Macintosh Quadra 700

The Quadra 700,along with its sister machine the Quadra 900 (basically a more expandable version of the 700, with more drive bays, Nubus slots, beefier power supply, etc.), was the first machine in the Quadra line. As such it marked a number of firsts for Apple (along with the 900 obviously). It was the first Mac to use the then high end 68040, to have a tower case (it was actually a IIcx case on its side) and the first mac to have built in ethernet. It was introduced in October 1991at the bargain price of $ 6000. It was discontinued in 1993.

Vital stats:

• Codenames: Shadow, Spike, IIce, Evo 200
• CPU : 25 Mhz 68040 (with built-in FPU)
• RAM : 4 Mb soldered on the motherboard, one bank of 4 30 pin SIMM slots (needs at least 80ns SIMMs), accepting 1Mb, 2Mb, 4Mb, 8Mb or 16Mb SIMMs.Room for up to 68 Mb of RAM, but will only detect 64Mb
• ROM : 1Mb
• optional L2 cache
• 2 NuBus 90 slots
• 1 PDS slot
• Data bus : 32 bit
• Video : built-in, 512k VRAM , expandable to 2 Mb
• 2 ADB ports
• 2 DIN-8 serial ports
• DB-25 SCSI port
• Sound Input : mono 8bit
• Sound Output : stereo 8bit
• Gestalt ID : 22
• Minimal system software version : 7.0.1
• Maximal system software version : 8.1

Once Apple's flagship machine many Quadra 700's continue to live on as low-end email or word processing machines. Along with the Quadra 900 it was designed to replace the IIfx as top of the line Mac. A PowerPC upgrade was once available for it.

It has a number of quirks that you may want to be aware of :

• One of the NuBus slots is positionned in such a way that it is not possible to simultaneously have a card in it and a card in the PDS slot
• Regular 16Mb SIMMs can corrupt data on the floppy drive, it is reccomended that low-profile 16Mb SIMMs be used
• The built in video cannot use 16bit color
• When using 24bit color, the builtin video actually uses 32 bits of VRAM per pixel, ie unlike most machines it cannot drive 640x480 @24bpp with 1Mb of VRAM.