March 14, 1994: You’ve Got the Power!

The original Mac was powered by the Motorola 680x0. Later Macs used more powerful chips but the architecture remained similar. A big change came with the jump from 680x0 chips to the PowerPC processors.

The change necessitated rewriting the OS, with developers including two binaries for any program that needed to run on both architectures and the ability to seamlessly emulate older programs on the new chips. While many people would see this as an opportunity to enhance Apple's operating system, Apple engineers deemed unacceptable any change to the feel of the classic OS. Hence, the programmers wrote a small program to turn a pixel on or off depending on whether the machine was running emulated code or native programming.

The PowerPC chips were leaps and bounds ahead of the 680x0s they replaced. The first computers to use them, the Power Mac 6100/60 through 8100/80AV, debuted this day in 1994.