples site and on Online Tech Journal, but boil down to this:

• The 603 has a 64-bit bus, but the motherboard had a 32-bit bus. It took four memory cycles to collect and integrate data so the CPU could process it.
• The motherboard had two sections which could only communicate via the CPU. One part handled ADB, networking, and SCSI, the other dealt with IDE, video, and graphics.

These compromises were rooted in a decision to use as many components and subsections from the Quadra 605 and Quadra 630 as possible, to reduce design costs.

Send in the Clones

Power Computing introduced the first licensed Maclone, the Power 80, running an 80 MHz PowerPC 601. Over time, speed was increased to 100 MHz, then 120 MHz. Power Computing went on to be a very successful company, until Apple pulled their license in 1997 - and then bought the company.

Adopting PCI

Until June 1995, Apple had stuck with the 10 MHz 32-bit NuBus slot as the standard Mac expansion slot. But June was the first Mac with PCI slots, a 33 MHz 32-bit architecture pioneered on the Wintel side.

The Power Mac 9500/120 not only used PCI slots (six of them), it was also the first Power Mac to use the powerful PowerPC 604 processor. In October, Byte magazine noted that the 8500/132 (which also used a PPC 604) was 87% faster than a 133 MHz Pentium for integer math. Never again would the Wintel crowd be able to look down on the Mac's performance

But perhaps the most forward-looking feature of the 9500 was the CPU daughter card. Today, it's very easy to find a 400 MHz G3 card that can plug into the daughter card slot and make the 9500 several times faster than it was at birth.

Small Improvements

Apple moved from 2x CD-ROMs to 4x mechanisms, both of which sound pretty slow in this day of 24x to 40x drives.

The LC 580 improved the price of the LC 575 by moving from the Sony Trinitron to a less expensive monitor.

More Power to Go

May saw the introduction of three PowerBooks, the 190, 190cs, and 5300. Both series used the same case, and the 190s could be upgraded to PowerPC status with a 5300 motherboard.

The 190s were the last PowerBooks designed around the Motorola 68LC040, and both ran at 33 MHz. The 190cs had a color screen, while the plain 190 displayed grays.

The 5300 used the new PowerPC 603e, a version of the 603 with a larger on-chip cache that greatly improved performance when running old Mac software using 680x0 emulation.

And although today's 5300s are very nice laptops, that's mostly because Apple fixed them and newer versions of the Mac OS work more reliably on it. The initial release was recalled due to a combustible battery. The case plastics tended to chip, a characteristic shared by the 190. For these, the PowerBook 5300 earns a Road Apple.

More Power Macs

In August, Apple replaced the 7100 with the 7500, which sported a 100 MHz 601 and a brand new case with a slide-off top. The 8100 was replaced by the 8500, which shared the same minitower case originally used by the Quadra 800.

Both the 7500 and 8500 had three PCI slots and used CPU daughter cards, allowing upgrade to a 400 MHz G3 processor today.

The Competition

After many years of working on a replacement for Windows 3.1, Microsoft finally shipped Windows 95 in August.

Intel introduced the Pentium Pro in November.

But the most significant computing event of the year had nothing to do with Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Apple, or any other company.

1995 was the year World Wide Web entered our language.

Personal Perspective

It really wasn't a breakthrough year for Apple. The x100 series of Power Macs were evolutionary jumps, the 5200 suffered from too many compromises, the Power 80 was nothing to get excited about, and the LC 580 was no faster than its predecessor.

Apple adopting PCI was news, and even today the 9500 is in strong demand on the used market, mostly due to the 6 expansion slots and the ability to plug in a fast G3 processor.

The PowerBook 190 was a step backward after the PowerBook 500 series. The earlier models came with built-in modems and ethernet; with the 190 and 5300, you had to buy your own. While this lowered the price of the computer, it made support more difficult since you never knew which PC card modem, ethernet adapter, or combination card you'd be working with.

But with millions of Power Macs in use by the end of the year, Apple was leading the personal computer revolution from older designs into the RISC world.