Apple Performa 6200/75mHz Computer

The PowerMac 6200 was one of the first Macs to use the new processor and expectations were high…sadly they weren’t met.

Despite being a faster processor, Apple once again allowed history to repeat itself and, just as with the LC series, managed to cripple the final machine before it even got off the drawing board. In a cost cutting exercise, Apple based the new machine on the older Quadra 605 motherboard. The speed may have been adjusted for the new chip but the memory wasn’t. The 64 bit 603 processor was forced to run on a 32 bit bus (meaning that every access to memory took twice as long as was needed as data had to be fetched in two halves, in exactly the same way that the 32 bit 680X0 processors usedin the LC series ran on a 16 bit bus) but sadly this wasn’t the end of the stupidity. The IDE system (as opposed to the SCSI system used in earlier Macs) was designed around an 8 bit controller and this slowed hard disk access down enormously.

If this had been the end of the story things would have been bad enough but the 6200 was endowed with all manner of quirks that did nothing to endear it to Macintosh fans. The serial ports didn’t support hardware handshaking which is needed for modems rated at 9600bps and above (users wanting to use a faster modem had to use the comm slot); Using a serial printer when no modem was connected could cause network problems (plugging the printer into the modem port apparently helped); Network stability was affected when no SCSI devices were attached (fitting a SCSI terminator into the SCSI port apparently helped)… All in all, a less than shining example of computing power.

The Apple Power Macintosh 6200/75 features a 75 MHz PowerPC 603 processor, 8 MB of RAM, and a 500 MB hard drive in a compact desktop case. Although the Power Macintosh 6200/75 was sold only in Asia, the consumer version, the Performa 6200 series, was sold worldwide.