September 17, 1992: First Mac with a Built-In CD Drive Debuts

The first Mac to feature a built-in CD ROM drive wasn't a top of the line Mac IIfx or even a top of the line Performa (if such a thing existed). It was a middle of the road machine.

Although middle of the road in pricing, in performance the machine was all D-O-G. The 600 featured a 68030 chip, 80 MB of hard drive space and 5 MB of RAM (the nonCD version featured 4 MB). These would've been decent specs if the machine had been introduced a year earlier.

Besides being the first Mac to feature a built-in CD drive, it was also the first Mac to use metal as a case material. The CD ROM drive began the journey to being part of every Mac this week in 1992.