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| Also known as | "Quadra 1000", "Cyclone" |
|---|---|
| Developer | Apple Computer |
| Product family | Macintosh Quadra |
| Release date | July 29, 1993; 32 years ago (1993-07-29) |
| Introductory price | US$3,500 (equivalent to $7,600 in 2024) |
| Discontinued | July 18, 1994 (1994-07-18) |
| Operating system | System 7.1 -Mac OS 8.1 |
| CPU | Motorola 68040 @ 40 MHz |
| Memory | 8 MB, expandable to 128 MB (60 ns 72-pin SIMM) |
| Dimensions | Height: 14 inches (36 cm) Width: 7.7 inches (20 cm) Depth: 15.75 inches (40.0 cm) |
| Weight | 25.3 pounds (11.5 kg) |
| Predecessor | Macintosh Quadra 800 |
| Successor | Power Macintosh 7100/66AV Power Macintosh 8100/80AV |
| Related | Macintosh Quadra 660AV |
TheMacintosh Quadra 840AV is apersonal computer designed, manufactured, and sold byApple Computer from July 1993 to July 1994. It was introduced alongside theCentris 660AV, where "AV" signifies audiovisual capabilities, such as video input and output, telecommunications,speech recognition, and enhanced audio. The 840AV has the samemini-tower form factor as theQuadra 800, with a significantly different logic board which includes a fasterMotorola 68040 processor.
The Quadra 840AV was discontinued shortly after the introduction of thePowerPC-basedPower Macintosh. ThePower Macintosh 8100/80AV provides the same functionality in the same form factor, and had a significantly higher price point. The7100/66AV was priced comparably to the 840AV but in aIIvx-style desktop case.
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At launch, Quadra 840AV's 40 MHzMotorola 68040 CPU andinterleaved RAM made it the fastest Macintosh available, topping both the nominally higher-endQuadra 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 fastest68k Macintosh of all time, because all later high-end Macintoshes arePowerPC-basedPower Macintoshes. It sports a faster 66.7 MHz AT&T DSP 3210Digital Signal Processor 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 theQuadra 700 andQuadra 900/950. Other new Quadra and Centris models released in 1993 do not support 24-bit color unless a video card is used.[1]
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, andS-Video 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 AppleGeoPort 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 earlierMacintosh Quadra 800; 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.[2]
Internally, the 840AV is significantly different. Apart from the faster processor, the logic board lacks the 800'sProcessor Direct Slot 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 inSIMMs (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.[3]
The Quadra 840AV was part of a hardware package that was offered with the initial release ofMedia 100.
Jonathan Chevreau of theNational Post said on August 7, 1993, that the Quadra 840AV andCentris 660AV were the next most interesting multimedia computers behind the newSGI Indy, putting Apple among the forefront of the birth of the major industry of desktop multimedia.[4]
Ben Thompson ofByte magazine said in September 1993 thatApple andSilicon Graphics were trailblazers by setting audio and video input as default features of those two Macintosh and of theIndy desktop PCs, which "could change the way businesspeople communicate".[5] 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 sound—but noted that the SCSI DMA performance is completely lost on the legacy architecture of System 7 pending a completemicrokernel-based rewrite of the operating system such as withPink orCopland. 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.[6]
| Timeline ofMacintosh Centris,LC,Performa, andQuadra models, colored byCPU type |
|---|
 See also:List of Mac models |
