Mac Users! Attention!

[bsu...@bangor.ac.uk]

OK here I am in the tiny psychology computer lab (dont laff - we just
have biology lectures in this building for some retarded reason) using a
Mac Performa 6200 "PowerPC". It is without a doubt one of the slowest
windows-style machines I have ever used, especially for the internet. I
had a 286 which had barely more trouble manipulating windows even in
hi-res hi-colour SVGA, and my old atari (running an 8mhz 68000 chip --
the pre-powerPC macs went all the way up to 75mhz 68050's, didn't they?)
probably wouldnt have so much trouble formatting a webpage....

Before I end up with the impression that all macintoshes are like this
(I just thought I'd pop in and have a go on some non-PC machine for
once), tell me what model you have and if your experiences are similar.
Anyone who can give me an opinion on just how old this thing is would be
welcome - it's going a bit beige around the edges, but that might just
be from being in a smoky place (this isnt, but it might have been last
year :-).

Text editing is a real pain and websites take ages to process for
display after the browser has loaded them! This sucks! Possibly the
larger psych comp lab down the hall might have faster machines, I dont
know - this is the first time I've strayed off the path that leads
Door-Stairs-Lecture Theatre..

RSVP!

EddyH

[bsu...@bangor.ac.uk]

And to think that it's supposed to be the best image-work platform... If I
tried to do any serious photo editing on this particular one, I'd slowly go
mad...

[tahrey estée]

Hello "Me"... meet the real me. And my misfit's way of life. A dark black past is my... most valued possession.

Ah, wikipedia, if only it had existed when I was at uni, along with a properly usable form of Google, life would have been a magnitude easier. Well, that and 3G tethering or wifi, and affordable laptops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_6200

"The 6200 was introduced in May 1995 with a PowerPC 603 CPU at 75 MHz as a PowerPC-based replacement of the Quadra 630, and continued using the 630's case, but sharing the logic board with the Power Macintosh 5200. Because they use a logic board design directly adapted from the 32-bit Quadra with a 64-bit data path CPU, these models are sometimes described as being among the worst Macintoshes ever produced.[1] Other hardware issues include problems with the IDE controller, the SCSI controller and the serial ports."

...

So it was basically an "SX" machine - despite having a CPU running at 75Mhz that was probably the equivalent of a Pentium-150 - and probably 5 years old by that point, during a period when technology was advancing so rapidly that something 3 years old could be considered an antique. That explains everything, really.

Yes, I know no-one cares. But having rediscovered this, I figure I may as well get closure.

This is something I still remember from that time, and I never properly realised post-graduation just how early in my university career it actually happened...

[tahrey estée]

*reads on*

...so it was, ultimately, part of the "LC" range, just with that bit quietly hidden from the 6200's name (whenever you have a Mac name suffixed with LC, for "low cost", you know you're going to have a bad time) ... and some core parts of the design may well have dated from the 1993 Quadra 605.

Quite possibly 8mb of RAM onboard, which would have been rubbish even for the late 90s, coupled with the earlier Mac systems' famously shit approach to virtual memory handling.

Screen mode likely to be 832x624 in 65k colour or thereabouts, chowing up 1mb of RAM unless they had actually bothered to give it some dedicated VRAM. Displaying on an integrated "15 inch" monitor that only had a paltry 12.8 inches of the tube visible.

Still in use in the 21st century. I get the impression that the Bangor MacLab was rather under-funded.