I find Brand’s writing style is awkward, and of course, the classical Mac militancy.
And yes — by way of an optional 166 MHz Cyrix CPU — it could even run Windows.
Almost all Macs did this - they were called PC compatibility cards, and were basically PCs jammed onto a NuBus or PCI card, with varying degrees of interopability, ranging from “yeah it’s just a PC” to integration with the host, including using it in a window and virtual disk images on the host’s filesystem. Using it was almost like modern virtualization, except since the host and guest used different architectures, this was the fastest way. (Emulation software like SoftPC and Virtual PC existed, but until the late 90s, might not have been fast enough for most people.)
The Power Macintosh 4400 seems like the Apple version of the Sun Ultra 5/10 (also released at around the same time) - both used PC-grade components in an attempt to lower cost, with the downside of lowering quality too. Interestingly, Sun also had add-on boards (SunPCi for one) that did the same thing as the add-on card for the Mac.
I find Brand’s writing style is awkward, and of course, the classical Mac militancy.
Almost all Macs did this - they were called PC compatibility cards, and were basically PCs jammed onto a NuBus or PCI card, with varying degrees of interopability, ranging from “yeah it’s just a PC” to integration with the host, including using it in a window and virtual disk images on the host’s filesystem. Using it was almost like modern virtualization, except since the host and guest used different architectures, this was the fastest way. (Emulation software like SoftPC and Virtual PC existed, but until the late 90s, might not have been fast enough for most people.)
The Power Macintosh 4400 seems like the Apple version of the Sun Ultra 5/10 (also released at around the same time) - both used PC-grade components in an attempt to lower cost, with the downside of lowering quality too. Interestingly, Sun also had add-on boards (SunPCi for one) that did the same thing as the add-on card for the Mac.
So a Mac is a machine that is too expensive and has quirky hardware? I think I missed the point of this post.