Before there was Boot Camp, there were DOS Compatibility Cards

I had one of the OrangePC cards in my PM 7100. It ran Win95, but it was really freaky about letting me install any native Win95 apps.

I also used to have one of these on my PowerMac 4400.
I primarily bought it just to run StarCraft. lol

I think you meant to say, "BEFORE APPLE COMPUTERS BECAME PRETTY LOOKING PCs, there DOS compatibility cards."

I sooo wanted one of these when I was a kid.

Test

We had these in our Mac Lab in middle school. We were so psyched to get a whole lab full of PowerPC's (Performa 6100s I think), complete with DOS card in each system. Too bad they were such dogs as actual machines -- but it was super neat to press I think it was CMD (then known as Open Apple), Option, W and go into Windows 3.11.

My friend Lee and I even installed Windows 95 on a few machines, until we learned what software licensing was and how we couldn't do that. Oh, good time!

Dont forget about the OrangePC cards. From what I remember, they were basically standard socket 7 systems jammed on a card, and could take memory and processor upgrades. IIRC, a friend of mine had one which he upgraded to a K-6 III+ at 500 mhz—not all that shabby given the time frame.

I had a Compatibility Card in a PowerMac 6200 a few years ago. It was running a Pentium chip of some sort - a PI or a PII from memory. These were never, ever used in a PC system without a cooling fan on the heatsink; but the compatibility card had a fanless heatsink. Result - random crashes and lock-ups in Windows once the PC had been running for half an hour or so. These went away completely as soon as I removed the passive heatsink from the card and replaced it with a fan-cooled heatsink.

I still wonder if this (back in Windows 95 days) was a deliberate strategy by Apple to make Windows look less stable than it actually was, certainly compared to the less-than-rock-solid System 7.5...

I had a Power Macintosh 6100/66 DOS Compatible. I used to love working in OS 7 and then pressing Command-Return to flip over to Windows 3.1 to play Minesweeper.

Now, in "the future," I have a PowerBook G4 and am stuck with VirtualPC and Windows XP. I miss the old days.

I remember a guy that had one of those in his "pizza box" 6100/60. I thought it was the most amazing thing ever that you could run windows on your mac and just switch to it with some key commands...