The person who says I don't write enough about the Power Macintosh 5200 and 6200 is outright incorrect. (Though, I tend to do it directly on forums, rather than on this blog.)
If you're scratching your head right now, I envy you a little bit. Nevertheless: The Power Macintosh 6200 and its brethren were a family of computers made by Apple in the early-mid 1990s. As such, they're discussed frequently and with surprising vigor on the Internet. In 1999 or so, a web site focused on providing buying advice for people looking for inexpensive used Macs advised since you can get both a 6200 and either a 7200 or a 9500 (higher end, professional-focused models) for about the same price, you should try to find the 7200 or the 9500. Most online dislike the 6200 & co vehemently because it made compromises in order to be what it was in 1995 when it was new: a $1900 machine with everything you could ever want in a home computer, and had adequate performance for the time.
The thing about the 6200, to use a car analogy (which you shouldn't be doing and I shouldn't be doing) is it was never supposed to be a really premium or high performing computer. The 6200 was the Honda Civic to the 9500's Acura MDX. In 1995 when it was new, the 6200 included everything you might need to get started with a computer: The computer itself, software, a display, keyboard and mouse, a modem, a CD-ROM drive, and usually a printer. The 7200, on the other hand, was about the same price and included: a mouse. The 9500 was a fair bit faster, and for this privilege, it was $4700 and included: a mouse. The 7200 and 9500 were designed with networked business environments in mind, and so one other advantage they had was Ethernet networking.
The technical details of the 6200's compromise involve it putting a fast, new PowerPC 603 processor on what was essentially a minimally adapted motherboard designed for old, slow MC68040 processors. This is akin to putting a Pentium on a motherboard designed for 486 CPUs: you will get some increase in performance, but the CPU will spent most of its time waiting for the rest of the system. To make matters worse, the specific Mac from which the 6200 gets its architecture (the 630, which shares its enclosure and motherboard-on-a-tray design) had a really "interesting" two-halves architecture, which means owners of 6200s who tried to take advantage of expansion possibilities later in the life of the system (by adding, say, a 33.6 kilobaud modem) found CPU performance suffered badly during some types of network interaction. This is sort of like the time you tried to tow a trailer with your Honda Civic.
However, in the 1990s, when you typically got online, fetched your e-mail and newsgroups while grabbing a coffee, then disconnected before reading and replying, I don't think most of the users of such a system noticed this compromise early on in the system's life. (And, I'd say this is a fair expectation for the timeframe.)
When viewed compared to its predecessors and higher end members of the product stack, the 6200 is a pretty bad computer. Not unusable, or else the millions sold would have been returned immediately, but it's no speed demon like the 9500, nor did it enjoy an inexplicably long lifespan, the way some of the earlier 68040-based computers did. It enjoyed what I'd say was a normal lifespan, and I personally believe it is important purely for volume reasons: it was affordable enough for schools to buy untold numbers of them, and it was the first computer many people used, or bought for their homes.
Today, somebody online brought up an interesting and (surprisingly) actually different thought about the 6200: It was a bad product because it didn't scale up well to the web as it existed in 1998 and 1999. Okay, actually that aspect of the conversation was really bad, because if it wasn't until 1998 a computer you bought in 1994 stopped being able to work with entirely new computing concepts, or things that change as frequently as the web does, then it has done fine in my book.
Either this person changed their mind or was running around in a circle, because the next thing they mentioned was really interesting: The way they now saw it, no "home computer" before the iMac in 1998 was a good home computer, because without the Internet, home computers are nearly pointless. "Toys for the rich," was the phrase used.
I personally disagree with this sentiment. Without "the Internet" (I'm going to presume he meant the web, because it was possible to connect to the Internet using various means with a 6200 even when it was new in 1994 or 1995) you can still use a computer for financial tasks such as budgeting, balancing the checkbook, planning, recordkeeping; other general productivity tasks such as letter and report writing; maintaining databases such as recipes, contacts, inventories, drawing up diagrams of things, and that's just the functionality included in ClarisWorks, which was bundled with the system. In the 1990s, educational games were usually 3-4 aisles worth of any given software or computer store, and most home computer bundles in the 1990s started to include an encyclopedia set, which alone might have otherwise cost more than a decent home computer.
Anyway, let's work with the framework of "a home computer isn't useful without the Internet." It's definitely almost completely true today, even if you're using almost entirely locally executed applications (such as Outlook and Skype) to do it, communicating via the Internet is an incredibly important part of daily life.
The original iMac released in 1998 was a pretty great system for the time in two ways. First was in terms of its technical merit as a computer: it was essentially the same computer (with some minor updates) as its professional brethren, it had a good display built in, it changed out old and tired interfaces for fresh modern ones, and maybe more importantly: it included both 10/100 Ethernet and a 56k modem (up at the last minute from a 33.6k modem, a good decision on Apple's part.) Second: it was a lot less expensive than the Performas of yore, and was released into an environment that was overall, a lot Mac-friendlier than 1994 and 1995 had been so you could buy an inexpensive printer in a retail store and odds were good it would work with your new iMac.
Using this framework, I would argue all of the "home" Macs up through the iMac in 1998 were "bad products." The 6400 and its brethren were of course far better computers, but since they weren't the iMac, they were worse products.
This does two things.
The first is this actually provides a really interesting framework for why most of the people on the vintage Mac scene seem to really dislike any Mac that was affordable, most of them were used as consumer computers and if no consumer computer without the Internet is a good computer, then no consumer computer until around the launch of the iMac is going to be a good computer, full stop.
The second is that it provides a pretty interesting opportunity to talk about the appliance arrangement of the iMac. The thing that probably makes the iMac most "special" compared to its siblings in the Power Macintosh G3 family and its direct predecessors in the Power Macintosh 6500 and 5500 family is it gets rid of legacy interfaces the Mac had been carrying around since 1987 when the Macs SE and II were launched. The iMac, somewhat prophetically, also did away with the most common removable storage of the day, the floppy diskette drive, on the grounds you'd be drowning in either USB peripherals, or you'd have storage on a network service before long. (It took until Mac OS 9 shipped a year later to make it happen in operating system, but that's splitting hairs, and it's not fair when I split the hairs.)
The iMac's direct predecessor as a "consumer computer" was the Power Macintosh 6500 family. It was available in a few speeds and configurations, had several different slots inside, each with a specialized function, came with a separate monitor, and was generally a pretty normal beige computer minitower from the 1990s, down to the fact the default monitor for it required two or three cables connected to the computer in order to function fully. (Many of Apple's monitors at the time had speakers, and some of them either used ADB to control the monitor, or had an ADB hub built in, so you could connect your keyboard and mouse to the monitor instead of directly to the tower on the floor.)
The iMac sat on your desk in a single unit, and was significantly smaller than Apple's previous all-in-one computers, and required just a few cords to plug in. Apple even released a fair number of advertisements over the years about the iMac being very easy to set up. In reality, at the bare minimum, only two cords were eliminating – the video cord for your monitor, and its separate power cord, but it made the computer a lot easier to understand, and the few ports it had were easier. Sound, modem, Ethernet, and a "universal bus" port, to which you could attach any kind of peripheral.
But the real killer application, the thing Apple got right in 1998 in time for the launch of the iMac was the Internet. The iMac was actually really well equipped on this front. It included both a fast dial-up modem and an Ethernet connection, it had enough memory and CPU horsepower to run the common Internet applications of the day, and through deals with both Netscape and Microsoft, included almost all the most common Internet software on the system in a time when those applications cost money to add to the professional computers. Apple had also been building more networking functionality into Mac OS, so it could configure itself to work with most regional and national dial-up Internet providers at the time, and it included some of their software as well – EarthLink and AOL in particular were represented. The iMac also didn't yet do away with the bundle of desktop productivity software, a game or two, an encyclopedia, and some financial software, meaning if you were buying it as a toy to manage your checkbook and write letters offline, it was still suitable for the task.
The change from 1994's Performas to the iMac of 1998 didn't happen overnight. In the real world: 6500 shipped with almost exactly the same software configuration, as well as a 33.6k modem (not as fast as the iMac, but usably fast) and sufficient documentation to make it work, but it was the iMac that really cemented the idea that this was a computer for the Internet. It didn't hurt that the iMac was faster and less expensive than the 6500, as a trade-off for the fact it shed a whole lot of connectivity and expandability the target market was unlikely to use it anyway.
The thing I think endears the iMac to so many people is it was the first not only to be capable of using the Internet, but to give you a computer it didn't make sense not to connect to the Internet.
And, what does the world do once Apple finds the formula for the ideal home-based personal computer? Complain about the loss of the expansion they were never going to use anyway. The first good consumer computer Apple built is often seen as representative of the time when Apple grew less friendly to the values held by many on vintage computing forums. For example, at about the same time, Apple reduced the amount of available expansion on its professional computers. The most frequently cited example of this is that the Power Macintosh 9500 and 9600 included six slots, and the Power Macintosh G3 included three. (This was later increased to four, but the graphics controller was on a card, and even later, at least one version of the Power Macintosh G4 included five total slots, but those are inconvenient truths.)
From its inception, the Macintosh was always meant to be an appliance. If it's visibly apparent the return to this idea started in 1998 then I'd say Steve Jobs' return to Apple did what it was supposed to: re-focus the company and give them a really profitable business model selling computers to people who care about accomplishing tasks, but don't specifically care about computers.
Unfortunately, by definition, the people on vintage computing forums care about computers, and as such, the only Macs that look good to this group are the ones from eras when Apple wasn't being very Apple-like. Further, it seems most of the enthusiasts of vintage Macintoshes see the professional market as the most interesting and relevant part of Apple's history. What has always been funny to me is that this market was always aspirational toward the systems built by the likes of Sun, Silicon Graphics, and Digital, who all had much better hardware much earlier on. The difference was Apple managed to build something a typesetter who had never used a computer before could buy and install PageMaker or QuarkXPress on in their time at home. As such in vintage Macintosh enthusiast scenes, the home computers often get tossed aside as having poor performance or being irrelevant. There are a few interesting exceptions, but the biggest one was a product that wore badges in both Apple's professional and home line-ups in its day, accepted a fairly wide range of CPUs, and it was eventually discovered had a very high memory limit using sticks not built when the machine was new.
I still think the 6200 & Co did well at their job, providing a relevant consumer computing experience for a pretty good price. You weren't going to get a better Mac for the price (certainly not a better complete system to put on a new desk), and the PCs you could get were either going to involve a steep learning curve and a lot of do-it-yourself, or were going to have similar performance issues. (A favorite game of the PC OEMs both at the time and today was keeping old generations of parts on sale longer than strictly necessary, for example.)
The issue is context, and although the 6200 provided an Internet experience, it wasn't the one some of today's youngest vintage Mac enthusiasts expect or want. In the 1990s, if you were going on the Internet, you were probably pulling your e-mail in with POP, checking newsgroups, and using FTP. If you had time to just sit online, you were going to be using IRC and other really intense applications like telnet. The Web existed, but the earliest web browsers were computationally trivial, compared to today's web experiences which are now often heavier than local applications.
I would argue the goals of a "good" consumer computer have actually changed over the years. Before the Internet was widely available, having machines rich in input and output options, with a lot of good local software was really important, because that machine was going to operate as an island for most or all of its life. This is the reason I called out the iMac didn't abruptly stop including ClarisWorks, financial software, an encyclopedia, and a game or two. In the early times of the availability of the Internet, it operated a lot differently from the way it does today. Even by the time of the original iMac in 1998 during the rise in popularity of the web, it worked differently and it had a different relationship to the local computer than it does today.
A good consumer computer in the mid-1990s would have had to keep including a lot of local software, but introduce ways to get online, and be friendly both to those who have used computers before and people buying their first. Bundling every peripheral and service known to humanity was very popular during this time and I think it was important to have those bundles available for people just getting started, people buying a second machine or a home version of their work computer, as well as for people switching to the platform from elsewhere. Today, computing of all kinds can be more minimalistic, because games, reference material, and even productivity software are expected to be available on the web, and because even bigger strides have been made in the standardization of technologies used for peripherals.
The thing I'm not addressing here, which nobody seems to be interested in actually talking about, is what Apple could hypothetically have done to make the 6200 a better computer. It's something I want to talk about eventually, but it's also a really complicated discussion, because I can't claim to have insider knowledge about things like the cost of some of the parts, and the costs involved with adapting different architectures. Eventually I'll get to that post, but I wanted to let this one sit for a while.
I don't think I'll ever be done writing about the 6200, because for as small and inexpensive as it was, it was just this huge thing, and arguably a fairly large part of Apple's history.