Macintosh IIci

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Macintosh IIci

The Macintosh IIci was the first II series Mac to have integrated video (hence the i). It was introduced alongside its smaller brother, the IIsi (which is a lot more rare, and many were sacrificed for their 32-bit "clean" ROMs for SE/30's and IIcx's).


Integrated video brought a significant advantage (no need to buy a separate video card, which were very, very pricey at the time!), but at a cost in performance: the integrated video was not only slower than most dedicated cards at that time, but it was also stealing some of the RAM to be used as video memory (in the same way as low-end integrated graphic cards do nowadays).


But, for an office machine, it was pretty sweet (and expandable: three NuBus slots, along with a PDS slot for processor upgrades). My IIci boots into system 7 really fast, in less than 10 seconds from pressing the power button to the desktop (of course, it has a really lightweight OS in its tiny 40 MB hard drive, with few extensions). It also has a TransMac CI-50 accelerator (has a 68030 clocked at 50 MHz, and more L2 cache) and an Asante Ethernet card on one of its NuBus slots. Finding drivers for the TransMac has been difficult, and I haven't been able to fully test it...


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