1977 – 1993retired
Apple II
“It put color graphics and VisiCalc in a plastic case, and never stopped being useful.”
“First of the mini-towers, gone before the tower got comfortable.”
The Macintosh Quadra 700 arrived in October 1991 alongside the Quadra 900, the first of Apple's Quadra line, built around the Motorola 68040 to go toe-to-toe with Intel i486DX-powered PCs. It was also Apple's first computer in a mini-tower case, riding the wave of a form factor that was displacing the monitor-on-desktop boxes of the 1980s. At US$5,700 it wasn't cheap, but it proved considerably more popular than its
By early 1993 the base model had drifted down under $4,700 as the Quadra 800 took over — a mid-tower with more expansion options and a faster 68040. The 700's run was a modest eighteen months, but it quietly set the template Apple's desktops would follow. It left the stage on its own terms.
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“It put color graphics and VisiCalc in a plastic case, and never stopped being useful.”
“Enhanced in name, eternal in our hearts — lowercase letters never looked so good.”
“News in the blanking interval: America typed its answer to Ceefax, then the sets stopped listening.”