The Macintosh Quadra 840AV is a

personal computer A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...

designed, manufactured, and sold by

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Computer Co ...

from July 1993 to July 1994. It was introduced alongside the Centris 660AV, where "AV" signifies audiovisual capabilities, such as video input and output, telecommunications,

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

, and enhanced audio. The 840AV has the same mini-tower form factor as the

Quadra 800 The Macintosh Quadra 800 (also sold with bundled server software as the Apple Workgroup Server 80) is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's Quadra series of Macintosh computers. Introduced in February 1993 alongside the first ...

, with a significantly different logic board which includes a faster

Motorola 68040 The Motorola 68040 ("''sixty-eight-oh-forty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola ...

processor. The Quadra 840AV was discontinued shortly after the introduction of 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 Inc., App ...

-based

Power Macintosh The Power Macintosh, later Power Mac, is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Inc., Apple Computer, Inc as the core of the Mac (computer), Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by ''Mac ...

. The Power Macintosh 8100/80AV provides the same functionality in the same form factor, and had a significantly higher price point. The 7100/66AV was priced comparably to the 840AV but in a IIvx-style desktop case.

Hardware

Quadra_840AV_%26_Macintosh_16-inch_Color_Display_%26_AppleDesign_Powered_Speakers_%26_Apple_Extended_Keyboard_II_%26_Apple_Desktop_Bus_Mouse_II

At launch, Quadra 840AV's 40 MHz

CPU and interleaved RAM made it the fastest Macintosh available, topping both the nominally higher-end Quadra 950 and the Quadra 800 by 7 MHz. The 840AV is the only Mac to use the 40 MHz-clocked 68040, and it remains the fastest 68k Macintosh of all time, because all later high-end Macintoshes are

-based

es. It sports a faster 66.7 MHz AT&T DSP 3210

Digital Signal Processor A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing. DSPs are fabricated on metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit chips. ...

chip, compared with the 55 MHz variant in the 660AV. The on-board DSP was primarily intended to speed up audio/video processing, although few Mac programs make use of this due to the complexity of programming it. The Quadra 840AV includes 1 MB of VRAM which can be expanded to 2 MB to support 24-bit color, a capability shared only with the

Quadra 700 The Macintosh Quadra 700 is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from October 1991 to March 1993. It was introduced alongside the Quadra 900 as the first computers in the Quadra series, using the Motorola 68040 ...

and Quadra 900/950. Other new Quadra and Centris models released in 1993 do not support 24-bit color unless a video card is used. The 840AV and its relative, the Centris/Quadra 660AV, marked a number of firsts for the Macintosh family. They are the first Macintoshes to include on-board 16-bit 48 kHz stereo audio playback and recording capability, and

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 ...

and composite video input and output. To improve video playback, two separate frame buffers are used: one for standard graphics, and one specifically for video. This enables the live video input to be displayed as a scalable "window" within the Macintosh user interface. They are also the first personal computers that supported speech recognition (PlainTalk) out-of-the-box. The Apple GeoPort Telecom Adapter Kit introduced with the AV Macs add many DSP-based telecommunication functions, such as modem, fax, and telephony. The Quadra 840AV has a similar case to the earlier

Macintosh Quadra 800 The Macintosh Quadra 800 (also sold with bundled server software as the Apple Workgroup Server 80) is a personal computer that is a part of Apple Computer's Macintosh Quadra, Quadra series of Apple Macintosh, Macintosh computers. Introduced in ...

; the housing, chassis, power supply, and internal storage assemblies are the same, but the front and rear panels changed, with the power button being moved to the front. Internally, the 840AV is significantly different. Apart from the faster processor, the logic board lacks the 800's

Processor Direct Slot A processor direct slot (PDS) is a slot incorporated into many older Macintosh models that allowed direct access to the signal pins of a CPU, similar to the functionality of a local bus in PCs. This would result in much higher speeds than having ...

and second ADB port, but has a DAV slot (in line with NuBus slot A) and the new GeoPort. Also, unlike the 800's 8 MB of fixed RAM, all of the 840AV's memory is in

SIMM A SIMM (single in-line memory module) is a type of memory module used in computers from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. It is a printed circuit board upon which multiple random-access memory Integrated circuit chips are attached to one or ...

s (this is the reason why the maximum amount of memory is lower). The way in which the 840AV deals with its memory (DRAM) differs from the other machines of its generation (Quadra 700, 800, 950) in that 4, 8, 16, or 32 MB 72-pin 60ns SIMMs may be installed up to 128 MB and sizes can be mixed. However, the Quadra 840AV does not support 1 MB, 2 MB, or 64 MB SIMMs. The 840AV and 660AV are the first Macintosh computers to operate in 32-bit mode at all times, and cannot be toggled back to 24-bit mode, which may be useful for using early Nubus cards that conform to the 24-bit addressing. The Quadra 840AV was part of a hardware package that was offered with the initial release of Media 100.

Reception

Jonathan Chevreau of the ''

National Post The ''National Post'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet newspaper and the flagship publication of the American-owned Postmedia Network. It is published Mondays through Saturdays, with Monday released as a digital e-edition only.

'' said on August 7, 1993, that the Quadra 840AV and Centris 660AV were the next most interesting multimedia computers behind the new

SGI Indy The Indy, code-named "Guinness", is a low-end multimedia workstation introduced on July 12, 1993 by Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI). SGI developed, manufactured, and marketed Indy as the lowest end of its product line, for computer-aided des ...

, putting Apple among the forefront of the birth of the major industry of desktop multimedia. Ben Thompson of ''

Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...

'' magazine said in September 1993 that

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

and

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

were trailblazers by setting audio and video input as default features of those two Macintosh and of the

Indy Indy may refer to: Computing and technology *Indy (software), used for Internet access to music *Internet Direct, or "Indy", a software library * SGI Indy, a computer workstation Periodicals *''The Indy'', shorthand for newspapers that include ...

desktop PCs, which "could change the way businesspeople communicate". He said the new AV Macs had a surprising leap in features, breaking Apple's trend of slow but stable incremental technology refreshes. He tested the 840AV as the overall fastest Macintosh, attributing this to its "radically" new AV series hardware features such as dedicated DMA channels for SCSI, serial, ethernet, and soundbut noted that the SCSI DMA performance is completely lost on the legacy architecture of System 7 pending a complete

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

-based rewrite of the operating system such as with

Pink Pink is a pale tint of red, the color of the Dianthus plumarius, pink flower. It was first used as a color name in the late 17th century. According to surveys in Europe and the United States, pink is the color most often associated with charm, p ...

or Copland. He tested the wealth of AV features such as telecommunications, print-to-fax, speech recognition, and video capture, and appreciated their productivity gains with surprisingly no compatibility problems.

Timeline

References

External links

Macintosh Quadra 840AV: Technical Specifications
at Apple Support
Quadra 840AV
at apple-history.com
Quadra 840AV profile
at Low End Mac

at EveryMac.com {{Apple hardware before 1998 840AV Quadra 840

Quadra 840AV The Macintosh Quadra 840AV is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from July 1993 to July 1994. It was introduced alongside the Centris 660AV, where "AV" signifies audiovisual capabilities, such as video input ...