The Quadra 700,along with its sister machine the Quadra 900 (basically a more expandable version of the 700, with more drive bays, Nubus slots, beefier power supply, etc.), was the first machine in the Quadra line. As such it marked a number of firsts for Apple (along with the 900 obviously). It was the first Mac to use the then high end 68040, to have a tower case (it was actually a IIcx case on its side) and the first mac to have built in ethernet. It was introduced in October 1991at the bargain price of $ 6000. It was discontinued in 1993.
Vital stats:
- Codenames: Shadow, Spike, IIce, Evo 200
- CPU : 25 Mhz 68040 (with built-in FPU)
- RAM : 4 Mb soldered on the motherboard, one bank of 4 30 pin SIMM slots (needs at least 80ns SIMMs), accepting 1Mb, 2Mb, 4Mb, 8Mb or 16Mb SIMMs.Room for up to 68 Mb of RAM, but will only detect 64Mb
- ROM : 1Mb
- optional L2 cache
- 2 NuBus 90 slots
- 1 PDS slot
- Data bus : 32 bit
- Video : built-in, 512k VRAM , expandable to 2 Mb
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- 2 ADB ports
- 2 DIN-8 serial ports
- DB-25 SCSI port
- Sound Input : mono 8bit
- Sound Output : stereo 8bit
- Gestalt ID : 22
- Minimal system software version : 7.0.1
- Maximal system software version : 8.1
Once Apple's flagship machine many Quadra 700's continue to live on as low-end email or word processing machines. Along with the Quadra 900 it was designed to replace the IIfx as top of the line Mac. A PowerPC upgrade was once available for it.
It has a number of quirks that you may want to be aware of :
- One of the NuBus slots is positionned in such a way that it is not possible to simultaneously have a card in it and a card in the PDS slot
- Regular 16Mb SIMMs can corrupt data on the floppy drive, it is reccomended that low-profile 16Mb SIMMs be used
- The built in video cannot use 16bit color
- When using 24bit color, the builtin video actually uses 32 bits of VRAM per pixel, ie unlike most machines it cannot drive 640x480 @24bpp with 1Mb of VRAM.
Sources : The Low End Mac - http://www.lowendmac.com
Apple History - http://www.apple-history.com