Macintosh Color Classic


The Macintosh Color Classic is a personal computer designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from February 1993 to May 1995. It has a "all-in-one PC" design, with a small, integrated 10″ Sony Trinitron display at 512 × 384 pixel resolution.
The Color Classic is the final model of the original "compact" family of Macintosh computers, and was replaced by the larger-display Macintosh LC 500 series and Power Macintosh 5200 LC. It has been renamed to Macintosh Colour Classic in Europe, Australia & New Zealand and Macintosh Color Deluxe in Asia.

Hardware

The Color Classic has a Motorola 68030 CPU running at 16 MHz and has a logic board similar to the Macintosh LC II.
Like the Macintosh SE and SE/30 before it, the Color Classic has a single expansion slot: an LC-type Processor Direct Slot, incompatible with the SE slots. This was primarily intended for the Apple IIe Card, which was offered with education models of the LCs. The card allowed the LCs to emulate an Apple IIe. The combination of the low-cost color Macintosh and Apple IIe compatibility was intended to encourage the education market's transition from Apple II models to Macintoshes. Other cards, such as CPU accelerators, Ethernet and video cards were also made available for the Color Classic's Processor Direct Slot.
The Color Classic shipped with the Apple Keyboard known as an Apple Keyboard II which featured a soft power switch on the keyboard itself. The mouse supplied was the Apple Mouse known as the Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II.
A slightly updated model, the Color Classic II, featuring the Macintosh LC 550 logicboard with a 33 MHz processor, was released in Japan, Canada and some international markets in 1993, sometimes as the Performa 275. Both versions of the Color Classic have 256 KB of onboard VRAM, expandable to 512 KB by plugging a 256 KB VRAM SIMM into the onboard 68-pin VRAM slot.
The name "Color Classic" was not printed directly on the front panel, but on a separate plastic insert. This enabled the alternative spelling "Colour Classic" and "Colour Classic II" to be used in appropriate markets.

Upgrades

Some Color Classic users upgraded their machines with motherboards from Performa/LC 575 units, while others have put entire Performa/LC/Quadra 630 or successor innards into them. Based on Takky there is a way to upgrade the Color Classic with a G3 CPU. Another common modification to this unit was to change the display to allow 640 × 480 resolution, which was a common requirement for many programs to run.

Models

Introduced February 1, 1993 : Macintosh Performa 250, Deluxe III
Introduced February 10, 1993 / March 16, 1994 : Macintosh Color & Colour Classic, Deluxe IV
Introduced October 1, 1993 / September 9, 1994 : Macintosh Performa 275, Color Deluxe
Introduced October 21, 1993 / December 3, 1994 (: Macintosh Color & Colour Classic II, Color Deluxe CD