The Apple Macintosh IIfx was Apple’s way of saying, “Why settle for fast when you can have fast for 1990?” Nicknamed the “Wicked Fast” Mac, this beast was to other computers of its time what a Ferrari is to a grocery store parking lot: completely unnecessary but irresistibly cool.
Powered by a 40 MHz Motorola 68030 processor, the IIfx was Apple’s speed demon, complete with a pair of custom I/O processors to handle things like floppy drives and serial ports. That’s right—it needed extra chips to manage the hard work of talking to printers and loading Oregon Trail. In 1990, that was like having a butler for your butler.
Its speed wasn’t cheap. The IIfx launched at a wallet-busting $12,000, which in today’s money is enough to buy a decent used car—or 50 Chromebooks. It was so exclusive that Apple practically issued you a monocle and a smoking jacket when you bought one. Rumor has it they even considered shipping it with a complimentary cup of artisan espresso.
But what did you get for that princely sum? A computer that could handle up to 128 MB of RAM, which was more memory than most people could comprehend needing back then. It was also packed with custom black-tantalum capacitors, which sounded so fancy you’d think the IIfx was moonlighting as a James Bond gadget.
Of course, it wasn’t all glamour. It ran System 6 or 7, meaning it could crash just as spectacularly as its slower cousins. But hey, at least it could do it faster! And let’s not forget the “affordable” peripherals like its $3,000 monitor, which was practically mandatory unless you wanted to experience 40 MHz of raw power on a green monochrome display.
In short, the Macintosh IIfx was the computer equivalent of a Lamborghini in a world of Honda Civics. It screamed “overkill” and “status symbol” louder than a dot-matrix printer, and for that, it remains a glorious relic of the early ‘90s tech arms race.
