Macintosh Quadra 700

Hardware

Form factor: The Quadra 700 case has the same dimensions as the popular Macintosh IIcx and Macintosh IIci models; this made it possible for users of those models to upgrade to the more powerful Quadra 700. The IIcx and IIci were designed to allow their rubber feet to be moved to the side for vertical orientation which was preferred by some users, so the 700 recognized this by making cosmetic changes to the front bezel to emphasize the vertical orientation, including the cooling slate and printing of the Apple logo and model name. Brian Benchoff of Hackaday suggested that the popularity of the Quadra 700 was the turning point for computer manufacturers to move over to the tower form factor en masse. The tower form factor of the Quadra 700 was by necessity: common peripherals of the Quadra were the relatively extremely heavy color CRT monitors offered by Apple (those whose screens measured 20 inches and over diagonally could weigh 80 lbs or more) favored by the desktop publishing industry during the 1990s. Such monitors threatened to crush the plastic frames of the Macintosh IIcx and Macintosh IIci; customers might have been tempted to fit such heavy monitors atop the IIcx and IIci because of their horizontal form factor.

CPU: Motorola 68040 @ 25 MHz. The clock oscillator runs at 50 MHz; replacing it with a faster oscillator (up to 74 MHz) results in a performance increase.{{cite web

Memory: The Quadra 700 could be upgraded to 68 megabytes of RAM, which with its 25 MHz processor made it a very useful computer for scientific or design work.

Expansion: Two NuBus slots and a Processor Direct Slot; processor upgrades from Apple and other manufacturers were sold for the 700 when the PowerPC 601 accelerator cards came along in 1994. However, using a processor direct slot will block one of the NuBus slots.

Storage: 80 and 160 MB hard disks were available at launch. A faster 230 MB unit became available in mid-1992 when the Quadra 950 was introduced.{{cite magazine

Video: Like the IIci, the 700 has integrated graphics built into the system board but, unlike the earlier model, it uses dedicated VRAM for its video memory.{{cite web | access-date = September 11, 2023

Sound: 8-bit stereo, 22 kHz.

Ports: I/O was available with dual serial ports, two ADB ports, an AAUI Ethernet port, mono audio in, stereo audio out, and a DB-25 SCSI connector. The Quadra 700, along with the 900, are the first Macintosh models with built-in support for Ethernet networking.{{cite book | author-link1 = David Pogue

Operating system: System 7.0.1 was included as standard. This is the earliest Macintosh model to support Mac OS 8. The Quadra 700 can also run A/UX. {{cite web

The Quadra 700 uses tantalum capacitors on the logic board, rather than electrolytic capacitors which can leak fluid.{{cite web

In popular culture

• The Quadra 700, alongside an SGI Crimson running IRIX, was featured in the film Jurassic Park (1993).{{cite web
• The original version of the game Myst, for the Macintosh, was created mostly on the Quadra 700 using HyperCard.

Timeline

References

References

1. (December 1991). "MacWorld 9112 December 1991".
2. "Macintosh Quadra 800 - MCBX".
3. (June 1993). "MacWorld 9306 June 1993".
4. (June 1993). "MacWorld 9306 June 1993".
5. Benchoff, Brian. (February 16, 2018). "Whatever Happened to the Desktop Computer?". Hackaday.
6. (June 1993). "MacWorld 9306 June 1993".
7. McFerran, Damien. (January 2009). "The Making of Myst". Imagine Publishing.