Quadra 605

This Macintosh Quadra 605 from 1993 is my first Mac. If I remember correctly, with the monitor (CRT, I don’t have that anymore. Who does?) it was around $1500. Back then, in order to buy a Macintosh where I live, one had to go to this specialty store near downtown Denver. At the time, I had to pay with cash, so I went with a buddy who terrified me when he wanted to go to Burger King in this bad part of town that we had to drive through to get there… while I had this money in my pocket. But, we did accomplish the mission safely.

I did buy an Apple Laserwriter shortly after this for around $600, and used it for a very long time. That was a great printer, which still worked well when I eventually let it go for a $60 printer with more features.

Before this Quadra, I had a Magnovox PC running a system called GeoWorks, a competitor to Windows. I’d purchased it instead of a Macintosh in order to save $300 or so. While it was okay, it was lacking any software to do anything other than word processing, and simply token versions of anything else. I did a lot of writing back then, so that was okay for a while, but eventually I had to give in to the fact that paying a bit more for something that could do vastly more in return, was worth it. Poor GeoWorks, I remember watching an interview with the creator of that system, he was so frustrated with how Microsoft bullied them out of the market when they had a better system (supposedly) than Windows.

I upgraded the processor on this Quadra with one that had a co-math processor (or something to that effect), added more than the official maximum RAM, and an ethernet card. There wasn’t much more that could be done at the time. There was a PowerPC card for this, but they are extremely rare, I’ve never seen one since they stopped making them. These days, I’d buy one just because I could have the best Quadra 605 possible. Eventually I’d like to add a solid-state drive. I took the start-up battery out so it doesn’t leak and damage anything.

This Quadra has been in deep storage, in a cool area completely out of sun light. However, the beige plastic has a small amount of yellowing to it, I’m not sure if this is from the when I was using it back in the day, next to a window, or if it is just happening regardless. Super Nintendos do this, they yellow badly no matter what. I really don’t want to take the thing apart and soak it in that solution (I forgot what it was, hydrogen peroxide?) to get it back to it’s normal beige blandness. Yellow is much worse than beige!

Warcraft II would slow down quite a bit as any given network game progressed. Sim City 2000 could only go so fast, but was very playable. QuarkXPress ran well, but could bog now with big documents. It was a good Mac at a good price for the time, but it wasn’t for big programs in work environments.

The concept of having a computer like the new iMac that is so much smaller, cheaper, and more capable than this Quadra, it blows my mind how far we’ve come!