Vintage Apple Ping!
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Posted on 06/20/2015 11:12:19 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: There’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern Web.
It’s a lowly machine, my Mac. The specs pale in comparison to even my Kindle: 8 MHz CPU, 4 MB RAM, 50 MB hard drive, and 512 x 384 pixel black-and-white screen. My current desktop PC is on the order of 200,000 times faster—not even including the GPU. Still, that Mac Plus was where I cut my computing teeth as a child. It introduced me to C, hard drives, modems, and the Internet.
Yes, in a certain sense, my Mac has already been on the Internet, first via BBSes and later via Lynx through a dial-up shell sessions. (There’s nothing quite like erotic literature at 2400 bps when you’re 13 years old.) What it never did was run a TCP/IP stack of its own. It was always just a dumb terminal on the ’net, never a full-fledged member.
How hard could it be to right that wrong?
Everything went smoothly at first. I had my mom ship the computer to me. It arrived in good condition, having been stored undisturbed in her basement since the mid-1990s. I plugged it and its external hard drive in, flipped the power switches, and watched the happy Mac glow to life on the tiny CRT. Sure, the hard drive gave a groan of protest when it first spun up, but that quieted down, and everything seemed stable with the data intact. At least for the first few minutes.
(Excerpt) Read more at kernelmag.dailydot.com ...
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
Congrats, you posted an Apple thread I’m interested in.
Thanks for the heads up.
Your current desktop PC runs at 1.6 THz?
Where can I get one?
I would have tried DataViz’s MacLink-PC for the Zip drive connectivity trick.
I did successfully hook up a Mac IIx (68030, 9 MB RAM, 16 Mhz), via external modem through an ISP to run Netscape back in 1998).
I don’t know if AOL supports its old 68000 version of the AOL browser. Also, Localtalk Bridge might provide true Ethernet capability with lower-overhead.
In my experience, it was possible to get 28K or better using LocalTalk or garden variety serial modems, so he might have done better with a USR Courier 56K and a dialup line. (maybe the modem deals with some of the processor overhead).
Dang...Must use alot of lectricity
I love this type of project. Unfortunately, our house was burglarized a couple of months ago and the thieves took a bunch of my vintage computer gear. I am sure that it got chucked in the garbage when they figured out it wasn’t modern equipment. They took an old Timex Sinclair 1000 and supporting peripherals, an old Atari 800 Computer with floppy disk drives and dozens and dozens of old discs and programs.
My TI99/4a computer along with its external expansion box will be missed. Also taken was a TRS-80 computer from Radio Shack along with peripherals. The largest volume of stuff missing was my collection of Commodore 64 items and software. Some of this gear actually goes for good money on eBay these days. I was hoping to play with some of this stuff again one day. Unfortunately, I do not have good documentation for my insurance company and they have not been very supportive.
Clock cycles no longer matter. You need to use floating point numbers. If he’s got an 8 core CPU running at a couple GHz
I’ve got an 8-core i7 running at 3.6 GHz.
I used it to do the math. 8*3.6 GHz = 28.8 GHz, or 0.0288 THz. That’s 576 times faster than 50 MHz.
576 << 200000.
And its throughput is nowhere near that good due to coordination overhead between the CPUs.
576x = difference in clock cycles per second
200,000x = claimed difference in performance
Two totally different animals.
How deep was the pipeline on the old bird? How many registers? FPU? Memory access time? L1-L3 cache? Advances in OS and compilers (probably offset somewhat by sloppier programming). What about swapping?
Ah... no.
Read the article again.
The relevant line is: My current desktop PC is on the order of 200,000 times faster.
shhh
its a mac-o-phile hippie circle. facts are not welcome
Yeah, I was thinking the same.
Mac drool parade. I mean, I agree they're better. I own a bunch of i-devices. They're better than Microsoft. I don't see how any technically erudite person could disagree.
But Apple doesn't walk on water.
Exactly my point. 200,000 times FASTER. He doesn’t say 200,000 times the clock cycles per second.
If I say my truck is twice as fast as yours, that doesn’t mean that one particular part in my engine runs twice as fast, it means that I can get from point A to point B in half the time.
Let's get her on the Internet!
I’m so sorry.
I hope not! Also sorry for your loss. As depicted in some movies, people often store old keepsakes in safes, that thieves believe to contain gold or jewels; one man's treasure is another's junk. Although I keep Apple vintage stuff, I thought a TRS-80 would be a nice addition. Have some Atari stuff. That video of the 1986 Mac Plus loading a page seems slow. I still have my 300 baud modem that I used with my Apple II; your eyes would glaze over watching the letters slowly paint on the screen to build a line when on Compuserve forums.
He's probably referring to FLOPS. Clock speed and the ability to do calculations are not necessarily connected. Multiply by number of processors.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.