In this issue of “Retro Mac” we will be looking at the first Mac to break the 100MHz barrier. The Power Macintosh 8100. Introduced Nov.3, 1994, the 8100 did not have the most inspired design. It was practical and powerful but Apple had yet to start it’s campaign for making computers that looked as good as they worked.

The 8100 sported a 1.44MB floppy drive as well as a 2x CD-ROM drive, clearly more the enough to handle all of your data needs.

Although it came standard with a mere 16MB of SIMM memory, the machine itself could handle a total of 264MB! This was made possible due the 8 RAM slots. I personally am very impressed to see a 15 year old computer flaunting 8 RAM slots.

The GPU sported 2 MBs of VRAM which where more then enough at the current time, however, if you were looking for a little more power you could utilize the four empty SIMM slots on the graphics card to double your VRAM from 2 to 4MB.

The 2GB SCSI drive was standard for this area and provided great bandwidth and performance.

Last but not least is the 110MHz PowerPC 601 CPU. The 601 paired with the 36MHz system bus and the 64bit data pathways provided what can be considered a truly powerful computer.

As far as the operating system goes, the machine was able to support OS 7.5 all the way up to 9.0

I’ll let you decide if this machine was worth the $4,400 price tag.

What’s your favorite RetroMac? Let us know in the comments section below!