Macintosh Colour Classic

The Macintosh Colour Classic (US English: Macintosh Color Classic) was the first compact Mac with a built-in colour screen. It appeared odd, with some people unable to come to terms with how to describe it: squat, tall, strange and wonderful were all words used in attempts to describe the Mac.

Features
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 (PDS), incompatible with the SE slots. This was primarily intended for the Apple IIe Card (the primary reason for the Color Classic's switchable 560x384 display, essentially quadruple the IIe's 280x192 High-Resolution graphics), 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 PDS slot.

The Color Classic shipped with an Apple Keyboard model known as an Apple Keyboard II (M0487) which featured a soft power switch on the keyboard itself. The supplied Apple Mouse model was known as the Apple Desktop Bus Mouse II (M2706). 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 "Performa 250" to be used in appropriate markets.

Specifications

 * RAM: 4 to 10 MB (4 MB soldered to logic board)
 * SIMM Sizes: 1, 2, or 4 MB
 * Supported classic Mac OS versions: 7.1, 7.1.1, 7.5, 7.5.1, 7.5.3, 7.5.5, 7.6, 7.6.1

Replacement
The Color Classic is the final design of the original "compact" family of Macintosh computers, and was superseded in the United States by the Macintosh LC 520, which featured a faster 25 MHz 68030 processor and a larger 14" color display with 640x480 resolution.

An updated model, the Macintosh 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 Macintosh 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.

Upgrade paths
It is possible to swap in a logic board from a Macintosh LC 575 to gain an even faster 68040 processor (unofficially called the "Mystic" upgrade). The LC 580 also looks very similar, but uses a newer logic board architecture that will not physically fit the Color Classics without modification. Some enthusiasts have modified the case to fit a PowerPC-based logic board from a Power Macintosh 5500 (unofficially called a "Takky" upgrade). The cache slot can then be fitted with a PowerPC G3 CPU.