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Macintosh IIci

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The 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. The IIci came with either a 40 or an 80 megabyte hard disk.

The IIci introduced a lot of technical and architectural enhancements, some of which would be important in preparing for System 7 (which was then called the Blue project) and would influence future Macs, though some of them came at the cost of compatibility:

  • a completely new, 32-bit clean ROM with built-in 32-bit QuickDraw that consists of 2 parts: one part that is the same across all Macs, and another area (called the overpatch area) that is specific to each Mac.
  • discontiguous physical memory that are mapped into a contiguous memory area by the MMU. Some of the System 7 VM functions had to be added to the ROM to support getting the physical address of the memory.
  • an optional Level 2 cache. The cache card, which fitted into a special slot on the motherboard, was later included in all systems at no charge.
  • a first for a non-all-in-one Mac — onboard graphics for an external display. This freed one of the system's three NuBus slots. However, because the integrated graphics used the system's RAM for its VRAM, some users used a NuBus graphics card to reclaim the lost memory.

In other words, the IIci was designed to run System 7. System 6 was suboptimal for the IIci because there were no support for virtual memory or 32-bit addressing.

For a short time in 1989, before the introduction of the 40 MHz Macintosh IIfx, the IIci was the fastest Mac available. It was also one of the most popular Macs of all time.

Possible upgrades include 25, 33, 40 or 50 MHz Daystar 68030 boards, a couple of different 68040 upgrades, and two PowerPC 601 upgrade cards running at either 66 MHz or 100 MHz, exclusively from Daystar Digital, which was bought by XLR8, which still holds the Daystar product logo and name for its line of products. 68030 and 68040 upgrades were also made by Sonnet, Diimo and other companies.

An easter egg exists in the IIci ROM. If the system date is set to September 20th, 1989 (the machine's release date) and the Command - Option - C - I buttons held during boot time, an image of the development team will be displayed.

The signatures of the product design team can be seen in the molded plastic of the case if one removes the motherboard.

References

  • Macintosh Buyer's Guide, vol. 7 no. 3 (Summer 1990)
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