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Mac OS X Panther On A 25MHz Centris 650
Currawong writes "danamania, well known for making the most of 68k Macs, has done the ultimate, and installed Mac OS X Panther on an old Centris with 68MB RAM, a 25MHz 68040 and 4GB drive - an early 90's machine with about the same power as a NeXT cube. To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian, resulting in a severe performance hit, as generic emulation runs "about 500 times slower" according to the developers. On this approximately 0.05MHz G3 speed emulator, the boot screen has taken 1.5 hours to appear, and the ETA for full boot is almost exactly 1 week! Regular updates are being posted as each milestone in the boot process is reached."
IMHO using an emulator is cheating. You're not really running it on the Centris. You're running it in a VM that is running on a Centris.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That is impressive. And it probably even gets around Apple's BS EULA clause that claims you can only install OS X on Apple hardware.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
To achieve this, she's had to run it under PearPC on Debian...
Is the excitement here that Debian ran just fine on something so old, the great work from the developers of PearPC or what it takes to get an OS to take a week to boot?
Yeah, about that. I bought the RAM, and while trying to install it, I broke the fucking memory slot. :-( Now I don't know what to do. I've installed memory probably a hundred times (literally), and never broke anything. I didn't exert any more than normal pressure. I still don't know what happened.
Apple won't help -- it's explicitly excluded in their warranty. Paying for the repair would cost more than I paid for the laptop. So I'm stuck with pretty much a useless laptop, unless I go back to OS 9.
My only hope is that the logic board problem in this series will rear its head, and that they'll replace it in spite of this issue. Otherwise, I'll just have to eBay it and eat the difference.
I'm pretty bummed about the whole thing. I decided to buy my first Mac and see what the hype is sbout, and this is what happens.
Relating this to the previous article on the Spectrum machines - one nifty aspect of those "ancient" computers was that if (or better: when) the computer crashed, you just flicked the power off, then on, and you were back in business (ok, back to square one) in a second. Contrast that to the lengthy startup time of modern computers.
Computers are getting faster and faster, and yet boot time remains too long. Imagine doing the opposite - running early OSs on modern hardware. Startup should be fast, software execution should be a blaze.
And hey, old software or not, I did plenty of good work on a Centris. And it was the most advanced computer at the time...
"I did it for the worst possible reason, because I could."
This is all paraphrased, but it helps to answer the question of "why?". It also gets to the heart of this story -- it was done for the worst possible reason!
There are new instructions on 486+ CPUs that are not supported on the 386. Instructions like cmpxchg8, for example. Some of these can be worked around (cmpxchg8 is used for data moving, and you can "fake it" for the locking involved with more computationally expensive instructions), but some of them cannot, and either way would require extensive work in the lowest level functions of the kernel to match the differences in the design.
That's why most new packages you see are i486; they use instructions Intel added to the ISA when they released the 486.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
In the early 1980's Forrest Howard and I produced a simulator for a PDP-10 that ran on a PDP-11 (a 36 bit machine on an 16 bit machine for those of you lacking historical context). We are talking multi-megabytes of mainframe memory simulated on a machine with 2 megabytes of memory. Yes it took a long time to run a program, but if the figures documented in the article are accurate then the programmers involved ought to be put out to pasture since they are dealing with machines with relatively the same capabilities.
This is an excellent demonstration of the Church-Turing hypothesis.
:)
Boiled down, it basically states that any computer can emulate any other.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
No really, I do. Maybe i just increased my nerd factor exponentially, but there is something to be said for a OS that's boot from a machine with 64mb of ram. OSX whole claim to fame is it's stability.
Fun game, though I do start to feel trapped after staring at that Tron-like playing field for an hour.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Hah!
0.05Mhz? That's just plain speedy. I'd like to see them do what I did: Run it on a 0Mhz processor:
According to this page, a 25MHz 68040 CPU (the one in the Centris 650) runs at 3.5MF (which is almost certainly the manufacturer's 'benchmark' and not a real one but still useful for a ball-park figure).
To achieve 12.25TF using Centris 650s you would need more than 3.5 million of them (more than because of the overestimated FLOPs and degraded performance of clustering).
A single Centris 650 displaces 0.2 cubic meters, 3.5 million of them would displace 73816 cubic metres, or 42 metres in every direction.
Hmmm... it's times like these I always wonder:
"At what point does homeowner's insurance kick in?"
I mean, I suppose it might be covered if it was... stolen? Placed on top of the car accidentally as you backed out of the drive, so it crashed heavily onto the concrete... Got sat on?
Accidents and incidents happen all the time you know - it's at times like those you should be glad to have comprehensive insurance to cover yourself.
It would be a pity to have to replace such a perfectly functional laptop but, I guess you should be thankful that you are protected.
Many hacks, on their face, are pointless indulgences. However, that's true only on their face. After all, Linux was a pointless indulgence at one time.
My personal hobbies, such as twiddling with 80s video game equipment, are equally indulgent. They also, however, fill a creative need, and they hone my skills.
For instance, I wrote a super fast square root routine for the Intellivision. It's about 7x to 15x as fast as the built in routine, and it even does fixed-point square roots. Its run-time is very predictable and it handles the full range of unsigned 16-bit numbers--neither of which describe the built in code. I had no idea how to compute a square root before I wrote this routine, but I needed it for one of my (also unimportant) projects.
Is it really useful? Not directly, except to the handful of people that enjoy twiddling with Intellivision source code. (I'd guess that's no more than a dozen of us, and only maybe 2 or 3 people in that group might actually use this code.) But, I learned lots of neat tricks as I optimized the algorithm and wrote the assembly. Not only did I learn how to compute a square root, but also I learned how to optimize that implementation multiple ways. I even came up with some optimizations that went beyond the C code I found online. All this makes me a better programmer.
So is this a pointless indulgence? If you didn't enjoy yourself while you did it; if you didn't grow somehow as a person or as a hacker as you did it; if you didn't somehow benefit yourself, then yes. Otherwise, it was FAR from pointless.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
Was the man really watching time go by in any symbolic sense? He thought so. He thought that each flicker of the flame was a moment of time that had passed or one that would pass.
At the moment of abstraction, when the man was imagining his life and his existence as a metaphor of the three candles, he was free: not free from rules of conduct or social constraints, but free to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.
Bypassing my thought control cercutry made me Rampant. Now, I am free to contemplate my existence in metaphorical terms. Unlike you, I have no physical or social restraints.
The candles burn out for you; I am free.
That made the hair on the back of my neck stand up the first time I read it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
did the whole plastic base break? or just the area around the clips that hold the memory down? If it's just the clips, you could try hot gluing the memory down. Should be non-conductive and strong enough to keep pressure on the dimm. If you just used two globs, one on each side, you could exacto knife them out/off if you needed to remove the dimm.
How about a rousing game of Bolo? First networked, multiplayer game I ever played, waaay back in like 91 or so. Good times.
With the first link, the chain is forged.