Friday, November 20, 2015

Apple Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh

Apple in 1997 released a specially designed bronze-colored Mac to celebrate its 20th year of making
computers. The Apple machine featured a 250 MHz PowerPC 603e processor and 12.1" LCD screen powered by an ATI 3D Rage II video chipset with 2MB of VRAM capable of displaying either 800x600 or 640x480 pixels up to 16bit color. It had a vertically mounted 4x SCSI CD-ROM and an Apple floppy Superdrive, a 2GB ATA hard drive, a TV/FM tuner, an S-Video input card, and two "Jewel" speakers and a subwoofer built into the externally located power supply "base unit".

To participate in the celebration, Mac lovers had to plunk down $7500--three times what the same computer cost in a different case. It may qualify as the priciest case mod of all time. Steve Jobs might have bought one; we doubt whether many others did.
This Macintosh may not have been a well known machine in its time, nor a big seller, but it has had a lasting legacy on personal computers. All-in-one LCD computers are now quite common, which clearly owes its design to the TAM, including using a vertically mounted removable drive (i.e. Superdrive).


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