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Forget The Pentium, Hack The 68K
Mr. Groove writes: "Hey foo, think your PIII is killer? Imagine running Photoshop on one of these!" Frugal or insane -- only you can decide.
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The 68k is hugely popular as an embedded processor. Hell, my fridge has one. Wow...powers macs ans refridgerators! Nice and versitle.
As I scroll through the stories, see the mods are on meth
... fool
I take a look at my karma, realize there's none left
'Cause I've been trolling and flaming so long that
Even Trollmastah thinks that my mind is gone
But I ain't never crossed a post that didn't deserve it
Me be modded up at all, you know that's unheard of
You better watch how Katz's talking, courting the masses
If I ever meet his homies I'll kick their asses
I really hate to troll but I gotta say
VA pays the bills, that means Hemos is gay... fool
I'm the kinda troll that script kiddies wanna be like
On Slashdot in the night, trollin' to set this earth right
They been spending most their lives living in a trollin' paradise
They been spending most their lives living in a trollin' paradise
We been spending most our lives living in a trollin' paradise
We been spending most our lives living in a trollin' paradise
They got the moderation, they rule the nation
I can't post a normal post, I tried -- no route to host!
So I gotta be down with the Slashdoterati
Too much videotape watching got me chasing Natalie
I'm an anonymous fool with hot grits on my mind
Got pancakes in my hand and first posts in my eye
I'm an open source caveman from k-stuff-inchfan
And my homies is down so don't even try that ban
First ain't nothing but a heart beat away
I'm owning you left and right, what can I say
I'm -3; never will I whore to hit 25
The way we're going just won't survive
Tell me why are we so blind to see
That the ones we mod aren't just ACs
They been spending most their lives living in a trollin' paradise
They been spending most their lives living in a trollin' paradise
We been spending most our lives living in a trollin' paradise
We been spending most our lives living in a trollin' paradise
Karma and the stories, stories and the karma
Zealot after zealot, dogma after dogma
Everybody's posting, but half of them ain't thinking
What's going on in Andover, something must be stinking
They say I've got to log in; nobody talks to ACs
If they can't even read it, how can they raise me
I guess they can't
I guess they won't
I guess they front
That's why I know my life is out of luck... fool
Tell me why are we so blind to see
That the ones we mod aren't just ACs
Tell me why are we so blind to see
That the ones we mod aren't just ACs
...posting the link? It's not about 68k hacking, it's about using PPC boards in old cases.
The webpage referenced descibes modifications to the Mac Color Classic (and Color Classic II which was never released in the US) Almost all of the mods are done by replacing the Classic motherboard with one from an All-In-One mac like the educational models. Since the motherboards are similar enough, they can be hacked to fit into the case of the classic. Also, most people tweak the little 9" trinitron to 640x480 so it can actually be used for real work. Some people even go as far as to replace the 603e in the LC motherboard with a G3 upgrade chip, making one crazy fast classic. To me this seems like crazy stuff, but I'm sure some people enjoyed doing it. Looks like a sweet hack.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
But will it work with the old LC II's >=)
Wow, now this is cool. (although it is a mac)
:)
Makes me want to pop some dual PIII's in an old Pet box.
And so what if the title was a little missleading, it is still the coolest MAC I have ever seen.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
You'd be surprised what can run off a 68k chip. They truly are an example of excellent versatile design. These things have been in common use since the 70's when they ran the first Macs. Since then, they've found their way into everything from robots to calculators. They provide an excellent chip for robotists (hobby and professional) as they are highly versatile and can be programmed using Interactive C (designed to be similar to a language most programmers already know). Check out the Rug Warrior for an example of a robot running off a 68k. Now, they run the TI-89 and TI-92(+) graphing calculators. 68k assembly is remarkably capable. Plus, they can be overclocked from the intended 10 mHz up to a whopping 12 mHz very easily (even farther with a little work). Despite the speed limitations of the chip, a good assembly or C programmer can use one of these things for just about anything.
Of course, my calculator is more powerful than those Macs...
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
Pretty leaky for a closed mind.
I'm working on installing a Pentium chip inside of my Furby with a fan and all. I'm just having trouble deciding through which hole the air flow will come out.
hey there, power mac,
swinging round the mouse so fancy free
nobody you meet could ever see the source code in there...
inside you
hey there, power mac,
why do most fanatics pass you by?
could it be you just don't try?
or is it the case you wear?
you're always window shopping
but never trying to change
this won't get newer people in range.....
as customers..
hey there, power mac,
there's another OS deep inside
BSD is really neat but darwin it came to be...
the world will see....
a new power mac!
[Fade music out]
So why should we care? As was pointed out in the Slashdot story itself, this seems economical -- why buy a whole new computer when you can just stick some new chips in your old Colour (Color, whatever) Classic? I could easily see some clueless MCSE guy deciding to put "mission critical" data on a hacked Colour (Color) Classic Mac that's liable to burn out at any second -- and I don't know about you, but I'd prefer not to have our airplanes and nuclear missiles being run on overclocked 1990s Macintoshes. Ugh.
Hacks are neat and all, but the danger of "burning out" the chips simply outweighs the cost -- in the long run, the Opportunity Cost of using standardized chips is much less.
Yu Suzuki
Yu Suzuki
Deamcast. It's thinking.
I have to admit, I would never have imagined that the person who hacked a Color Classic monitor to run at 640x480 would be a woman! That'll teach me to Think Different!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Thanks, Slashdot, this story made my day. :)
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'm not talking about ten page pastes of the same thing over and over or one word attempts at getting a first post. I'm talking about the intelligent trolls. Anyone who reads the above post without cracking a smile - nay, anyone who reads any such post without cracking a smile - has obviously missed the boat.
Trolling on Slashdot has become its own subculture, much like B1FF on Bitnet. OOG, the Don Knotts guy, they are all a part of Slashdot culture.
Trolling has taken a new meaning with Slashdot. Trolling is not necessarily flamebait. Admit it, you've been had by the Don Knotts guy *at least* once, and you felt pretty silly. It was harmless enough, and nobody but you knows you've been had, but thats part of the charm. The OOG posts and poem or song lyric posts, arguably, require intelligence and a certain amount of cleverness to produce.
Most trolls on Slashdot are like graffiti artists; if you let them grow a little bit, they can paint murals that you're somewhat ashamed to envy, like the above spoof of "Gangsta's Paradise."
although not as cool of the story i once heard of the guy in germany who took a Power Mac and an Apple //gs, removed all the pieces from both, and put all the Power Mac pieces into the //gs.. leaving a power mac in a //gs case :)
i still wonder if that was real. supposedly there are pictures floating around somewhere.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Maybe I'm just spoiled by my 21" Sony, but I can fit almost 9 of those 640x480 desktops on my screen at once...
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I'm not sure this is exactly newsworthy. I mean...it's just a guy who basically gutted an old mac and put new shit in it. What other articles are we going to see??
/. tomorrow. oh well - you heard it first.
Learn how to make your own 500hp Ugo
John Holmes writes: it's the craziest thing...you have to have m4d sk33lz to figure this out. Basically, we put an engine from a Z28 into an old ass Ugo, we put new headers and an exhaust kit on it, as well as a K&R filter and new plugs and wires. A subframe connecter, and a new racing tranny. But the badges are still the same.
Oops - that's going to be posted on
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
This is just a bunch of people doing it for fun. Who the hell is talking about running planes and missiles off of Macs in old case...or any Mac at all??
I like it. It's fun. It's like swapping a VR6 into a first gen. Rabbit and spanking all those turbo civics.
Blar.
I'm sorry. The first Macintosh was released on October 5, 1984. It used a 68k chip clocked at 8 mHz.
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
Alright. I'm one of those tight-assed people that usually doesn't think much at all of the trolling going on.
But this one made me grin like hell.
Weird, tho, it's actually got a few _points_; intelligent trolls, who'd've thunk it?
- C. "Everybody's posting, but half of them ain't thinking". Hehe.
But not to worry, I gave her an 4 year old Mac Clone of my husband's to update it. Now she's zipping along at 150 mHz! :-)
I still have a working Mac Classic, just B&W, as color wasn't available when my parents bought it. It has 80 MB of disk space and 4 MB of RAM, if I recall correctly. I can't manage to throw it away though. I'm still hoping to get some use out of it. :-)
(My sister, on the other hand, still uses the first family computer, a Mac SE, to do her finances in Quicken.)
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
...I could change a G3 into a Color Classic! Now THAT would be useful!
One Microsoft Way
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
For years I had a Quadra 700, which I did tons of graphic design work on. People would ask how fast it was, and were amazed when I told them 25mHz. It was completely stable, and you could work ahead of the processor, as in punch in several keystrokes (Cut, New, Enter, Paste, F11) and it would do all of them, something Windoze won't do. (Does GIMP do this, anyone?)
Granted, it sucked at web browsing, but it produced many beautiful images for years.
Its death came (at 21,000 hours total runtime) because a mouse (the furry, wall-chewing kind) moved into the case, leaving droppings on the motherboard. I've since moved on to multitasking systems with more than one mouse button, but I wish I would have had the foresight to duct tape shut the PCI slot that was open.
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
Why, why, and why?
If your religion is any product line, even an Open-Source one, you really have some things to think about.
. .should be enough for everyone.
What? it's a chip?
Does anyone else remember this one? Someone frankensteined an ancient Apple //e into accepting a Powermac 9500 motherboard with a ~200MHz 604e (this was a couple years ago, I think). They actually did a really nice job - the reset key on the //e's keyboard mapped to the power key on the Mac, and a bunch of other things were rather elegantly handled.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Food for thought: The original TI/99-4A could be expanded to 256K of RAM with a box the size of a small bookcase. Today's inch-high laptops can store 256 megs of RAM. That's an increase of 1000-fold. Pretty amazing stuff.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Food for thought: The original TI/99-4A could be expanded to 256K of RAM with a box the size of a small bookcase. Today's inch-high laptops can store 256 megs of RAM. That's an increase of 1000-fold. Pretty amazing stuff.
Ahh the good 'ol TI-994/A. The secret to expanding it was to buy the ungodly expensive and heavy PEB(perihperal expansion box). most people didn't.
I wish I could get one now. I'd gut that baby out and make it a retro '80s case! Either that or a case made to look like a Pac Man arcade cabinet.
You see, if you have one of these old Color Macs, you will want to upgrade them to a PPC in order to run Darwin on it. When you think about, there's not much point in keeping an old machine around. It just takes up space. Honestly, what are you going to run on MacOS anyway? MacPaint?
With this incredible modification, you'll be able to run an Open Source Operating System on your previously-68k Mac. The Motorolla chips are notoriously difficult to program for, which hindered the development of Open Source Software on that chip, and is also why MacOS, which runs so well under the PowerPC, is so slow and powerless on the 68k. So with your new chip, you'll be able to run the Open Source OS of choice for Macs: Apple's Darwin. Because it comes from Apple, and you have official Apple hardware, you can always count on getting good support.
Myself, I'll just be excited if I can port Quake, and watch it run on my 9 inch screen
The C64 had a 6510, basically the diff was talking to all the support chips. Atari and Apple had base 6502's.
man, is this old news (look at the dates on the site). but, if you're still interested in 68k, apple hardware, or if you're looking for cool cases and some other really interesting hardware hacks - including links to the power colo(u)r classic among others - take a gander at AppleFritter.com - a site dedicated to apple hacks, prototypes and rarities.
and as for all the rest of you, why do so many of you spell "Mac" "MAC"? what do you think it stands for? Mac is short for Macintosh. not McIntosh or even MacIntosh, and certainly isn't an acronym. those of you in the northern US, where an A.T.M. is sometimes called a M.A.C. i can understand, but these are not cash machines!
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
AMIGAS!!!11!!! YAY!!!
Now, someone tell me how to do this to my Amiga 500!
(I am only as Red as my beard)
-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
Not often...
Why? Because it's cooler to keep them around! How many of you have old Commodore 64's or ColecoVisions that still work? Would you gut it to get a Pentium III crammed in there? Heck no! It's more froody to show it off in working condition during dinner parties...
My point is, the whole reason this is cool and noteworthy is that the old Mac-in-the-boxes were classics. You could turn it into a two-bottle beer cooler using some copper tubing and an air conditioner pump and people would still stand up and take notice because it's nostalgic.
So, let's all Here-Here! for the Mac-in-the-boxes. But, can we perhaps stop throwing a party everytime someone jams something inside that doesn't belong there?
Notice: Your mouse has been moved. Windows will now restart so this change can take effect.
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
Doh... thought I had it nailed down.
Like win16it was multitasking. Almost.
The mac os back then was like win16 in that it didn't split the CPU time up fairly among apps. The app that used it all got it all.
The os had to wait for the cpu to catch up with the app so the app would relinquish control to the OS, which would then apply any mouse clicks or keypresses you did while it was busy.
New Macs and Win32 machines can do that, but only if a) the app is lagged, and b) you're really careful, since it's a lot eaiser to jump out to other apps.
One thing that really impressed me about the original Macintosh machinese was that the Apple engineers were really creative about how they built the hardware-- not just what the box itself looked like.
For example, I was really impressed when I learned that the Macintosh SE/30 included custom ICs to accelerate the normal windowing GUI operations. This was YEARS before the PC saw any kind of real 2D acceleration... and it was a great idea. Anybody who ever played with an SE/30 and a PC of the same era would see the awesome performance advantage the SE/30 had.
That being said, I was reading through some of "Inside Macintosh" books circa the SE/30 and these guys looked like they were BEASTS to program-- people really had to write assembly language GUI programs? I guess I'm a spoiled product of the OOPY late 90s, but that seems like a deathwish if ever I heard one.
Another interesting tidbit-- the Apple Macintosh OS is more INfamouse than famous, we all know, but those from around the San Jose area will appreciate the code name Apple engineers had for the OS: Winchester Mystery OS -- signal traps and jumps to null addresses etc... I laughed hard at that one...
Upgrade a butterfly.
The IBM Thinkpad 701 (/701C), codenamed "butterfly" was an amazing laptop -- very light and compact, it nevertheless had a full-sized keyboard which "unfolded" when you opened the butterfly's lid.
The only problem is that the butterfly is a little slow, doesn't have much RAM or disk space, has a battery which lasts only a couple hours, and lacks any communications beyond a 14.4Kbps modem. (It was fine back when we were all using 486s, but times have changed.)
If someone could work out how to upgrade the butterfly to be on par with modern laptops -- essentially completely rebuilding it apart from the keyboard and display -- that would be a truely great hack.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I think the Macquarium hack was much cooler. It upgrades a Mac's resolution from b&w to real life. And it runs at the speed of a real aquarium too. If one could figure out how to harness the processing power of a goldfish...
Daniel
---
Might even be more secure incase someone breaks into your house. They'll see the old case and thing that it's a piece of crap and take something else. When in fact you have a state of the art pc inside a case from 10years ago.
I guess the saying "It's not on the outside that counts, it's on the inside." really has a point here.
Try NetBSD.
..but I still think that "Trollers Wheel" was funnier. Man, this troll is hilarious.
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
The Nitro used a Turbo motherboard and a daughter card which allowed the CPU (and some on-board cache?) to run at 40MHz.
Randy Rencsok's site at www.channelu.com or thereabouts should have more detailed information, or look for one of Mike Paquette's posts on comp.sys.next.hardware.
William
Maybe my life is just to exciting, but I've bored enough to spend to time and money on something that I would want to use in the first place. 9" monitor? Now PIII or Athlon in an IBM Z50... At least they can with a 14" :)
links to the power colo(u)r classic
Didn't Apple do that and call it an iSor^H^H^H^HiMac computer?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ok,
While the processor may be capable of lots of stuff.. My time is honestly worth more than hacking around in an old mac... Hell, I'd rather be hacking around in an old Atari ST ANYWAY. At least there is cool software you can get for the Atari ST, that you just can't get anywhere else.
--Remove chicken to e-mail
Has anyone else ever given serious thought into porting the TI-89 and its software to the Macintosh? I mean, they both have 68k processors.. and it would be cool to do some nice big 3-D graphs on a computer screen with the 89's math software.. and it would also be good for assembly programs and for testing them. I mean, it might take a little work doing, but once it was finished it would be really cool.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
But it has to do with getting rid of - or getting - unwanted computer hardware.
freeboxen.com is a site for people to unload the hardware they don't want for people who do. I just stumbled across it in another thread. It could really use some support. What a great idea!
-- --
Stay Tuned Next Week For...
The Adventures of Open Souce Man!
-- --
Stay Tuned Next Week For...
The Adventures of Open Souce Man!
(with Natalie Portman and her Aibo)
You can stick a PIII motherboard in your old 286AT case! (Around the same vintage as the colour classics)
You can replace the 5 1/4 inch with a CDROM and you can replace the old CGA monitor with a 21 inch Sony, and it will all run fine!!
Oh, wait.. I had a computer like that.. so does everyone else I know.
I (actually my parents) had a Mac+ for a while (before that they had one of the original 128K Mac, too). Did you know that upgrading the RAM invalidated to warrenty?
They were nice machines, in 1984.
A TI-92 emulator for the macintosh is available here.
I don't think the emulator in question actually works on 68k macintoshes, it claims to requrie a 100Mhz PPC, though a VMWare-style hardware abstraction hack with almost no slowdown would be pretty easy to throw together for a 68k mac i'd imagine. Assuming anyone actually was WILLING to.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I was invited into the 'elite troll guild' or whatever a while back, but currently I have no idea whats going on in the 'community' any more. While trolling was fun for me, it was just to time consuming.
Anyway, while there were really multiple communitys based on diffrent goals, one of the things I always hated was the 'don knots/CNN' guy. The guy that would post the same link to the same fsking page over, and over, and over again. What kind of reativity was that? I it was just so annoying.
Anyway, I just wanted to vent about the DK guy. God, what an idiot.
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Wow, so it's shoehorning a modern motherboard into an older machine. Nothing like the old days of hardware upgrades, when you could upgrade your processor by soldering daughterboards straight on to the original motherboard (which invariably wasn't designed to be upgraded in any way).
:-)
:-/
I know Amiga people got up to loads of stuff (including PowerPC upgrades), but the Atari people did quite a lot too. here is an example of a modern Atari upgrade; there were lots more in the past. One popular example was putting a 32MHz 68030 into an 8MHz 68000 machine (requiring lots of new circuitry), while others included the addition of modern PCI graphics cards, faster serial ports, HD floppy support in older Ataris, switchable OS upgrades, and so on.
My old ST at home has a 4MB memory upgrade (that involved soldering wires on to the surface-mounted MMU, my ST being of a particularly perverse design) and a TOS 2.06 ROM upgrade (great fun that - a daughterboard soldered directly on to the 68000 itself, and a tiny software utility to switch between the old TOS 1.02 ROMS and the new TOS 2.06 ROM, for compatibility with old games etc). It also has a SCSI host adapter (it looks just like a normal cable, except there's a custom chip inside the SCSI plug end).
It gets on my nerves when people say how brave they were coping with, say, a 50MHz machine. I used my old 8MHz ST for useful stuff, and until recently it was being used by my mum for word-processing with Papyrus. By that I mean full page layout, WYSIWYG, a modern, non-modal interface, TrueType/Speedo vector fonts, 300dpi output (usually) keeping up with a DeskJet 600, etc etc etc. And all fast enough to keep up with my mum's very fast typing. If a program was released for Linux which had an identical interface and identical features, I would get it straight away. And imagine a lot of other people would, too.
The ST was only retired because the keyboard doesn't work so well after 12 years of constant use - the space bar's a bit dead.
Ford Prefect
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
the fact is no one does care and 386+ has been optomized to run in protected mode ever since because of that severe real mode limitation. Every processor out there, by the way, runs faster in real mode than in protected mode, even the x86. That is why it is such a stupid hack: it was the only thing Intel could have done in order to keep their very stupid processor architecture from dying after the 8088.
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
This continues to point out the fact that people want small computers that are cheap but not comprimised. A compact car that you can still get under the hood, if you will.
Trolls, it must be cool to be that bored.
The mouse must have been a PC fan, he showed you what he thought of macs.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I can appreciate the nostalgia of using souped-up old machines (we've all seen those people with cool retro cars we all want), but a computer can be a thing of pride without the fancy (or not so fancy being the case... no pun intended) stylings or most powerful hardware. I loved my old Packard Bell 120mhz machine, telling people i was using it when ripping them to shreds in TFC (Half-Life needs a 133), but I replaced it with a custom build. The new one is better, and I am just as proud.
It's all about the Pentiums.... BABY
My other first post is car post.
I'm working on fitting an entire computing lab inside a converted ENIAC. A whole 3000 cubic feet, baby!
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
What a wonderful service. I've posted four items so far. Medium sized companies like where I'm at have heaps of $0 value stuff that real computer freaks would drool at. I strongly recommend that everyone post their useless crap on this site!
Most trolls are just complete idiots, but I'll agree that some of them are funny.
However, OOG is not a troll. If you had ever bothered to read his posts you would realize that he posts on topic. While not always insightful his posts are generally interesting and since he doesn't post that often I would assume that he mainly posts when he knows something about the subject.
Just because he came up with an original style doesn't make him a troll.
---CONFLICT!!---
top the ultimate hardware hack ever:
the MacQuarium.
Gutted Mac Classic, Classic II or SE. The monitor is removed and cut glass installed to make a fish bowl.
Advantages over current hardware: crash resitant, near perfect implementation of artifical intelligence (how smart are fish anyway? They'll eat themselves to death). Much more enjoyable than psuedo fishtank screensavers.
Disad: Crash leads to death, requires 24/7 uptime and system monitoring. Operating elements will sometimes eat each other.
The plans are here.
No sig is worth reading.
> Why is it that Mac zealots are almost uniformly
:)
/ summary.pdf
> stupid? Is it because the intelligent Mac Users
> aren't zealots? I think so. Ether that, or only
> stupid people like Macs...
Flattery will get you no where. But seriously, what can I say I had to respond to the original troll.
> I have never in my life heard of a chip called
> the 8085. are you talking about the 8088? Witch
> was wankyer, but came out later? (used an 8bit
> bus, instead of a 16bit bus like the 8086)
If I remember my history correctly, the 8085 was an 8 bit processor that was popular with the CP/M crowd. It of course could only address up to 64 K of ram, so Intel came up with that backward, upside down memory model of segment/offset so that programs written for the 8085 could run on the 8086. It's too bad Intel didn't know to do away with that legacy memory model and go with a flat one, oh well.
> I guess you've never heard of PnP ISA, not that
> it matters, ISA's on the way out. Anyway, if you
> want true plug and play, just don't buy any ISA
> cards, it isn't that hard...
I have heard of PnP ISA and it simply doesn't work! I don't know how many conflicts I have had to manually solve in windows 95, 98 of supposedly "PnP" ISA hardware. PCI doesn't do this...
> Serial and parallel ports are very useful, in
> that you can hack something up in your garage
> that can interface with it.
They are very useful, so is the joystick port for extremely simple devices to be developed. What is extremely unuseful is for every com port an IRQ taken up (IRQ sharing for the most part DOESN"T WORK!). If you want to get any kind of bandwidth out of parallel, you need to use a DMA port, and of course every parallel port uses an IRQ. Why introduce all of that potentional conflict with you can have a single controller that controls all those devices with a single set of resources like the USB root hub?
> I'd like to see you build a USB device by hand.
I wouldn't want to. But then neither would I build a serial or parallel device by hand, even though I know it would be easier.
> Am I supposed to be impressed by your mad daisy
> chaining abilities? Another thing that's always
> bothered me is Mac users tendency's to elevate
> the lamest Mac features to amazing heights.
> "Ohhh. You can eject the floppy without pushing a
> button!!!!!"
Yeah, but it is annoying to have to use a paperclip to eject it manually sometimes too. Seriously, you can plug a mouse into a keyboard port on a PC or vice versa and royally f*ck yourself. ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) and USB have been idiot proofed so that you cannot do this.
> If you could address more then 1 meg of ram in
> real mode, it would be real mode, it would be
> some other mode. And real mode would have to be
> put back in for Backwards compatibility. Anyway,
> none of this matters because the CPUs have other
> modes, and everyone uses protected mode, witch
> lets you get up to 36gigs of ram.
Well, I don't think that a model that relies on protected mode and REQUIRES virtual memory to run is very efficient. Try running Age of empires with 128 MB or RAM and disable Virtual memory, Will it run???
> > FPU on an x86? What a joke!!!
> Ever year of the Athlon? 4 floating point ops per
> cycle, and you can buy one that runs at 1ghz
> today. When your CPU maxes out at 500mhz,
> everything is a joke...
The x86's FPU will never be the fastest becuase of inherent limitations in which the FPU is accessed. I have heard of AMD getting around this with the Athlon making the FPU faster, however, if you really want to see the real scoop, check this site out:
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/summary/local
The newest Pentium III's and Athlons have very fast FPUs, faster even than the fastest G4's, however they don't have anything on the Newest ALphas, Sparc III's or R12000 processors...
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
Every rule has an exception, and this is the only rule with no exceptions! Huh? -- Spatch
And if the person you're responding to knew that Slashdot is considered 'VA Linux' turf by certain competitors... He has no idea who the songwriter is, who probably works in San Francisco.
Car Craft put a 500hp V-8 in a Chevette...just 'cuz they could. It kicked major ass, and was a great exapmple of the hacker mentality hard at work in the hot-rodding scene.
This month's Hot Rod has an article about a guy who dropped a turbocharged Thunderbird engine and a lot of custom intercooler crap into a '71 pinto. Again, way fast and way neat. Beige boxes (or '69 Chevelles and '78 Camaros and '84 Mustangs...the automotive equivalent of beige boxes) suck. Freak power rules.
SoupIsGood Food
Geez, I knew Apple charged too much for their computers, but if people are going to these lengths, apparently things have really gotten out of hand! ;-)
> These things have been in common use since the 70's when they ran the first Macs.
//e and the Apple //c, used a 65C02 cpu. Lots of people put a z80 card in one of the Apple ]['s expansion slots, so you could run cp/m as well (the Apple ][ user could choose DOS 3.3, ProDOS, USCD Pascal and CP/M as an OS).
The first Mac was released in April 1984. In the late 70's ('79 if I'm correct), the Apple ][ (two) and Apple ][+ were very popular machines, the first home computers to have colour graphics. These machines used the 6502 processor.
Later Apples, the Apple
The first Macs used the Motorola 68000, later Macs had 68020, 68030 or 68040 processors. Unfortunately, in lots of late-68K Macs, Apple put 68LC040s, a 68040 without a copro. The problem with early models of the 68LC040 is that copro emulation wouldn't work due to a bug in the cpu that would destroy the stack pointer. a Bad Thing(tm) indeed.
Now if you'll excuse me, I suffer from acute nostalgia. I'm off to do some vintage computing on one of my Apple ]['s.
In shock new intel says the PII is the best overall choice for the majority of PC users and applications
So who's gonna stuff a PII into a MAC Classic or an i-Mac
So a few people who actively visit slashdot could handpick the best trolls so that I can show my future kids just how funny OOG was.
In his day, the incredible MEEPT always made me laugh. He was one of the first trolls on /. but his posts were always classic. I think he's still around, but doesn't post nearly as often ... which is a shame.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
That's not a headline, but an observation. /. has a very complicated moderation scheme in effect. Trolls like this one seem an awfully lot like hackers -- they find creative ways around the moderation system. And they aren't malicious; rather, the way they've found to hack the system is to post stuff that is so entertaining that moderators mod it up, even though it is off-topic.
They've had to get creative because the system is actively hostile to them and to their speech. And that is a good thing too; not only does it keep most visible discussion on-topic and interesting, it makes the filtering process for the best trolls very rigorous, and keeps troll quality (yes, I said that) high. At least, the quality of trolls that get this far are of high quality. (Or maybe the moderators are just high. On life, of course.)
(I even think of it as an artistic commentary of the dynamics of free speech with a low S/N ratio versus controlled (therefore not completely free) speech with a high S/N ratio. But I doubt that argument will go over highly here....)
That's just my little defense of the trolls; they've had to get so entertaining and creative that they deserve a little praise, IMO. Enjoy tearing it to shreds.
phil (hoping he gets a reply from OOG, and, hey, I didn't need my karma anyway)
The Mac IIfx had a 40Mhz 68030 CPU. I can remember an article in Mac{User|World|Week) comparing it to lower-end Sun and HP Apollo workstations. It wasn't priced that far off when it was first released 10 years ago. It must have been pretty beefy compared to its siblings, as it had a lifespan of 2 years before being discontinued.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Uhhh...You said:
Mac Users love to go on and on about there love, there company, and how much PCs suck (and, how much there users must be stupid to use them).
Then:
I can only be insulted so many times by a user base before I start to revile them
And then:
no one advocates Microsoft 'cept for brainwashed MCSEs, who are too unintelligent to count.
So, are you logic-impaired, dealing with cranial-rectal inversion, or simply really stoopid.
Just a question, Troll.
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
The 68Ks have been around for a good long time, and are extraordinarily versatile. However,the first Macs debuted in 1984...
--
Hmmm, An Athlon w/ 256 MB RAM or my G4-500 with 768 MB RAM.
See how easy it is to fsck with either-or constructs?
One is a current machine (Athlon), pretty decent, but nothing to write home about. One is a really cool hack.
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
No webpage yet. That's coming soon.
Speaking as a recent adopter of NetBSD-Mac68k, let me say that it's been an adventure to get it running on an old SE/30 that I picked up last month at a swapmeet for $10. I beefed it up with 32 Megs of RAM, a 1 gig SCSI hard drive, and it's a fun little Unix box now. I'm learning to cope with the one-bit 512x348 screen, and using it as a 'bare bones' system. The limited screen architecture, and the limited X11 that's installed by default forces me to learn a lot of the real core technology just to make it a useful machine. I've become a Tab Windows Manager (TWM) enthusiast, for instance. It is nice that all that TWM stuff in the numbered O'Reilly X Windows volumes is finally coming in handy. I finally got backspace to work last nightn an Xterm (xkeycaps then doctoring up an .Xmodmap file).
Minimalism provides good experience, in my estimation.
So if you have an SE/30 laying around, give NetBSD-68K a shot. It's fun.
Don't be alarmed. I actually got over my Amiga zealotry after several years of counselling.
I am now obsessed with my iMac. Gently fondling its curves, running my fingers delicately over its mouse, repeatedly inserting CDs into its willing slot before finally penetrating both of its microphone jacks...
I have to go shower now.
(I still feel like I'm cheating on Agnes and Denise)
-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
Whoever you are, you sure typed a lot of extra words after that sentence "I never heard of an 8085." I call it extra words because it doesn't matter what you said. That sentence was so appallingly ignorant that I stopped reading after it.
Get a clue. If you don't know what you're talking about, don't say anything. Maybe you'll learn something by listening.
And m68k assembler just kicks the crud out of x86... have you ever looked at that stuff?
Having had the opportunity to program both x86's (NASM) and an Amiga 500 (Assempro) in assembly, I can say that 680x0 assembly rocks. I mean, you put in MULU d7,d3 and it multiplies the LSW of d3 and d7 and puts the result in d7! None of this EDX:EAX crud. (No memory seg:ofs either, and all the fun that causes with DMA, DOS, and real vs. protected mode.) Also, note the comments in the dnet source about the x86's lack of registers. Amiga calls were a bit more involved than DOS's, but there were a lot more of them, too. It would probably be fairer to compare the Amiga (Workbench 1.3, 1989-ish) to Windows 95 in terms of complexity.
I foresee a future where x86 programming just becomes impossible because of all the layers... real, protected, virtual real, mode64, virtual protected... MMX, SSE, 64BE. Some of those were made up as a possibility of what could happen if (hypothetical) 64Bit Extensions were added to the 32bit Intel Architecture. When this future arrives, before Microsoft gets Windows onto it, a new window of entry will open... for a computer to open the gates to 64-bit computing with sensible instructions. Port Linux... add user-friendliness (hey, with a new bus arch. we could define a new protocol for graphics cards, so any X64 card would work!)... and grin. And begin development for 128-bit platforms.
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
Duh... Off course I know the difference between a CPU and a computer, but that's besides the point.
Isn't *anyone* old enough to remember this stuff?
The 8085 was an 8 bit successor to the 8080, but a *very* week response to the z80 from zilog, an upwards-compatible to the 8080 developed by engineers who left intel.
The 8085 had a little bit of serial i/o on chip, and a couple of extra interrupts. It did *not* implement the extended instruction set of the z80.
CP/M ran on the 8080, and therefore the Z80. Most programs were written to the 8080 so that they could run on both; it tended to be only machine specific code that was written in Z80. The z80 was also 5v instead of needing three supplies.
The 8086 was source compatible with the 8080, not the 8085--it didn't have those extras. You could also cross-compile z80 source to the 8086.
The 8088 came out simultaneously with the 8086; it was the same thing (almost) on an 8 bit buss. ISTR that there was a load you could use t see which you were using because a buffer (?) was a different size onthe two chips, which would yield a different result.
If memory serves, the 8085 was announced at the same time as the 8086, but don't hold me to that.
hawk
Posted on Slashdot last year. A Mac Plus that runs at 1Ghz.
Maybe those old Macs still have a life after all?
Considering how cramped those cases are, this is pretty impressive demonstration of how cool the PowerPC chips run. Imagine stuffing a PIII into a case that size, with the monitor, hard drive, and an Ethernet card!
-jon
Remember Amalek.
The nice and old Amiga 1200 has combined 68k and PPC add-on boards. no wait, even G4 boards. ofcourse it's not cool for /.-readers 'coz it has the word "Amiga" in it.
The amiga with G4 will even be able to run Tao/elate! (these things even run linuxppc:)
anyway, you don't know how cool this is until you've seen one in action...
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The Nitro was kind of the legendary holy grail of NeXT computing.
Here's a site with good info on the Nitro board:
http://www.channelu.com/NeXT/Black/Nitro/
Sam Goldberger of Spherical Solutions hacked up a 60Mhz board called the Pyro that he was selling from his site for a long time. I don't know where he is now, orb.com seems to have been taken over by the aggressively commercial orb.net.
NetBSD should run on your cube, and there is a 68k linux project out there, but I'm not sure if they are supporting the NeXT hardware or not.
I have used my 030 cube for ages, it made a great web server, AppleShare file server, and everything else I ever asked it to do.
A BEOWULF CLUSTER of these???????
no sig
What you need is a good butane regulator, and this here's the best they make.
:^P
;^)
No shit...maybe soon I'll turn my K6-300 based machine into an 800Mhz Athlon-based machine, and get put on Slashdot. Hell, that's what this story sounds like.
I'd like to take one of those stupid-ass new teensy-tiny Compaq Presario cases and find a way to shove some real, off-the-shelf hardware into one.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Jesus, man. You just made me choke and suck a sunflower seed down my throat. sigh. :)
OMFG, you fucking rule dude. After reading that other one I could barely breathe. Your post nearly killed me. LMAO
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I'm rooting around here for the only Mac Plus web server... I don't know how the hell he did it, but here it is:
http://macplus.schoolvision.com/I actually have one of those old Color Classics at home. I've got the thing upgraded to an '040. With a big processor and a tiny screen, it sort of makes me think of a porche.
Fear the wrath of Ares' Horse of Fire
When you can get a decent framerate at Unreal Tournament on a Mac, even the highest end one, give me a ring.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.