The
Macintosh Quadra series was
Apple ComputerApple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and manufactures consumer electronics and computer software products. The company's best-known hardware products include Macintosh computers, the iPod and the iPhone...
's product family of professional high-end Apple Macintosh
personal computerA personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator...
s built using the
Motorola 68040The Motorola 68040 is a microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060 In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the 040...
CPUThe Central Processing Unit or processor is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, and is the primary element carrying out the computer's functions. This term has been in use in the computer industry at least since the early 1960s...
. The first two models in the Quadra line were introduced in 1991, and the name was used until the Power Mac was introduced in 1994. The product manager for the Quadra family was Frank Casanova who was also the Product Manager for the
Macintosh IIfxThe Macintosh IIfx was a model of Apple Macintosh computer, introduced in 1990 as the fastest Mac, and discontinued in 1992. At introduction it cost from US $9,000 to US $12,000, depending on configuration....
. The first models were the Quadra 700 and Quadra 900, both introduced in 1991.
The
Macintosh Quadra series was
Apple ComputerApple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and manufactures consumer electronics and computer software products. The company's best-known hardware products include Macintosh computers, the iPod and the iPhone...
's product family of professional high-end Apple Macintosh
personal computerA personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator...
s built using the
Motorola 68040The Motorola 68040 is a microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060 In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the 040...
CPUThe Central Processing Unit or processor is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, and is the primary element carrying out the computer's functions. This term has been in use in the computer industry at least since the early 1960s...
. The first two models in the Quadra line were introduced in 1991, and the name was used until the Power Mac was introduced in 1994. The product manager for the Quadra family was Frank Casanova who was also the Product Manager for the
Macintosh IIfxThe Macintosh IIfx was a model of Apple Macintosh computer, introduced in 1990 as the fastest Mac, and discontinued in 1992. At introduction it cost from US $9,000 to US $12,000, depending on configuration....
. The first models were the Quadra 700 and Quadra 900, both introduced in 1991. The Quadra replaced the
Macintosh II seriesThe Macintosh II series was a series of personal computers in Apple's Macintosh line.-Features:The Macintosh II models were "modular" systems which did not include built-in monitors and were intended for business use...
as the high end computer in the Macintosh product line.
Models
The first computers to be part of the Macintosh Quadra series were the Quadra 700 and Quadra 900, both introduced in 1991 with a
Central processing unitThe Central Processing Unit or processor is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, and is the primary element carrying out the computer's functions. This term has been in use in the computer industry at least since the early 1960s...
(CPU) speed of 25 MHz. The 700 was a compact model using the same case dimensions as the
Macintosh IIciThe Apple Macintosh IIci was an improvement on the Macintosh IIcx. Sharing the same compact case design with three expansion slots, the IIci improved upon the IIcx's 16 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU and 68882 FPU, replacing them with 25 MHz versions of these chips...
, with a
Processor Direct SlotProcessor Direct Slot or PDS, was a solution introduced by Apple Computer, in several of their Macintosh models, to providing a limited measure of hardware expandibility, without going to the expense of providing full-fledged bus expansion slots.Typically, a machine would feature multiple...
(PDS) expansion slot, while the latter was a newly designed tower case with five
NuBusNuBus is a 32-bit parallel computer bus, originally developed at MIT as a part of the NuMachine workstation project. The first complete implementation of the NuBus and the NuMachine was done by Western Digital for their NuMachine, and for the Lisp Machines Inc. LMI-Lambda. The NuBus was later...
expansion slots and one PDS slot. The 900 was replaced in 1992 with the Quadra 950, with a CPU speed of 33 MHz. The line was joined by a number of "800-series" machines in a new minitower case design, starting with the Quadra 800, and the "600-series"
pizza boxIn computing, a pizza box is a style of case for computers or network switches. They tend to be very thin, normally one or two rack units in height, making them wide and flat...
desktop cases with the Quadra 610.
In 1993 the Quadra AV series was released, consisting of the 800-series Quadra 840AV and the 600-series Quadra 660AV, at 40 MHz and 25 MHz respectively. Both included an
AT&TAT&T Inc. is the largest provider of local, long distance telephone services in the United States, and also serves digital subscriber line Internet access. AT&T is the second largest provider of wireless service in the United States, with over 77 million wireless customers, and more than 150...
Digital signal processorA digital signal processor is a specialized microprocessor with optimized architecture for fast operational needs of Digital Signal Processing.-Typical characteristics:...
and
S-VideoSeparate Video, more commonly known as S-Video, and sometimes incorrectly referred to as Super Video and also known as Y/C, is an analog video signal that carries video data as two separate signals: lumen and chroma...
and
composite videoComposite video is the format of an analog television signal before it is combined with a sound signal and modulated onto an RF carrier.Composite video is often designated by the CVBS acronym, meaning "Color, Video, Blank and Sync"...
input and output ports for video, as well as
CDA Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store sound recordings exclusively, but later it also allowed the preservation of other types of data. Audio CDs have been commercially available since October 1982...
-quality
microphoneA microphone, colloquially called a mic or mike , is an acoustic-to-electric transducer or sensor that converts sound into an electrical signal. In 1876, Emile Berliner invented the first microphone used as a telephone voice transmitter...
and audio output ports. The AV models also introduced PlainTalk, consisting of the text-to-speech software MacinTalk Pro and speech control (although not dictation). However all of these features were poorly supported in software, and DSP was not installed in later AV Macs.
Branding
The Quadra name was also used for the successors to the
CentrisMacintosh Centris was a set of three 1993 Macintosh models that were built around the Motorola 68LC040 and 68040 CPUs. The name was chosen to indicate that the consumer was selecting a Macintosh in the center of Apple's product line: lower performance than the Quadra computers, but higher...
models that briefly existed during 1993: The
610The Macintosh Quadra 610 and Macintosh Centris 610 are two closely-related personal computers that are a part of Apple Computer's Quadra and Centris series of Macintosh computers, respectively. When the Centris 610 was introduced in February 1993 alongside the larger Centris 650, it was intended as...
, the
650The Macintosh Quadra 650 and the Macintosh Centris 650 are two closely-related personal computers that are a part of Apple Computer's Quadra and Centris series of Macintosh computers, respectively...
and the
660AVThe Macintosh Quadra 660AV is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's Quadra series of Macintosh computers. When it was originally introduced in July 1993 alongside the Quadra 840 AV it was called the Macintosh Centris 660AV, but it was renamed without any major changes in the...
. Centris was a "mid-range" series of systems between the Quadra on the high end and the
LCThe Macintosh LC was Apple Computer's product family of low-end consumer Macintosh personal computers in the early 1990s. The original Macintosh LC was released in 1990 and was the first affordable color-capable Macintosh. Due to its affordability and Apple II compatibility the LC was adopted...
on the low end, but it was later decided that there were too many product lines and the name was dropped. Some machines of this era including the Quadra 605 were also sold as
PerformasThe Macintosh Performa series was Apple Computer's consumer product family of Apple Macintosh personal computers from 1992 until 1997, when the introduction of the Power Macintosh 5x00 series ended this product line...
, further adding to the confusion.
The last use of the name was for the Quadra 630, which was a variation of the LC 630 using a "full"
Motorola 68040The Motorola 68040 is a microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060 In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the 040...
instead of the LC's 68LC040, and introduced together with it in 1994. The 630 was the first Mac to use an IDE based drive bus for the internal
hard diskA hard disk drive is a non-volatile storage device that stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Strictly speaking, "drive" refers to the motorized mechanical aspect that is distinct from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or a floppy disk...
drive, whereas all earlier machines had used
SCSISmall Computer System Interface, or SCSI , is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, and electrical and optical interfaces...
.
The first three
Apple Workgroup ServerApple Workgroup Server and, later, Macintosh Server, were the names given to selected models of Macintosh computers which were sold by Apple Computer with additional server software and sometimes bigger hard drives. Apart from that, they were mostly identical to computers out of Apple's...
models, the WGS 60, the WGS 80 and the WGS 95 (mostly called "AWS 95" for "Apple Workgroup Server") were based on the Centris 610, the Quadra 800 and the Quadra 950, respectively.
Processor
The transition to the Motorola 68040 was not as smooth as the previous transitions to the
Motorola 68020The Motorola 68020 is a 32-bit microprocessor from Motorola, released in 1984. It is the successor to the Motorola 68010 and is succeeded by the Motorola 68030.- Description :...
or
Motorola 68030The Motorola 68030 is a 32-bit microprocessor in Motorola's 68000 family. Released in 1987, the 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040. In keeping with general Motorola naming, this CPU is often referred to as the 030 .The 68030 features an on-chip...
. Due to the Motorola 68040's split instruction and data caches, the Quadra had compatibility problems with
self-modifying codeIn computer science, self-modifying code is code that alters its own instructions while it is executing - usually to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance or simply to reduce otherwise repetitively similar code thus simplify maintenance...
(including relocating code, which was common under the
Macintosh memory modelHistorically, the Mac OS used a form of memory management that has fallen out of favour in modern systems. Criticism of this approach was one of the key areas addressed by the change to Mac OS X....
). Apple partially fixed this by having the basic Mac OS memory copy call flush the caches. This solved the vast majority of stability problems, but negated much of the Motorola 68040's performance improvements. Apple also introduced a variant of the memory copy call that did not flush the cache. The new trap was defined in such a way that calling it on an older version of Mac OS would simply call the previous memory copy routine. The net effect of this was that many complex applications were initially slow or prone to crashing on the 68040, although developers quickly adapted to the new architecture by relying on Apple's memory copy routines rather than their own (or flushing the cache), and using the memory copy that did not flush the cache when appropriate (most of the time).
See also
External links