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BobHoward posted:I wonder how much 88K Macintosh hardware is out there. I didn't know about the prototype Mac m88k HW at all, or that they even did that!
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Mar 8, 2024 01:52
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however much Mac 88k hardware is out there, 50% of it passed through Weird Stuff (RIP)
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Mar 8, 2024 01:54
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Speaking of weird architectures, and since I'm not done with other would-be effortposts stuck in draft states, anyone else here other than me have any GreenArrays boards or parts?
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Mar 8, 2024 02:08
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minidracula posted:From what I understand when I last looked into it, MVME was probably the most manufactured and deployed m88k form factor? Data General also originally built AViiON systems on m88k, before switching to x86 (Pentium-era, initially, I think). There were some other small scale users, OMRON's LUNA being another, mostly in Japan, and some use in telcos, etc. (Nortel had some use of m88k in some part/version/edition of DMS at one point). Beyond that I'm not sure. I know some CMU folks used m88k for some Mach projects. The sense I got was once AIM "took off" and settled on PowerPC, m88k was well and truly dead inside Motorola, and it had already had a late start compared to SPARC and MIPS in the RISC space of the era, etc., etc. If wikipedia is to be believed, m88k was a product for just 3 years, 1988 to 1991. 1991 was about when the AIM alliance formed up, and yes, PowerPC absolutely killed m88k - it hadn't gotten much adoption and PowerPC had a built-in volume customer. Take a look at this CHM history page, which is about Gary Davidian's m68k emulator projects at Apple. It has some pictures of m88k Mac hardware - a Mac LC box with the 3-chip original generation m88k stuffed in it. https://computerhistory.org/blog/transplanting-the-macs-central-processor-gary-davidian-and-his-68000-emulator/ The oral history interviews with Davidian are neat and a big chunk does concern m88k. Hard to judge from it how many 88K machines they actually built, but probably not many - sounds like the project proved itself in that 68K emulation on 88K worked well, but then the AIM deal happened and swept away any need to distribute m88k Macs to a bigger team.
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Mar 8, 2024 12:16
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BobHoward posted:If wikipedia is to be believed, m88k was a product for just 3 years, 1988 to 1991. 1991 was about when the AIM alliance formed up, and yes, PowerPC absolutely killed m88k - it hadn't gotten much adoption and PowerPC had a built-in volume customer. Especially since the 601 was specifically intended to be a design replacement for the 88110, to the point of using the same bus protocol. Swap the part in your design, spin the board for the pinout, recompile/rewrite your firmware, done. Something that surprises me is that Data General switched to Intel instead of PowerPC; either they really wanted nothing more to do with Motorola or wouldn’t have anything to do with IBM, because they had a breadth of m88k designs they could have turned into 601 designs quickly. Maybe they were worried IBM would price the part to ensure no DG workstation or server was cheaper? (But IBM was still IBM then, and IBM never cared about price…)
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Mar 10, 2024 10:35
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Like a buddy has an I think 8-CPU AViiON minicomputer running DG-UX with 1.5GB of RAM, and I have single-CPU tower and pizzabox AViiON workstations, and both designs would have worked with a PPC601 dropped in. They’d have been the first to market, with a decent and secure SVR4 using IXI X.desktop for its UI…
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Mar 10, 2024 10:41
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it's the year of ARM on the windows desktop https://twitter.com/Lexcyn/status/1772295505524973783
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Mar 28, 2024 13:49
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show me the Act 3 numbers! but yeah that’s about what I got on the Steam Deck and it’s definitely playable what’s that part go for?
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Mar 28, 2024 13:59
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repiv posted:it's the year of ARM on the windows desktop Some sort of confidential arm manufacturing exclusivity contract for windows computers either expired at the end of last year or is about to expire which will allow the market to really open up
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Mar 29, 2024 09:21
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I've been listening to this 2021 Twitter Spaces recording that was a retrospective / requiem for SPARC, made by a bunch of ex-Sun/Oracle people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79NNXn5Kr90 It's a bit scattershot but fascinating. Lots of 'lmao our CPUs were so poo poo and doomed'. They confirmed my one of my gut reactions in a big way - I've never personally done anything with SPARC, but from a distance the register windows always looked like a terrible idea. Turns out that lots of the insiders think they were bad too.
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Apr 7, 2024 06:07
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 00:42 |
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This looks very cool, though I haven’t really dug into it: https://github.com/adam-maj/tiny-gpu quote:
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Apr 26, 2024 19:29
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