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 an all-in-one design, with a small, integrated 10″ Sony Trinitron display at 512 × 384 pixel resolution. The display is capable of supporting up to thousands of colors with a video memory upgrade.
A slightly updated model, the Color Classic II, featuring the Macintosh LC 550 logic board with a 33 MHz processor, was released in Japan, Canada and some international markets in 1993, sometimes as the Performa 275.
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.
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 logic board 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
Powered by a Motorola 68030 processor, the Color Classic can only go up to Mac OS 7.6.1. However, 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. 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.With the Mystic mod, the Color Classic uses the motherboard of the Macintosh LC 575 which has a Motorola 68LC040 CPU and is pin compatible with the Color Classic. A Color Classic with the Mystic upgrade can go up to Mac OS 8.1.
With the Takky mod, the case and connector need to be modded, but doing so will allow the use of a PowerPC 601, 603, or 604 equipped motherboard. A Color Classic with the Takky upgrade can go up to Mac OS 9.1. On Takky Color Classics, there is a way to upgrade the processor with a G3 CPU, but it will only go up to Mac OS 9.2.2 as Mac OS X isn't officially supported.