Subj : FreeBSD
To   : Neal Robles
From : Jasen Betts
Date : Wed Nov 28 2001 10:26 pm

Hi Neal.

26-Nov-01 22:21:00, Neal Robles wrote to Jasen Betts


 NR> Hello Jasen,

 NR>> A monitor is like having a permanent copy of DOS "debug" in ROM.
 NR>> This is one feature that I really miss in all the newer
 NR>> computers.

 JB>> Apple macintosh (atleast the 68K based ones) had that

 NR> This would be MacsBug, right?

dunno, I saw someone using it once...

 NR> Interesting how Apple tried to make
 NR> the breakout switch as inconspicuous as possible, as if that made
 NR> it any less technical :>

 NR> A friend recently gave me a Mac Classic, I think it must have had
 NR> 512K or 1M RAM (which I upgraded using normal 30-pin SIMMS to
 NR> 2(4?)Meg) and a 40M SCSI HD

Gotta watch it with the simms the mac wants 8-bit parts and the ninth data
line is shorted to ground, so if you use 3-chip simms you can burn out one
of the chips and lose you some of the needed bits, but if you using 9-chip
simms the burnt chip isn't missed) (or so I've been told)

 NR> This is the first time I played with
 NR> a Mac. Nothing much to play with, but I did find a cheat sheet for
 NR> the commands and will try poking around when I get time, using
 NR> M68000 Prog. Ref Manual (5th ed), the only reference I have.

 NR> Would you know of any downloadable technical tools and references
 NR> on this machine (68000, no memory management unit)?

No, I used to curse them at university, appletalk isn't scalable and having
about 50 of them on a single segment of Lan was bad news. (appletalk is
basically null-modem only at a 230400 bits per second)  MAC-OS5 wasn't
particularly stable either.  In the second year when we got to play with
suns via ancient dumb terminals (Visual 200s and second-hand VT62s) the
stability was the main thing we noticed and it was good. the year after
that they some X terminals

 JB>> Suns did too (I've only played with 68K based suns too)

 NR> Lucky you...

They were second-hand SUN3s running as diskless X terminals, every so many
boots the Nvram would glitch and you'd be dumped into the monitor
and you'd have to cast some spell with an IP address to get them to boot.

IIRC ctrl-stop would also bring up the monitor/debugger.

But yeah nice big 20" screens (but black and white (1 bit monochrome))
plenty of pixels though.

running "iko" would crash them when you logged out.
the sun4s (SPARC) that were hidden from us undergrads that we logged into
uning the x terminas (using something like xdm) they were nice and fast.

 NR> Regards, Neal

 -=> Bye <=-

---
 * Origin: We have met the enemy, and he is us.  -- Walt Kelly (3:640/531.42)

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