The Sad Story of the Centris | Hacker News Reader

The Sad Story of the Centris

512pixels.net

34 pointsingve12 comments

"Confusion hath made his masterpiece"

I was working at Apple in 1993. My parents called me one day and said that they wanted to buy another Mac, and were wondering which model was best for them. I'd been heads down on Newton for a couple of years and hadn't paid much attention to what was going on in the Mac line. So I found a catalog and started going through it, expecting to give them an answer right on the phone.

Man, I couldn't figure it out. There seemed to be about 40 different models of Macintosh, some clearly high end and others clearly low end, but nothing else that really stood out as very much different from the rest. The names were not very helpful (is a Quadra better than a Performa? What about the LC? Gahhh).

I would up giving them my Mac IIci (probably the best 68K-based Mac ever made) and I bought a PC.

It was easy for me. I bought the cheapest. I had just finished grad school in 1993, and had landed in a new town with a new job. Though I had run my thesis project on MS-DOS, a buddy had shown me his Mac, and I liked it. The Quadra 605 was under $1000, and there was an article floating around on how to jailbreak the video port so you could use a non-Apple display.

It was a clean machine. The tiny case sat under the monitor (old CRT's needed to be boosted to eye level anyway). It popped open with no screws, and the whole thing was a single board with a 30-Watt power supply.

The Centris line were a bit bigger, but not really any more complex -- just space for more add-ons.

Jailbreak seems to imply DRM or something, it's just Mac video used a different connector to VGA. It's still just analogue video, with some differences in the monitor type ID pins. Apple clearly should have realised when designing the Macintosh II that the IBM PS/2 range, release -1 months before it had set the standard for analogue video connectors for years to come. :-)

Indeed, I was being playful with the term "jailbreak," using it in the sense of allowing the use of third-party or non-approved products. Hardware side-loading, if you will.

My recollection is that Apple simply did not support non-Apple hardware, and the ability to access multiple resolutions and refresh rates was a pleasant surprise. They kept inventing unique video connectors long after that. The video connector for my PowerMac 6100 was surreal.

> My recollection is that Apple simply did not support non-Apple hardware

Quite the opposite I think; what you discovered was that Apple had actually (and quite intentionally - I just googled this and apparently it was done starting with the LC series to lower the cost of entry for the education market) designed their video cards to support VGA output with an adapter. Of course with later PCI Macs you could often plug in and use a PC video card directly (with the appropriate Mac driver). The technical (besides the obvious business) advantage of Apple's proprietary connection was that you didn't need to worry about DIP settings or making sure your monitor could sync up with the desired display settings - it just worked when you plugged it in, and the Mac automatically sensed the resolutions that the monitors supported.

It's quite a bit more complicated to connect, say, an early 2000s ADC monitor to a modern PC. It's also complicated to connect a Thunderbolt monitor (such as the UltraFine 5K) to a non-Thunderbolt PC.

One might suspect that this is just another stupid thing that Apple does to lock in and overcharge its customers, and there are some obvious business incentives for Apple to do so, but there were certainly technical advantages to ADC (vs. DVI) and Thunderbolt (vs. HDMI) notably that they also handled USB/data and power as well as sound and video. Also (IIRC) 5K over HDMI didn't work at the time the LG UltraFine 5K monitor came out, but Apple wanted the 5K resolution (as used in the 27" iMac which had the requisite "retina" pixel density) so they couldn't use HDMI. If you go back to the NeXT PC, Steve Jobs really wanted to have a single cable that connected your monitor to your PC, so it had to handle data and power (I believe) as well as video and sound.

Interestingly enough it seems that Apple's proprietary video connectors date back to the Macintosh II in 1987, the same year that IBM came out with the PS/2 and VGA. So the Apple Macintosh Video 15-pin connection and VGA basically came out at the same time.

I'm also reading that the Centris line had its own HDI-45 connector and cables that combined video in/out, audio in/out, and ADB (keyboard/mouse) in one cable/connector. More Jobs-like single-cable design (well except for power) even in the non-Jobs era.

Interestingly SCART includes audio as well as video but doesn't seem to have caught on in the US. Sony's PlayStation AV connectors/cables also handle audio and video, typically with hydra cables that have separate connectors for different signals.

Quadra 605 was the first Mac I had. I was like 13... I did so much exploring the early internet on that thing, I loved it. I didn't realize it was the cheapest option at the time but it makes sense now.

The Q605 is a great machine, and probably the best choice for a lot of uses back then.

You could easily add an external CD-ROM drive, hard drives, Zip drive, etc.

Only real downsides are the lack of an FPU (although you could upgrade to a full 040 aftermarket if you wanted), and use of LC PDS expansion cards which weren’t as plentiful as NuBus cards.

to add to the confusion the Quadra 605 and the Performa 475 were actually the same machine. I know because i had the Performa 475 ( and performed the very after market upgrade you refer to, so I could run Infini-D and other 3d modelling packages)

It ran HyperCard just fine. ;-)

Indeed, I found this weird cheap SCSI CD drive that doubled as a portable audio CD player for 20 bucks at a computer junk shop, but it was good enough to load Word Perfect and America Online on the second or third try. During my time with the Mac, AOL switched to using "proper" TCP/IP, so you could dial into their service but then switch to mainstream browser and e-mail software. That was before there was residential broadband.

I think the junk shops are mostly gone, probably having moved online, but except for my new computer and monitor, I rarely bought anything new. Even modems. When each successive speed came out, businesses would dump their old modems and there would be truckloads of them, so it was possible to stay one step behind the cutting edge.

Agreed on the IIci, and not only in specs for its time. Apple mostly made great cases, and the IIcx/ci stands out as the best, in my opinion.

> The names were not very helpful (is a Quadra better than a Performa? What about the LC? Gahhh)

Ironically, the name "Centris" was actually the most helpful since it successfully evoked images of middle-of-the-road performance. "Performa" always seemed like a joke at the time.

Also, machines were phased in and out with quite some volatility. Just wait 4 months and you could get that high-end machine at a bargain. Also, there were (mostly short-lived) bundles, especially for the educational market. From a consumer's perspective, timing was everything.

I picked up a Centris 660av in an attractively priced bundle together with a monitor as my first desktop Mac. (Later, the first websites, I made, originated on this machine.)

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