The Power Macintosh 7100 is a

personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or te ...

that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from March 1994 to January 1996. It is the mid-range machine of the first generation of

Power Macintosh The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer as the core of the Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by ''MacWorld'' as "the most important te ...

line, between the

Power Macintosh 6100 The Power Macintosh 6100 (also sold as the Performa 6110 – 6118 and the Workgroup Server 6150) is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from March 1994 to March 1996. It is the first computer from Apple to use ...

and the 8100. The 7100 re-used the Macintosh IIvx case with few changes. The initial version of the 7100 was powered by a PowerPC 601, and an version replaced it in January 1995. The 7100 was succeeded in August 1995 by two new models, the

Power Macintosh 7200 The Power Macintosh 7200 (sold as a Power Macintosh 8200 in Europe) is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from August 1995 to February 1997. The 90 MHz model was sold in Japan as the Power Macintosh 7215, and ...

and the

Power Macintosh 7500 The Power Macintosh 7500 is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from August 1995 to May 1996. The 7500 was introduced alongside the Power Macintosh 7200 and 8500 at the 1995 MacWorld Expo in Boston. Apple re ...

, though sales of the 7100 continued into early 1996.

Models

The 7100AV variants include a 2 MB VRAM card with

S-Video S-Video (also known as separate video, Y/C, and erroneously Super-Video ) is an analog video signal format that carries standard-definition video, typically at 525 lines or 625 lines. It encodes video luma and chrominance on two separate chann ...

in/out. The non-AV 7100s have a video card containing 1 MB VRAM which was expandable to 2 MB, and no S-Video in/out capability. Apple did not release a "DOS Compatible" card for the 7100 as they had for some contemporary

Macintosh Quadra The Macintosh Quadra is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from October 1991 to October 1995. The Quadra, named for the Motorola 68040 central processing unit, replaced the Macintosh II family as ...

models, opting instead to offer the 7100 bundled with the SoftWindows emulator at a price of $385. With an optional 256KB L2 cache card installed, MacWorld Magazine determined that the performance is comparable to 25 MHz

Intel 80486SX Intel's i486SX was a modified Intel 486DX microprocessor with its floating-point unit (FPU) disabled. It was intended as a lower-cost CPU for use in low-end systems. Computer manufacturers that used these processors include Packard Bell, Compaq, ...

. Introduced March 14, 1994: * Power Macintosh 7100/66: No L2 cache. $2,650 USD. * Power Macintosh 7100/66AV: $3,450. Introduced January 3, 1995: * Power Macintosh 7100/80: 256KB L2 cache. * Power Macintosh 7100/80AV

Codename lawsuits

The Power Macintosh 7100's internal code name was "''

Carl Sagan Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on ex ...

'', one of the three "fraud" code names ( Pilt Down Man, Cold Fusion, and Carl Sagan) referring to the

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM– ...

processor pretending to be a

68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Secto ...

.An account of this lawsuit is given in '' Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos'', pages 363–364 and 374–375. Though the project name was internal, it was revealed to the public in a 1993 issue of '' MacWeek''. Sagan, worried that the public might interpret this as an endorsement which sullied his name, reportedly contacted Apple and threatened to sue unless they could prove the codename did not officially link to his intellectual property and identity. After they reportedly refused, he wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in a 1994 issue of ''MacWeek'', seeking to inform their readers of the situation. Following the letter, a rogue programmer at Apple renamed the project to "''BHA'' (for Butt-Head Astronomer). Sagan then sued Apple for

libel Defamation is the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal defi ...

over the new name, but since the new codename was a expression of opinion, not fact, he lost his case. Sagan continued pursuing lawsuits. When he sued Apple again, this time for the original use of his name, he lost this suit as well. Sagan and Apple, apparently not wishing to engage in a series of lawsuits over the issue, came to an out-of-court agreement in November 1995, leading to Apple making a statement of apology. The engineers on the project made a third and final name change from "BHA" to "LAW", short for "Lawyers are Wimps".

Timeline

References

External links

apple-history.com :: Power Macintosh 7100
{{Apple hardware before 1998 7100 7100 Macintosh desktops Computer-related introductions in 1994