Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (TAM)

Description

Background

The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh (or also “TAM”) is a personal computer that was released in 1997 as an exclusive model for the twentieth anniversary of Apple Computer. The device was sold in a limited edition for a year and offered an overview of the technological possibilities of that time.

 The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh has only been released in the US, Japan, France, Germany and the UK. Due to the limited edition, Apple chose to ship defective devices to three central locations, one per continent. The documentation for Apple technicians does not include instructions for disassembling the device.

History

In late 1996 apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. They had to break way from the traditional beige macintosh. The all-in one Macintosh had strayed over time. They needed an iconic Macintosh. It was time for a change. Macworld even mad their own concept design urging Apple to do something fresh and new. Apple was open about their design concepts at the time but concepts never went into production. Feeling the pressure Apple decided to change this. To mark Apple’s 20th birthday, they brought a concept computer into reality. It was announced at the Macworld San Francisco. 

Specs

The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh has a sleek all-in-one housing that accommodates a built-in 12.1-inch active matrix LCD screen. The BOSE sound system has integrated speakers and a separate subwoofer.[ 4] The subwoofer was in a base unit that also contained the computer’s power supply and was connected to the computer’s main housing via an “umbilical cord” cable. Furthermore, the computer also had a vertically mounted SCSI CD-ROM player with quadruple speed.

The PowerPC 603ev processor in the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh has a clock speed of 250 MHz. The motherboard is equipped with 2 memory slots in which 168-pin DIMMs of 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 MB can be installed, which yielded a maximum memory of 128 MB. As standard, the machine came with 32 MB. This was special EDO memory.

On the back of the TAM is a PCI slot, a level 2 cache slot, a video slot and an Apple Comm Slot II for the addition of Ethernet. The installation of expansion cards did come at the expense of the slim profile of the computer: the back panel had to be replaced by an included “boched” panel that added a few centimeters to the depth of the device.[ 4]

In addition to a 1.4 MB diskette drive with manual insertion on the right side of the case and the vertically mounted CD-ROM player, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh had an internal 2 GB ATA hard drive.

The built-in graphics are controlled by an ATI 3D Rage II video chipset with 2 MB SGRAM that can display up to 16-bit (thousands) colors at a resolution of 800×600 or 640×480 pixels. Furthermore, the machine also had an Apple TV/FM tuner card and an S-Video input card that was installed in the video slot by default.[ 4]

Peripherals: The Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh came with a 33.6 kbps GeoPort modem and a keyboard but without a mouse. The unique ADB keyboard with 75 keys and leather wrist rests included a trackpad. This trackpad could be detached from the keyboard if desired, filling the hole in the keyboard with a small leather insert. The Apple TV/FM tuner card included a remote control that could control both the television section and the CD-ROM player.[ 5] However, this was also possible with buttons on the front panel of the computer.

The pre-installed operating system was a specialized version of Mac OS 7.6.1 that allowed the buttons on the front panel of the computer to be used to control sound level, CD playback, brightness, contrast, and TV mode. This was the last Macintosh model that could boot System 7.

The ‘TAM’ was actually designed and engineered tob e a mass-market product at $3500. The computer consists of reused parts form existing macs. This was cheaper and speeded up development. For example the 12,1-inch active matrix LCD-display was also used in the Powerbook 3400, the power supply and logic board are modified versions of the Powermac 6500.

Pricing

But after an internal struggle within Apple, they decided to fix the initial price at $9000 dollar ($18000 dollar today) and marketed it as a luxury item. By the time it was relaesed in march 1997 Apple had already dropped the price to $7500, this still was the high-end market. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1998 he discontinued the TAM team and killed the product. To sell the remaining inventory Apple slashed the TAM’s price to $1995 dollar. Less than 3 months later Apple introduced the iMac for just $1299 dollar. It sold incredibly well and would define Apple’s design language for years. 

The TAM is now hard to find and that drives up the prices.