Massively Speeding Up Apple's First Power Mac!
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- 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.wikime...
"Long Road to a Native OS," Macworld, April 1995.
"Cosmos Carl," The Mac Bathroom Reader by Owen Linzmayer.
Carl Sagan photo: olinuris.libra...
"The Missing Links," New Scientist, July 2, 1981.
"Cold Fusion," Popular Science, August 1993.
Carl Sagan photo: commons.wikime...
"Letters," MacWEEK, January 10, 1994.
"WYSIWYG," Computerworld, January 10, 1994.
Carl Sagan v. Apple Computer, 1994: scholar.google...
"Code Names Uncovered," Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen Linzmayer.
Apple campus photo: commons.wikime...
"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
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?
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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!
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
My first classic mac was a 7600. Beautiful machine, and quite powerful. I dropped a G3 in it and it was definitely an improvement
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!
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.
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.
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 fondly remember these days of upgrades. I had A LOT of fun spending company money to keep old machines in service longer.
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.
Beavis „I am cornholio!”
- or when scientists need TP for their bunghole
this channel deserves more subs
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 gotta give you a hand for the camera work against that CRT. Those shots are so sharp and lovely. :)
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'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.
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 wondering but what do you do with all your computers?
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'm a Sagan fanboy, but Apple's "BHA" response is absolutely classic.
That Sagan story is hilarious!
Good overview, thanks!
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
This was an exciting era for Mac users :-)
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.
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
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.
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.
Upgrades like these kept Macs from ending up in landfills etc
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
I have a g4 in my 7100/66 with the same basic design but under Daystar.
I'm going to the flea market in an hour , hope I can get one of these
“BHA”… brilliant
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 😉
I had an 8500 up to G4 for years. Used computer to start with, and the G$ card prices did come down.
I remember someone telling me USB would eventually replace firewire. I laughed out loud, not exaggerating.
Boy was I wrong.
I've never seen a leaking Tadiran cell, I've got a CNC machine with a functional battery that dates to 1991, with no leakage.
@1108 you show a socket a with a PPC in it do you know any thing about that.
Thought that was AMD Socket A guess not. Looked that thing up and it says its a 337 pin for the g3 not a 462 pin for the AMD.
I found the newer technology card on eBay for about $150 but it doesn’t look like it has the video card holder that you talked about in your video. Did that come with the G3 upgrade newer technology card?
Now we just need a plastic upgrade kit for these old machines... My PPC 8xxx/9xxx towers look like they lost a fight with a BattleBot.
Apple's hardware focus shows most clearly when it transitions processor architecture.
MAN this Carl Sagan is a real BHA.
I miss the days when 5 years would give a 11x speedup in computers.
you make me want to fire up my quick silver g4 🤣🤣
You’ve got to put all the odd ware expansions cards you’ve got into one machine! Go on drop in the hardware compressor you had in this!
Were apple really that PETTY they NAMED one of their Computers like that?! OHHHH I LOVE IT!
the number of times that Apple missed proprietary hardware and got away with it is impressive
apple learned to develop their OS on multi architecture, ARM, Intel and PowerPC too.
I bought a very good PowerPC apple in 1997, never bought the 486 DX4 intel card for it, a perfect system for 2D artwork, kept using it for all publications.
An interesting video... reading the rumors that the next "Power Mac"... Sorry... Mac Pro... will be restricted to just lame storage upgrade.
Best to get a Mac Studio with an OWC ThunderBay Flex 8
did you forget your usual outro?
The “call to action” outro is dead for 2023. Everyone knows how UA-cam works at this point, so I’m letting the end screen tiles speak for themselves.
@@ThisDoesNotCompute it does seem like part of the furniture at this point for a lot of creators, so kudos for trying something different. well done also for never saying “smash that subscribe button …” 🤣
The issue with Mac CPU upgrade cards is they were never "for people on a budget". I get it, it probably was not cheap to source the components and the likely market share was very low so each unit needed to be sold for a lot of money to make any profit, but at $700 for a G3 upgrade card at a time when a brand new iMac G3 could be had for $900 just didn't make a lot of sense.
For most consumers, I would agree. The only use case where this would make sense is if a machine had some specific NuBus hardware they could not abandon or they were not ready to replace all of their old SCSI equipment with USB/FireWire equivalents. Once you factor the cost of replacing all of those old devices in addition to the computer, then perhaps the upgrade card to get a few more years of use would make sense.
Streisand effect at its finest
power pc macs were faster than their intel brethren when they both were shipping
Butt-head astronomer. That is simply brilliant.
If you liked this video, I believe they'll _"appreciate a thumbs up."_ They did not say that at the end of this video, but it is programmed into me.
I wonder if someone knows if there is a schematics for this mac? Internet tells nothing
If only they put the same effort into software and hardware that they put into unprofessional codenames. Kinda says it all about Apple really.
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
No nooo nope! I’ll just put the money on a used MBP
IDC wasn't a terrible idea, but between the pathetic DRAM-based onboard video on these, and lack of a passthrough for video upgrade cards (including Apple's own cards), it was mostly useless. The only NuBus PowerPC box without the IDC connector is the WGS 9150. The unfortunately-named HPV PDS card is typically faster than any NuBus video card, unless said card has DSPs or other crazy accelerators, because the NuBus was limited to 32 bit/20MHz (if NuBus '90 compatible; most cards ran at only 10MHz) while the PDS is 64 bits and ran between 30 and 40MHz (same as system bus speed). I have a variety of those 601 PDS G3 (and a G4) cards and they're pretty spiffy. Sonnet was able to get up to 500MHz out of them using their Fortissimo technology.
"Sometimes Newer Is Better Than New" has to be the worst slogan I've heard.
WILD EEP IF YOU ♥ BEIGE
Yikes! Now you might get sued if MOSSAD got wind of your witty remark at 7:03 (a battery "made in Israel" that "had not yet detonated") 😂
Channel is misleading. It does compute.
22nd
Same story different decade. No one wants to buy their trash now for the same reasons back then. It's fun watching these computer science students buy macbooks, I wouldn't hire them.
Thanks for this, I never heard about Apple disrespecting Sagan, that's really pathetic. I kinda doubt Jobs would have tolerated that kind of pettiness had he been there at that time.
Why would you be upset over an internal codename lol, did Carl.S not understand these things work, if he had not got involved no one would have really known, now he's had his name used repeatedly as a joke because of the way he acted, what a numpty.
Carl Sagan should get over himself
He did. He died shortly after this, in 1996.
@@michaelsworkshop9031 it’s a shame he never saw Apple’s turnaround beginnings in 1997-1998.
Totally dig your videos! I wish I had never tossed my old beige mac 68K machine. I still have my blue tower G3 though! It still runs too, but I need to check the battery. You probably knew this, but there is a radiation hardened G3 running on Mars right now. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RHPPC
hey Mr this doesnt compute
I know youre the pro and all so i thought id ask you
i recently bought a pre modded GBC on ebay with IPS. and its unplayable! the buttons are non responsive and you have to press them ridiculously hard to register commands.
Do you have a video on how to fix this or any recommendation?
thanks
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.
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
LOL The Carl Sagan thing was hilarious. Oh, man.
And the LAW a perfect end 😂
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.
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 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!
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!
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.
Why didn't they call it power mac? Seems weird they call mac power pc 🤔
Nothing more hilariously awesome than having an early woeful PPC being upgraded to a 500MHz G4. I have one in my PM 7800.
Apple using proprietary video cables were just stupid, especially for schools that use those computers! My middle school had that Power Macintosh and used the dongle with their existing Apple monitors! Apple for decades have been using proprietary connectors for display, thanks for USB-C that are easy to connect Macs to non-Apple monitors!
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
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!
I imagine Steve Jobs would've been proud of those engineers' codenames.
Sweet memories… thanks for the awesome video! 💜
could you pls install Macos Catalina to this?
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.
I miss the retro Windows/ThinkPads content this channel used to do semi-regularly.
Loved these upgrade vids!
I saw a motorola CPU in a Socket A motherboard on a pic around 11:03 and kind of puzzled. Does apple used their own kind of Socket A or it was some kind of freaky PowerPC upgrade for AMD Socket A motherboards?
Nope, apple used socket A zif sockets for their powermac G3s. They only used it for like, two years.
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?)