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Berenod's Quadra 950 find

Berenod

Well-known member
Have been on the lookout for a Quadra 950 for a while now, and with a bit of patience (well, a lot actually) I saw one pop up on a local second hand website.
Not much details, apart from that it was working and had a bunch of peripherals.

Picked it up this morning, and ended up pretty pleasantly surprised!

Here is what I got:
  • A decent shaped Quadra 950 (with both keys)
  • a no-brand 15" monitor (with one of them adapters with dipswitches to set resolution)
  • 100MB of ram, all slots seem to be occupied, will find out later how the 100MB is reached
  • A PowerPC601 card
  • 8-24 Apple display card (670), not accelerated but cool to make a dual display machine
  • Heaps of software, mainly DTP/Photoshop, including QuarkXpress with accompanying ADB license dongle
  • An external Micronet Advantage 230MB MO reader/writer with a bunch of disks
  • External Apple CD Rom
  • External Lacie CD Re-writer
  • Big box of cables, them scsi ones are annoyingly unyieldy!
All for the princely sum of 420€, which I reckon is a more then fair deal!

And, as pictures say more then a 1000 words:
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Berenod

Well-known member
Some of the, still very dusty, insides, saw there was a Maxell battery inside, and for me the words Maxell, battery and vintage Macintosh don't go well together, so duly removed!
Hopefully, as with other 68k Mac's, the battery only keeps time and some preferences...

Looks like a mix and match memory selection here :)

Last pic is of the harddrive caddy, from Micronet, doesn't look standard either, with the fancy scsi ID selector

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Juror22

Well-known member
That is an amazingly, terrific conquest (and that is an excellent price!) and it almost looks like you popped back into time to pick it up. Your patience definitely paid off!
 

MrFahrenheit

Well-known member
Very nice! Excellent condition, and included a PPC card and all of those external drives!?!? That's insane for 420€

Those MO disks are really cool. I have a whole thread here about using MO disks and drives on 68k Macintosh.
 
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Berenod

Well-known member
Very nice! Excellent condition, and included a PPC card and all of those external drives!?!? That's insane for 420€

Those MO disks are really cool. I have a whole thread here about using MO disks and drives on 68k Macintosh.
Cool, your thread just made it to the top of my "to read" list 😉
 

ArmorAlley

Well-known member
I would not surprise me if the 100MB RAM cost as much, if not much more, than the Q950 did when it was first bought.
This was back at the time when 32MB was a substantial amount of memory.
 

Berenod

Well-known member
I would not surprise me if the 100MB RAM cost as much, if not much more, than the Q950 did when it was first bought.
This was back at the time when 32MB was a substantial amount of memory.
True that!

You could put as much as 256 MB in the machine, which was stupid much at the time! And probably not aal that useful!

Bit like the SE/30 with 128 MB, totally bonkers early 90's!
 

Phipli

Well-known member
True that!

You could put as much as 256 MB in the machine, which was stupid much at the time! And probably not aal that useful!

Bit like the SE/30 with 128 MB, totally bonkers early 90's!
I find that era takes about 1 minute per 100MB of RAM to do the RAM test... I can't think why I dropped my 264MB of RAM C650 back to 136 ;)
 

joshc

Well-known member
The main thing such a high amount of RAM is useful for on 68k machines is as a RAM/scratch disk. Useful for quick launching of apps and for Photoshop.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
The main thing such a high amount of RAM is useful for on 68k machines is as a RAM/scratch disk. Useful for quick launching of apps and for Photoshop.
Audio and video capture too - basically the same, but some software doesn't need it using as a RAM disk (in the early days, hard disks and even interfaces weren't fast enough to capture audio, hence some protools cards had a built in SCSI interface (not to be confused with the other internal and external connectors that look like SCSI, but aren't!).

As a kid, more RAM meant more cast members in Director 4 too, but I've discovered there is an upper limit! I think it was 1024?? I remember when we upgraded from 5MB to 9MB and could suddenly do longer stop motion animations. Disappointed that I can't do a feature film frame at a time with 128MB 😆
 
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