[HN Gopher] PowerMac 6100 Upgrade Guide (2000)
___________________________________________________________________
PowerMac 6100 Upgrade Guide (2000)
Author : nickt
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-06-12 12:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kan.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kan.org)
| jnwatson wrote:
| I paid $3k for a PowerMac 7100 in 1994. I remember paying $1600
| for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996. I also bought L2 cache (an
| external module back in those days), and then a G3 upgrade.
|
| It lasted me a good 10 years.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I remember buying 32MB of RAM for my DOS Compatibility card
| (486Dx/2-66) that was in my 6100/60 for less than $400 in 1996
| from Best Buy.
|
| My entire 6100/60 with 24MB RAM was around $2500 with the card
| in 1994 right after the 6100/66 came out.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| "Cache Upgrades: A 30% speed increase for $15?"
| telesilla wrote:
| My Powermac 6100 AV, bought second hand for $1500 in 1996 came
| with RCA connectors, I got it to make music. That purchase
| kickstarted my career in all things digital. Came with 200MB
| drive I upgraded to a whopping 2GB. I travelled with it until I
| got an ibook, which was much more portable for gigs!
| bluedino wrote:
| >> I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996
|
| That's odd - I remember memory prices being really low around
| those times, and my friends and I loaded up our Windows 95
| machines with 16 or 32MB for $50-$150 when it was on sale
|
| 1996 Best Buy ad for reference:
| https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/web...
| deltarholamda wrote:
| >I remember paying $1600 for an extra 32 MiB RAM around 1996
|
| I remember doing exactly this around the same time. Back then,
| RAM was almost considered a durable good, because RAM prices
| had remained stable for so long. I thought, "well, this is
| expensive, but I'll get most of my money back if I ever sell
| the computer," and this wasn't a completely insane idea at the
| time.
| ginko wrote:
| From http://www.kan.org/6100/os.html#macosx
|
| > Mac OS X is the next big thing for the Mac. A fusion of Apple
| and NeXT technology, OS X is fully native, fully pre-emptive,
| fully protected and full of the bells, whistles and buzzwords
| we've been promised since PowerPC first appeared. It supports
| symmetric multiprocessing, to go along with the multi-G4 machines
| shipping now and the multi-core CPU's currently under
| development.
|
| >Sadly, Mac OS X probably will not run on a 6100, no matter what
| you do to the hardware.
|
| Anyone know why that was? Looks like people got OS X to work on
| iMac G3's so you'd think that a PowerMac with upgraded G3 and
| memory should be able to run it. Some other HW/MB feature
| missing?
|
| edit: This[1] video about upgrading to OS X on an iMac G3
| mentions the need to update the Mac's firmware so I guess there
| may not have been a FW upgrade for the 6100.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTLvhHNnLU
| crest wrote:
| Afaik MacOS X didn't boot on old world PPC machines with NuBus
| slots, but 10.2.x can be installed on a PowerMac 9500 with a G3
| upgrade and with a 32MB PCI Radeon GPU the UI was even usable.
| It helped that the box was also upgraded with >800MB RAM spread
| over 12 DIMMs as well as two 10kRPM U160 disks in HW RAID1.
| Still the slow 50-60MHz PPC60x bus was beyond painful.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I think it would be possible, but you'd likely need to drop
| into the open firmware and type in a magic incantation to make
| the bootloader think it was a supported system (don't ask me to
| remember exactly what that might be. It was a looong time ago,
| but I did get both PPC OS X and Darwin to run on an unsupported
| mac clone that had an upgraded cpu. I remember submitting a
| posting to resexcellence about it!)
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| OS X (10.0 - 10.3) worked out of the box on my iMac G3. It was
| pretty sluggish until 10.3 came out, but I didn't need to do
| anything tricky like firmware upgrades to get it running.
| winocm wrote:
| The 6100 does not use a conventional PCI bus.
| kergonath wrote:
| IIRC a big problem was the CPU. PowerMacs with 603s or 604s
| were "supported" by XPostFacto, but not the 601, which is why
| the 7200 could not boot OS X despite not using NuBus. The
| NuBus Macs also did not use OpenFirmware, contrary to all PCI
| (and AGP) PowerMacs.
| jamesfmilne wrote:
| Indeed these systems had NuBus, which was a holdover from the
| earlier 68k MacII and Quadra machines.
| nier wrote:
| > The basic requirement for Mac OS X to ever work on a
| machine is that it have a PowerPC processor, a PCI bus, and
| Open Firmware. So the earliest PowerPC computers from Apple
| (e.g. the 6100, 7100, and 8100) are not likely to ever work
| with Mac OS X.
|
| Source: https://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto/Fra
| mework.cf...
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| No OS X, but you can run the Mach 3/osfmk-based MkLinux. My
| 6100 was one if the first in Europe to run it and served as ftp
| server to distribute MkLinux. Must have been 1996 or 97, I
| think...
| lateralux wrote:
| I used Mklinux on a powermac 8100 for 5 years has my home
| distant ssh and cli box.
| perardi wrote:
| I believe that Mac OS X only ran on "New World ROM" machines.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_ROM
|
| (Could be wrong about that--that was a long time ago.)
| kerblang wrote:
| I still have my 6100, tempted to try exploring this. Always felt
| like that era was the last of the "fun macs" when things weren't
| all busybody fussy unixy with hi-res gradients and hyperslickness
| and so forth. The new macs just took the "personal" out of
| personal computing, as I see it. Take that with a grain of salt,
| of course.
| linguae wrote:
| I greatly appreciate the Jobs-era Mac OS X, with its Unix and
| NeXT heritage; in fact I personally think the high water mark
| of the Mac from both a software and hardware perspective was
| the Mac OS X Snow Leopard era. Nowadays I use FreeBSD and
| Windows, but I would be glad to use a variant of Snow Leopard
| with HiDPI support, updated browsers, and security patches if
| such existed.
|
| With that being said, there is something warm-feeling and even
| whimsical about the classic Mac OS and classic beige Macs. I
| truly think the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of the 1990s
| were well written and are timeless recommendations for making
| great, usable software. I believe designers of today's user-
| facing software tools should acquaint themselves with a classic
| Mac running contemporary programs like Microsoft Word 5.1 and
| the ClarisWorks suite to see great examples of well-designed
| software. I also like both the System 7 and Platinum themes,
| with a slight preference toward Platinum. I'm really curious
| about A/UX, which married the classic Mac OS and Unix, and I'm
| also curious about Rhapsody, a predecessor to Mac OS X that was
| based on NeXTSTEP but featured the Platinum theme from Mac OS
| 8.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| In what sense recent MacOS are worse than snow leopard?
| bombcar wrote:
| It was at the heyday of the "personal" computer on both sides
| of the divide; a single upgrade could make your machine
| _magically_ more capable in ways we don 't really have now.
|
| Adding a new processor could be a _huge_ speed improvement,
| adding a new graphics card would greatly expand your screen
| capabilities, etc.
|
| This site alone has a system with a 601 at 60MHz replaced with
| a G4 at 300 MHz, and RAM from 8MB to 264MB. That's like going
| from 8GB to 256GB today, just insane difference to how you use
| the system (and RAM was _much_ faster than the disk back then,
| so RAM disks made sense, etc).
|
| I remember our last DOS computer had enough RAM that it made
| sense to RAMdisk most of the most commonly used programs we
| had, even though it slowed boot up copying them into the RAM
| disk.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I had a 7200 and it never really performed very well. The
| "software" modem/telephony device was interesting, but the
| backing software was too crashy. Mostly I remember it seeming
| slower than the last generation of 68k Quadras; I had one of
| those on my desk at my day job.
|
| The first generation iMac, on the other hand, I did think was a
| lot of fun. All of the sudden the UI was responsive and the
| software was surprisingly reliable.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The "software" modem/telephony device was interesting, but
| the backing software was too crashy.
|
| I had a Mac from that era that sipped with a software modem,
| and at some point I upgraded to a serial modem for exactly
| that reason.
| haroldp wrote:
| I was thinking it was the end of the era of fun websites too.
| That is overstated, but...
| cesaref wrote:
| Yeah, good memories of that era. I had a 7500, which was a very
| upgradeable machine, taking lots of memory and CPU (and cache
| cards - remember them?).
|
| Mine had an annoying beat, like two fans running at slightly
| different speeds. Apart from that, it was a great machine, and
| ran Logic really well which was it's main job.
| pcurve wrote:
| Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Some people here get so
| touchy over post next jobs era macs.
|
| I do disagree with your timing though. I think the best of
| times was in the early to mid 90s. With radius graphics card.
| Daystar accelerators on Nubus slots. For some macs, separate
| math coprocessor. Asante network card. APS and LaCie external
| scsi hard drive and Daisy chaining them. Adb port devices.
| Nostalgia!!
| kerblang wrote:
| Actually I bought my 6100 somewhere around '93-'95. I know it
| was before 1996.
|
| But I'm not actually saying the 6100 was "the best of"
| anything; it was the bottom-of-the-line cheapest one you
| could get at the time. I'm really just talking about pre-OSX.
| The early Macs were and are fun too.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Over the weekend, some of us old timers were reminiscing
| about the bad old days of the early Avid NLEs. The damn chain
| of ADB dongles to enable the software and various plugins
| that to the uninitiated looked a lot like S-Video and would
| ultimately get plugged into the wrong port, bending pins
| ruining the dongle, then being told by support that a dongle
| could not be replaced. Striping 7 full height media drives in
| a SCSI enclosure just to get enough bandwidth to record the
| video, but not enough for audio that got saved to yet another
| drive.
|
| Also, SCSI chains requiring terminators (or not), and
| internal SCSI drives with the jumpers in the wrong pins.
| Original Wacom tablets built like tanks. 21" CRT monitors
| that weighed a bazillion pounds, had half-a-mile of bezels,
| and sitting 2 side by side caused EMI so the images were
| disturbed. ProTools requiring DSP boards that numbered more
| than slots in the computer. Expansion chasis to handle all of
| the extras. All now outpowered by your damn social media
| device, er, smart phone
| azalemeth wrote:
| Happy memories indeed. I always thought ADB was ahead of
| its time and although it really wasn't hot-pluggable it
| was, in fact, almost hot-pluggable. Much moreso than the AT
| PC keyboard connector at any rate. And it just made so much
| sense having one connector for all input peripherals,
| unlike DB-9 mice and DIN keyboards!
|
| I also fondly remember DIP switches being added onto SCSI
| external drives along with their block-like 50O resistor
| terminations. Woe betide you if you pushed the case back
| against the wall and flipped one of those mid-write...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Nothing about that first generation of Power Mac reminds me of
| "fun". It reminds me more of "kernel panics right before CD-R
| is finalized" or "kernel panics whenever the network cable is
| unplugged" or sometimes "kernel panics whenever any network
| cable anywhere on campus is unplugged" and quite frequently
| "kernel panics if I try to scan a slide" oh and from time to
| time "installing MS Office from 60 floppies is a bit of a
| chore". Really cannot think of anything in my personal history
| of computing that was less fun than a mid-90s Mac.
| lateralux wrote:
| They were wonderful computers for graphic software like Adobe
| Illustrator/Photoshop and QuarkXpress, video editing or music
| recording.
| smm11 wrote:
| I always wondered if Apple/Be could have had OS X running
| faster than Apple/NeXT did.
|
| The excuse was always that Be had no software. But NeXT
| stuff getting into OS X wasn't exactly perfect. Part of me
| thinks that at least one or two looked at getting A/UX or
| MAE or something on top of Be, just like Blue Box or
| whatever got onto OS X.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| There were no kernel panics back then. There was hardly a
| kernel per se until 8.6.
|
| We had "Sorry, a system error occurred" bombs. It was "funny"
| that those errors remained in 1 bit color even though the
| entire system had full color support for decades.
| sharikous wrote:
| I am not even sure there was something that you could call a
| kernel in that time.
|
| Apple was failing in their quest to secure a modern successor
| to MacOS 7.
|
| It sure was a lot of fun looking at what they threw at it,
| and MacOS 9.2 was polished for sure. But without MacOS X,
| MacOS would have gone the way of BeOS and Amiga...
| theodric wrote:
| Still a pity it didn't literally go the way of BeOS by
| acquiring Be, like might have happened. I used both
| NeXTstep on 68k and BeOS on Intel, and much preferred the
| latter. NeXTstep was a crawling horror of abstractions,
| which might have made it more portable, but also made it
| clunky.
|
| Anyone else remember having a top-spec iMac G4 in 2002 that
| couldn't even scroll or resize a window smoothly? Pathetic,
| and painfully slow. I gave up on 10.1.x and just ran Yellow
| Dog for about a year until I managed to lay my hands on a
| copy of 10.2, which was marginally better, but still much
| slower than Linux at the time. The iLamp was a wonderful
| machine, but very much let down by its intended OS.
| musicale wrote:
| Reacquiring Steve Jobs was probably worth it for Apple.
| ;-)
|
| In 2002, Macworld was happy with the iMac G4 performance:
|
| "Generally, using the iMac was a pleasure. It was speedy
| and responsive in most cases, although the Mac OS X
| version of iMovie was more sluggish than we'd expect from
| a G4-based machine."
|
| PC Magazine gave it 4 stars and an Editor's Choice award.
| Readers gave it a 5 star member rating.
| haroldp wrote:
| Ouch, nostalgia poisoning. I had a 6100AV with a Maxpower G3
| card, back in the day.
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| I never had a 6100 (honestly never even had a Mac pre-OSX), but
| I'm getting a massive amount of nostalgia poisoning from just
| the website. For most of the 90s, probably into the 2000s for a
| bit, finding a "fan page" like this was like striking gold. I
| feel like the equivalent today is some mix of finding a well-
| written Wiki page and a well-moderated subreddit on some topic
| or product you are interested in, but the personal touch on
| pages like this is somehow cooler.
|
| It makes me feel somewhat good to read this page and realize
| how charming I still find it.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Me too--I inherited a 6100 from my employer and used this site
| quite a bit.
|
| I bet it's still in a box somewhere in the basement... (checks
| weekend calendar)
| spicybeef wrote:
| I love this site. I just recently used it to pick out some RAM
| upgrades for my own PM 6100/60MHz upgraded with a MAXpowr G3
| 266MHz CPU upgrade. It also helped me confirm that a 7100 video
| card I had in my parts bin could be used on it as well!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| OS 8 and 9 were unreliable at using the internet because unlike
| Windows or Linux it was not a 32 bit OS with real memory
| protection. I remember various releases that struggled with the
| problem, especially they added a whole bunch of locks to protect
| memory structures which slowed the machine down dramatically.
|
| Classic Mac OS was designed to handle events raining in from the
| keyboard and mouse and was able to run on the 128k classic Mac
| but Apple was in serious trouble in the 1990s until MacOS X which
| was competitive with the competition.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It didn't have memory protection but it was 32 bit from the
| start and most apps were "32 bit clean" by version 7.5 or so.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| To memory what really messed with OS stability when browsing
| the internet on System 7.5.3 (the first Mac OS I used) up
| through 9.2.2 were browser plugins.
|
| Earlier on, Java applets were by far the most notorious
| troublemakers in this realm. I remember as a kid bumping around
| the internet on a Performa 6400 with Netscape looking for
| online games, and that machine could never go long without the
| browser crashing or the dreaded "Sorry, a system error
| occurred." dialog popping up after browsing a few pages with
| applets.
|
| Shockwave and Flash were reasonably stable for the most part,
| until 3D Shockwave games started appearing... those were almost
| as messy as applets were.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > To memory what really messed with OS stability when
| browsing the internet on System 7.5.3 (the first Mac OS I
| used) up through 9.2.2 were browser plugins.
|
| OS Extensions in general were a source of instability. It's
| like kernel extensions on Macs or kernel drivers on Windows
| today, there is no safety net and coding errors can take down
| the entire system.
|
| You really needed to weigh the reputation of a company for
| stability before adding an extension from them.
| bluedino wrote:
| >> unlike Windows or Linux it was not a 32 bit OS with real
| memory protection.
|
| Don't forget that until Windows 2000, neither was Windows
| icedchai wrote:
| How's that? Earlier versions of Windows NT had memory
| protection (starting with NT 3.1 in 1993.)
| mig39 wrote:
| I guess the average consumer was on Windows 95 or 98,
| though, right?
| [deleted]
| hedgehog wrote:
| I ran NT4 on my laptop in the late 90s and remember it
| was somewhat unusual. A little clunky, my memory is some
| common things like changing screen resolution required a
| reboot, but it was more reliable and responsive overall.
| Most people stuck with the 95/98/Me progression due to
| cost (2000 wanted more memory than Me and partially for
| that reason Me was default preload on most PCs).
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| I ran NT4 on my Thinkpad briefly around 98 or 99... it
| _sucked_. Power management didn 't work at all. USB
| didn't work at all. The video driver was awful. The
| built-in ethernet didn't work; you had to use a PCMCIA
| card to get networking at all.
|
| Essentially, it turned the laptop into an under-powered
| desktop with a built-in UPS and slow video.
|
| These things were generally better by the time 2000 came
| around... but NT4 was never any good on my laptop. (And
| at the bank where I worked when I graduated in 1999, it
| was terrible on those as well. The senior managers'
| laptops were the only systems in the bank allowed to use
| 98.)
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Indeed. Back in the days when RAM was hideously
| expensive, Windows NT needed too much RAM for the home
| PCs of the era.
|
| Also, Windows 9x had plug and play and the NT family did
| not.
|
| Most home users didn't switch over to the NT family until
| Windows XP.
| icedchai wrote:
| Probably! I was in college at the time. All the fellow
| nerds either ran Linux or NT.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Windows 95 absolutely had memory protection and preemptive
| multitasking, at least for "native" Win32 applications.
|
| System 7 had neither.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Windows 95 absolutely had memory protection and
| preemptive multitasking, at least for "native" Win32
| applications.
|
| I know it had preemptive multitasking, but did it have
| memory protection? I didn't use Windows in that era, but my
| recollection is it didn't.
|
| I do remember all the apologetics for cooperative
| multitasking, because that's what Macs were stuck with so
| it had to be justified.
| musicale wrote:
| > Windows 95 absolutely had memory protection and
| preemptive multitasking, at least for "native" Win32
| applications.
|
| Apparently the first 1MB of RAM was mapped for
| compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows, which meant that
| the common bug of writing through a null/zero pointer could
| easily crash the system.
| haroldp wrote:
| I mean, I worked for years as a professional web developer on
| MacOS 8 and 9 machines. The stability wasn't great, but it was
| fine.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Same history here, but to be honest, a good day with Mac OS
| 7/8/9 was literally defined by having no forced reboots due
| to a crash. Especially somewhat heavy multitasking with
| Photoshop, BBEdit, Netscape and Eudora usually lead to a
| system crash once every few hours. You can tell the seasoned
| Mac user by them having seconds enabled on the menu bar
| clock, so they can see whether the machine is still doing
| anything :)
|
| With later hardware and software, especially G3/G4 with Mac
| OS 9.x, the machine crashed less often, but usually still did
| at least a few times per week.
| icedchai wrote:
| Netscape, in general, was incredibly unstable. I remember
| 3.x crashing every half hour.
| haroldp wrote:
| > Photoshop, BBEdit, Netscape and Eudora
|
| This exact combo, plus MacSSH, Ircle and SoundJam, for
| years.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Of course, I only mentioned the essentials :) I wasn't
| much of an IRC person, and I remember using a different
| SSH client, but don't recall which one. Also, Fetch.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Same history here, but to be honest, a good day with
| MacOS 7 /8/9 was literally defined by having no forced
| reboots due to a crash._
|
| I recall having unexpected reboots every few days (except
| on systems with complicated SCSI chains, what a nightmare),
| but my bar for system extensions was also unreasonably
| high. I remember feeling a little sick seeing multiple rows
| of extensions when friends restarted their Macs.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You could have stopped and started your list with
| "Netscape" causing crashes. IE for Mac was a "glass of ice
| water in hell" compared to Netscape.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Yes, for a while IE was the best browser for Mac, not
| just in terms of stability. But before that time, we had
| to make do with Netscape, as there wasn't really any
| worthwhile competition.
| duskwuff wrote:
| For a long time, the Mac version of IE 5 was one of the
| best browsers on the market. It used a completely
| different renderer from the Windows version; as a result,
| its CSS support was quite good. It even supported
| transparent PNGs, which the Windows version of IE
| struggled with for years.
| cmclaughlin wrote:
| I recall OS 8 crashing often and loosing lots of work. Back
| then I was doing graphic design work and just getting into
| web programming. Photoshop, Illustrator and QuarkXpress all
| day with those apps crashing unexpectedly. MS Word for Mac
| was awful back then too. OS 9 was much better and Windows
| 2000 was actually really good. It's great that that sort of
| instability is a thing of the past!
| haroldp wrote:
| "Save early, save often!"
|
| As another respondent also remembered it, I would probably
| get less than one crash a day. Windows 95 had it's own
| (multifarious) problems. I was maintaining servers with
| _years_ of uptime and definitely looking forward to OSX. :)
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _OS 8 and 9 were unreliable at using the internet because
| unlike Windows or Linux it was not a 32 bit OS with real memory
| protection._
|
| This isn't my recollection at all, although the lack of
| protected memory on "Classic Mac OS" means that you would've
| _personally_ experienced unreliable anything if you were also
| running poorly-written extensions or other software on your
| system.
|
| System 7 (1991) was the first 32-bit version of Classic Mac OS,
| and Internet Explorer for Macintosh was very advanced for its
| time. Classic Mac OS had a healthy browser ecosystem which also
| included Cyberdog, iCab, Netscape, Opera, and WannaBe (a text
| browser).
| dylan604 wrote:
| Woz has an interesting section in his book "iWoz" regarding
| System 7 stability before/after Internet Explorer was
| installed. A fresh install of System 7 would operate just
| fine, but as soon as IE was installed, weird things would
| happen. It's definitely worth reading if you haven't already.
| Lammy wrote:
| I was curious and looked up iWoz, and it seems to be a
| little mixed-up on the dates of things since it talks about
| using iCab two years before it was available: https://datas
| sette.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/livros/iw... (Book
| page 296)
|
| "That first day I used iCab instead of IE, I had no
| crashes. Not a single one. Hmm." "I could never convince
| Apple. This was such a big lament for me at the time. I
| couldn't convince anyone that it wasn't the Mac OS that was
| at fault. Then one day Gil Amelio told me that Apple--in
| addition to avoiding excess production and inventory and
| keeping expenses down--was going to buy a new operating
| system."
|
| The NeXT merger was publicly announced in February 1997, so
| that private conversation with Amelio about their intent
| most likely would have been some time in 1996:
| https://www.tech-insider.org/mac/research/1997/0207.html
|
| iCab, on the other hand, didn't ship until February 1999 as
| a time-bombed beta: https://web.archive.org/web/20020305110
| 041/http://advergence...
|
| I wonder if he was experiencing instability due to Code
| Fragment Manager instead of IE itself? Mac IE was even late
| shipping for 68K Macs due to problems with CFM-68K.
|
| "Finally, Internet Explorer has been hit by the CFM-68K
| bug. Microsoft was on the cutting edge in adopting the Code
| Fragment Manager for 68K Macs, and due to the well-known
| bug in CFM support on 68K Macs, Internet Explorer is
| currently only available for PowerPC-based Macs. Apple
| should have this bug fixed soon, though, and Microsoft
| plans on releasing a 68K version at that time." --
| https://www.macobserver.com/reviews/ie3.shtml
|
| CFM-68K was infamously unstable until version 4.0 shipped
| in April 1997, and even the PowerPC-native version saw a
| bunch of improvements around that time, so this lines up
| with a 1996/1997 timeframe in iWoz if one ignores the
| anachronistic iCab story:
|
| "A revised Code Fragment Manager that helps some large,
| PowerPC-native applications launch faster and enables some
| applications to launch in low memory situations" --
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-releases-
| syste... (September 1996)
|
| "In late November 1996, Apple announced a bug in the
| CFM-68K Runtime Enabler extension. This bug could cause
| random crashes and hangs, resulting in application
| instability and potential loss of data. Because of the
| potential seriousness of these problems, Apple recommended
| that customers disable the extension. Also, Mac OS 7.6
| would prevent the extension from loading. Mac OS 7.6 does
| support the the 4.0 version of the extension." --
| https://macgui.com/kb/article/502 (May 1997)
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Classic Mac OS had a healthy browser ecosystem which also
| included Cyberdog, iCab, Netscape, Opera, and WannaBe
|
| Ehh...
|
| Cyberdog was never widely used. It depended on the OpenDoc
| framework, which most users didn't even have installed, and
| was only available _as a beta_ for a year or so. It was never
| a serious contender.
|
| iCab was a latecomer -- it was released in 1999, long after
| most of the mainstream browsers. It was used by a few people,
| but was never particularly popular either.
|
| I have never even _heard_ of WannaBe. Based on what I see
| online, it looks pretty obscure.
| Angostura wrote:
| I absolutely _loved_ Cyberdog. My browser and e-mail client
| of choice
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Having fully indexed instantaneous search for my emails
| in 1996 was absolutely living in the future.
|
| Especially if you subscribed to a lot of mailing lists
| and went looking for information on something specific
| that you knew you had read, but didn't know where.
| asveikau wrote:
| Seems like they conflated 32-bit with lack of memory
| protection.
|
| (Tangent: IIRC there were Macs where the CPU had a 32 bit
| pointer width but you could only use 24 bits of address
| space. And sometimes software would work on this assumption
| and break with a full 32 bits. But that's neither here nor
| there.)
|
| But in addition to lack of memory protection, cooperative
| multi-tasking was also a big problem. It was a pretty common
| experience to see something do intense work rendering a
| progress bar and the rest of the system would slow down. IIRC
| this made having something like a web browser open sometimes
| painful.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I had a 6100/60. It was one of the most significant personal
| computer upgrades I'd ever done- the Rosetta that ran 680x0 code
| on PPC was impressive. This was also around the time I think
| Apple decided to start to stay processor-agnostic by starting the
| LLVM project when OS X/Rhapsody became a thing
| azinman2 wrote:
| LLVM was Chris Lattner's graduate work. Apple didn't start it.
| He finished his PhD and got hired by Apple in 2005, well past
| when Max OS X came out. For a longtime the toolchain for OS X
| (and iOS) was GCC.
| hedgehog wrote:
| I believe the first use of LLVM in MacOS was the OpenGL
| fallback shader compiler in 10.5 released in 2007.
| jonhohle wrote:
| LLVM was started far after the 6100 and, afaik, didn't move to
| an Apple backed project until 2005[0].
|
| Apple did have "fat" binaries during the classic Mac OS
| transition, and interestingly enough, so did NeXT. The
| implementations were very different, however, and OS X
| eventually got the NeXT implementation.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM
| pmarreck wrote:
| ah thanks for the clarification
| scarface74 wrote:
| The first generation 68K emulator was far from impressive. It
| ran 68k code on my 6100/60 slower than my souped up LCII with a
| 68030/40Mhz card.
|
| Connectix's Speed Doubler had a much better emulator.
| johnklos wrote:
| There are no 256 meg 72 pin SIMMs. The page linked to from this
| site says that the author was mistaken, and they were 168 pin
| SIMMs.
|
| While 512 meg SIMMs are possible, they'd be custom. Otherwise, a
| 256 meg SIMM would be a single bank, which wouldn't make much
| sense.
| ctime wrote:
| > p.s. Use Netscape, or be viciously mocked, taunted and
| ridiculed.
|
| This is how we used to talk to each other.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pcurve wrote:
| In the 90s some of us derogatorily called it Nutscrape because
| l33t folks should be using Lynx. Good old days.
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