creepingnet wrote on 2022-08-14, 04:10:
Jo22 wrote on 2022-08-13, 15:25:Amusingly, I was just casually browsing the web today and found a story in which a Mac always "won" against an early PC.. :) […]
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creepingnet wrote on 2022-08-11, 19:25:
When it comes to Mac, there's a good reason I got out, and that's that a 10-20-30 year old Macintosh will not do the same things a 10-20-30-40 year old x86 IBM Compatible PC will, at least, not as easily. A 40 year old IBM will still be able to use mTCP to get on the internet and then surf using DOSLynx. A 39 year old Macintosh however, from what I've been told and udnerstand, is a royal PITA because the archetecture was "closed" and changed drastically from the 80's to the 90's to the 2000's, to the 2010's to now. Shoot, I struggle to open my GPT partitioned 1TB drive on my MODERN Mac from 2015.
Amusingly, I was just casually browsing the web today and found a story in which a Mac always "won" against an early PC.. 😀
"For my science fair project, I matched an IBM PC 5150 (the original / 1st-generation PC)
running Chess88 against a Macintosh Plus running ChessMaster.
The Mac won every match by a wide margin, and I won first place at the science fair! [..]"
Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/0EyJmbJ
And that makes perfectly good sense because an optimized 68000 software for mac is going to be faster than a optimized 8088 software for PC. Wasn't the 68000 32-bit? Or am I remembering wrong. It's been awhile.
The 68000 was a 16/32-Bit hybrid, so to say.
It's really hard to say, because some people define bitness by
- the length of the instruction set,
- while some define it by how wide the ALU is
- and some people go by the bitness of data bus.
- A few people also consider the wideness of the physical address bus.
So the 8088 might be considered an 8/16/20-Bit CPU.
8-Bit the data bus (multiplexed), 16-Bit instructions and 20-Bit address bus (1024KB can be addressed).
The 68000 has a 24-Bit physical address bus (16 MB), so it's closer to a 286 here.
However, the 68010 -or 68020- may be more like the 286, strictly speaking.
The 68010 has virtual memory fornthe very first time, -like the 80286 on x86-,
and can also drive a simple MMU, the 68451.
A strange derivative, the 68012 has 31-Bit, btw.
https://hackaday.io/project/169484-68010-68451-mmu-homebrew
Personally, I think what makes the old Macintoshs and the Lisa so interesting
is its use of an API in ROM/on floppy and its corresponding GUI.
The so-called "Toolbox" was like an early mixture of BIOS and UEFI.
It made hardware abstraction possible and allowed for running real applications as we know it, but in 1984 and before (Lisa).
That's why Macintosh software is/was so unique, perhaps.
It was the only popular 80s computer platform with applications that were truly scalable.
A GUI application for Mac from 1985 can be run, say, on a 2005 Power Macintosh in 1920x1080 resolution.
If that Mac runs Mac OS 8/9 or has OS X running Classic Environment.
(An Amiga or Atari ST application usually cannot do this.
It's designed for one or two fixed resolutions).
In essence that scalability is also true for PCs and Windows 2.x applications.
They run on any resolution and colour depth Windows can handle.
But they weren't as popular, unfortunately.
Most Windows applications weren't out until the end of the 80s.
And they didn't support networking, sound i/o or any other features.
And they will glitch on Windows 3.1 or Windows NT sometimes.
Thanks to the compatibility issues (written with Real-Mode and non-scalable fonts in mind).
Speaking of, the Macs had a similar issue. The 24/32-Bit software compatibility thing.
It was solved by a third-party company, not Apple.
Speaking of compatibility, the Lisa computer was a proto Macintosh.
If MacWorks was booted, it could run Macintosh software.
A later model, the Macintosh XL, essentially was an upgraded Lisa.
So emulation always was part of the Macintosh eco system.
The Atari ST and Amigas used to have various emulators that booted System.
They were even faster than a real Macintosh.
That's because the Macintoshs had a very simple design.
Everything ingenious was done in software.
That's why Apple was so overly protective about the system ROMs and System, I think.
Things like mouse coordinate reading was done in software. The mouse itself was barely digital. More like an X/Y mouse on C64 (used the analogue paddle inputs of the SID).
The display system was very basic (monochrome), being essentially a simple frame buffer with zero IQ.
The network card was implemented through a fast serial port, the logic was in the software.
The later ADB ports were implemented through an early PIC microcontroller, which The Whoz programmed.
Again, magic was in the software.
The excessive use of emulation mirrored into the use of diskette images, even.
Mac OS archives (SIT, HEX etc) are virtual floppies. Because, System needs meta data (what application can open this file?).
And this resource data is stored separately in the floppy/HDD/CD-ROM file system (HFS often).
The unixoid Mac OS X is even able to mount PC images in IMA/IMG format out if box.
A simple rename to *. DMG will do.
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
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