LGR - The DOS Compatible Apple Power Mac 6100

You bet, I'm glad you enjoyed it! The whole "Microsoft vs Apple in the 90s" thing always seemed overblown to me. For a good chunk of the decade, they arguably cooperated more than they fought!

LGR

Steve Jobs must have been spinning in his turtle neck when they released this cool monstrosity.

Joon Choi

I loved this video. Such a fascinating time for Apple vs Microsoft. While they were competitors, there were just times where they both had to come to the table for a solution. Never knew this computer existed and was fascinated how this worked. Thanks for the awesome video.

I have a MIGHTY NEED! Seriously, that thing is SO COOL!

Zeke

Very cool video! :-) I have the same card which I'm excited to play with. I also have an Apple Pentium 166MHz compatibility card (the one I sent you photos of). I remember being so blown away by running Mac OS 8.1, Mac OS X and Windows 3.1 on the same machine (my beige G3 MiniTower) back in the day. I want to do a comparison video of that 166MHz card and SoftWindows / VirtualPC.

Mac84

I always love a pizza DJ cat cameo

AlexPeaks

Excellent 😁

LGR

I also spend far too many late nights looking through old computer magazines, heh. Amazing what forgotten things turn up at 3AM sometimes.

LGR

That's one I'd love to try out someday, if time and circumstances allow. What went wrong with it in your case?

LGR

Definitely sold at CompUSA, as shown in the ad from them I included in the video :)

LGR

Happy to hear you enjoyed it! And yeah I held out on buying one of these until I found one in great shape as complete as possible. Definitely becoming harder to find in any condition, much less with all the disks and manuals.

LGR

I did not, I've had this for a good while now. Unfortunately didn't get a chance to look at stuff for sale there, was absolutely swamped by LGR fans!

LGR

Did you pick this up at the retro festival, per chance? God knows I grabbed enough Mac stuff in the back of my truck, I almost couldn't figure out where to put it all, haha!

At 4:39 it's just like using any Apple product in 2019! Amazing video, it's kind of crazy to see that level of 'virtualization' back in 1995! Although the add-on card does feel like black magic, when you mentioned the drive sharing it blew my mind... Specially considering that commercial and enterprise virtualization wasn't really a thing until like 10 years after that product. Thanks as always! Edit: BTW, cheers on the piece itself! It's super complete and in great condition. If you didn't mention the previous owner I would've thought it was new old stock

LJFox

I had one of these! Sigh, good times. Upgrading the video RAM was significantly cheaper than more general RAM, at only about $80 or so, so that was the first change that I made. Since it's two processors at once, it's possible for the Mac host to crash, but the DOS side will keep running. The integration is so smooth, you might not notice until you press that keyboard combo to switch from DOS to Mac and then the machine locks up. For added nostalgia, I had mine hooked up to a Bernoulli drive, because it was a year before Zip drives came out, and thus I was stuck with a dead-end technology. Oh well. Thank you for the nostalgia trip!

Sanguine Games

Speaking of Mac OS, you should do a retrospective on ARDI and their Executor product that I suspect Apple got to in court.

Robert Butler

Yeah, I remember this being sold at like CompUSA (I... *think*...?) I was always super curious about it, though!

Robert Butler

Ironically, I have the later PCI based DOS-compatible card with the Pentium 166Mhz chip and a Power Mac 7500 trying to do a classic Win95/System 7.5 gaming machine. It didn't pan out very well...

Carey Brown

Loved even before I watched. I know I’ll love what I’m about to watch. Zomg—so much nostalgia.

Taylor Cuzela

You have a knack for covering incredibly interesting things. I never even knew an Apple/DOS hybrid existed...

Alyxx the Rat

I love those alliterations! - "Array of Apple adapter aggravation" ❤

Kamira

Thanks for sharing! Haha, yeah I can imagine that this hybrid solution could've ruffled a few professor feathers on both sides.

LGR

I was working in the IT department of a small college during this period. We were a Mac school, but the accounting professors needed the PC version of Excel. This computer was our solution. Like all compromises, I’m not sure if anyone was really happy about it, but it worked... mostly.

Retro Viator

It sure is a step up in terms of information overload. DOS! Mac! DOS! Mac! Back and forth and back and forth, can't get enough.

LGR

Sure thing, Kevin! I was certainly hoping this would be an enlightening topic for folks, as I haven't seen these DOS cards talked about too much.

LGR

Me and you both, they look like a lotta fun to mess around with. Would really like to find one of their Mac clone systems as well!

LGR

Neat! Do you recall if the DOS side of things was utilized at all?

LGR

Glad to hear it, Marcos!

LGR

How did you survive limited to 1 measly mouse button? I wouldn't know what to do without right-click!

Terry Lee

This is what I like to call retro multitasking for the nerdiest of nerds!

Terry Lee

My family bought a (non-DOS compatible) Mac in 1995, which we had upgraded at the shop to a whopping 4MB. 72MB was unimaginable! By the way, we bought a Mac that year because of the advice of a certain 15-year-old (me). After reading all of the computer magazines, I decided "who needs Windows 95 when Copland is just around the corner?!" Yeah, not my best decision, but I still loved my Performa 6200 anyway.

Steve Lovelace

This was very interesting, I didn't know this was even possible, you learn something new every day. Thank You!

Great video! I owned that exact Mac back in the day (less RAM, though). One of these days I'd love o get ahold of the illusive Orange Micro Mac Pentium cards!

Tktagmedia

My high school had these things. We did our computer classes on these things. (For reference I graduated in 98)

Kijikun

Still up for me.

SolarstrikeVG

It's showing that the video was removed?

Tktagmedia

Got nothing to say other than: I loved the video. As usual.

🏛️👍

LGR

I understand, hehe. As mentioned in the main part, this really is just the tip of the Mac/DOS iceberg. Lots of stuff to potentially explore in the future!

LGR

Well, it turns you could upgrade the operating system up to Mac OS 8.1 with these cards' functionality; but after that OS it seems Apple broke the support of the DOS cards in 8.5. It also seems that Orange PC (a popular Mac upgrade company at that time) started to sell more DOS compatible cards with upgraded specs through the end of 1997, up to the early beige G3 models of the Power Macintosh. Incidentally, Apple themselves made DOS-compatible cards themselves in 1994 for their 68040 computers in 1993-94, which due to high success of the Quadra 610 DOS Compatible (a test system to see if DOS compatibility was desired) they obviously continued down that road. Additionally, it seems that AST Research made 286 cards as far back as the Mac II and Mac SE all the way back in 1987! Apologies for the wall of text here, but I'm a bit fascinated on this subject...

SolarstrikeVG

City council jokes. ❤️❤️❤️

Adam Christensen

Witchcraft, I tell you!

LGR

Wait wait wait...Mac and DOS in the SAME COMPUTER?! HERSEY! :P

Terminally Nerdy

I'm saying this because I noticed that when the DOS side and Mac OS side share a monitor, the DOS display is "letterboxed" as if forced to 640x480 60Hz. Laptop displays have the same behavior when the LCD display is enabled because LCD circuitry needs a consistent video mode. Most VGA modes other than 640x480 have 400 active display lines.

You were definitely better off with both separately, heh. Sure seems like there could've been more opportunity for these to thrive in business and educational environments though.

LGR

Yeah this one took me a good while to find, been looking for years now. So many odd retro Apple products I wanna cover!

LGR

Oh cool, I've been curious to see if anyone here had any first or secondhand experience and if so, what they used it for. Grad school work makes a lot of sense!

LGR

Honestly have no idea! Seems possible though since it relies completely on Apple's software for any input, other than the joystick connected to the breakout cable.

LGR

I'm also curious how Mac OS brings keyboard and mouse to the DOS side. Does the BIOS just have it's own keyboard/mouse handling or does the DOS motherboard have a PS/2 keyboard + mouse interface internally and some interface that lets Mac OS inject fake input to those ports for the DOS side?

I wonder if it uses Chips & Technologies SVGA chipsets because those have hardware bits to force a specific video mode to the monitor while "centering" the DOS display in the center, which is why they're typically seen in laptops that require that functionality to drive the LCD display.

Oh, man, great stuff. This took me right back to grad school. My advisor had one of these, as a devoted Mac person who also worked with tons of PC files. I remember lots of the analytical software was PC only.

Dang, I never knew such a thing existed. And at the time I had a new Mac, and built a Wintel PC with a 486DX2/66.

Kevin Furr

Nice! Very clean 6100. I've got one myself, but decided to use the PDS slot for a G3 card and a HPV video card from an 8100. Maybe one day I'll get an itch to give the DOS card a try, though they're becoming especially dear to find, and expensive to boot, for all the downsides you pointed out... Always love seeing you cover vintage Apple, though!

Like a charm! Now for a classic Mac OS version so I can swap over to that one at random? :P

LGR

Nice. I was planning to try to get ahold of one of these machines eventually. Nice to see Planet X3 runs on it!

The 8-Bit Guy

Yep, sure does! It's for ejecting the tray to insert a CD to begin with :) But it does not eject the CD-ROM from within DOS mode if there's a disc inserted already. The only way to eject a disc from DOS is by pressing Command+Y.

LGR

In the video you say at about 8:14 that ejecting a CD(-ROM) requires yet another keyboard command, but the system appears to have an eject button just below the tray.

Rudo de Jong

I believe that was a Power Macintosh 8100! That movie had quite a few Apple products indeed, I wonder what kinda product placement deal they had.

LGR

Wow, this reminds me of that mid 90s movie The Net with Sandra Bullock. She uses a machine just like this one in the end. You could easily see the PowerPC logo under the floppy drive.

Frederic St-Georges