Slashdot Mirror
Happy 25th, Macintosh!
bradgoodman writes to tell us that tomorrow will mark the 25th anniversary of the first Macintosh, debuting just 2 days after the famous Super Bowl XVIII commercial. "'The Macintosh demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to create a machine to be used by millions and millions of people,' said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, research director for the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, California, think tank, and chief force behind 'Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley,' an online historical exhibit. 'The gold standard now for personal electronics is, "Is it easy enough for my grandmother to use it?" People on the Macintosh project were the first people to talk about a product in that way.'"
EFI OpenBoot firmware has more code than the original Mac OS boot floppy, wich cheated by having 4 megs already in ROM.
So, what's your point, really?
My Apple //c and multitude of other antique hardware (including a Lisa 2) might boot faster, but they sure dont do as much.
Quit complaining and head back to your compiler!
Honestly, I think the evolution of suspend states has more than made up for it. Granted, you're still drawing a bit of power while in sleep, but modern Macs use next to nothing in that state and wake near-instantaneously.
Coupled with an OS that can run for weeks without a reboot, I've no complaints.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
The data/address separation
Are you referring to the memory buses here? The only data/address separation in the 68K instruction set was the separation between data and address registers, which the PDP-10 didn't have (it just had 16 GPRs).
The "PDP" that the 68K more closely resembles from a programming point of view is the PDP-11, with more complex addressing modes and an operand/operand orientation rather than the register/memory orientation of the PDP-10.