Power Macintosh 6100

Background

The Power Macintosh 6100 was introduced alongside the Power Macintosh 7100 and Power Macintosh 8100 and occupied the entry-level role of the new Power Macintosh family. The 60 MHz models were upgraded to 66 MHz in January 1995. Apple also released a PC-compatible model of the 6100/66 called the Power Macintosh 6100 DOS Compatible. This version came with a PDS card with an Intel 80486 DX2/66 processor (without L2 cache) and a single SIMM RAM slot that uses the same type of RAM as in the 6100 itself. The card supports to 32 MB of RAM, a Creative Technology Vibra 16 sound chipset, and also includes standard PC VGA and joystick ports. With this card, the 6100 is capable of running both the Mac OS interface and DOS/Windows 3.1 side-by-side, even on different monitors. The card could also use the main system RAM if there was no SIMM installed on the card. Notable were the new startup and "sad Mac" chimes: instead of the electronic "chuff" that was used on the previous generation machines, it played a guitar chord strummed by jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan, and instead of the "Chimes of Doom" arpeggio that played when there was a hardware error at startup, there was the sound of a car crashing and glass breaking. This and the other NuBus-based Power Macintosh models (7100, 8100 and Workgroup Server 9150) were replaced by the Power Macintosh PCI series released in 1995, although the 6100 DOS compatible continued in production until 1996.