[HN Gopher] The Apple Jonathan: A 1980s Concept Computer That Ne...
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The Apple Jonathan: A 1980s Concept Computer That Never Shipped
Author : erickhill
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-03-27 22:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (512pixels.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (512pixels.net)
| datavirtue wrote:
| Surprisingly sexy. Way ahead of it's time and beyond the scope of
| ideas that a commercial entity would deem even remotely
| acceptable.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| This sort of open and stackable expansion module system wasn't
| uncommon at all for 80's home computer systems though.
| CharlesW wrote:
| The TI-99 "sidecars" examples is new to me, and don't
| remember other "stackable expansion" examples from the time.
| What do you have in mind?
| Findecanor wrote:
| That reminds me of the TI-99's "sidecars". Those were flat on the
| desk, so the computer could get _quite_ wide.
|
| http://www.mainbyte.com/ti99/hardware/sidecar.html
|
| The Amiga 1000 supported sidecars but later big-box Amigas had
| internal expansion slots like PCs. The wedge-shaped home computer
| Amiga 500 supported sidecars. I had an Amiga 500 with SCSI HD
| sidecar, and a video grabber which was _two_ sidecars (one for
| the RGB splitter), but the HD and grabber didn 't work together.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >This meant that every user could have their own unique Jonathan
| setup, pulling together various software platforms, storage
| devices, and hardware capabilities into their own personalized
| system. Imagining what would have been required for all this to
| work together gives me a headache. In addition to the shared
| backbone interface, there would need to be software written to
| make an almost-endless number of configurations work smoothly for
| the most demanding of users. It was all very ambitions, but
| perhaps a little too far-fetched.
|
| Sounds an awful lot like the mess which is Windows.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| But it was exactly this "mess" of the accidentially opened PC
| platform what gave us the hardware cambrian explosion of the
| late 90s. Without this, Nvidia probably wouldn't exist, and
| everything that's not Apple would have an IBM logo slapped on
| ;)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a great idea from a consumer & aesthetic POV, but the
| technical challenges would have been interesting.
|
| It's also a reinvention of one-bus-for-different-boxes
| computing from the 70s - Unibus, Massbus, and so on.
|
| It could have been made to work, but it would have been speed-
| limited, and mechanically unreliable if it wasn't done exactly
| right.
| wildzzz wrote:
| There are modern systems that still use this sort of modular
| backplane design. MicroTCA and PXIe are the two major ones,
| both providing at least power and a PCIe bus on the backplane.
| MicroTCA supports carrying Ethernet, SATA, and PCIe on the
| backplane. However both of these are more intended for
| industrial computing. I could see a consumer variation based on
| MicroTCA where the chassis has a pre installed controller and
| backplane. The backplane would be configurable based on the CPU
| you are running. Higher end CPU would allow for more PCIe lanes
| meaning more slots, lower end would only allow for a few slots.
| The computer part is provided by a heavily packaged SBC
| containing a processor and memory. Mass storage either sits on
| the SBC as m.2 or as a chassis card connected via SATA or PCIe.
| You'd have a GPU card connected to a x16 slot (up to two of
| these for a large chassis). High end sound card sits on another
| slot. Various interface cards sit on others. You could even
| drop in an FPGA accelerator card.
|
| This would all probably be too expensive for your average
| consumer though.
| CharlesW wrote:
| That FrogDesign-era aesthetic is everything. I'm as affected by
| it as I am by my favorite music of that era.
| jhbadger wrote:
| >Pleased with his concept, Fitch named it Jonathan (after
| himself)
|
| While it may not have been coincidental that Fitch's name was
| Jonathan, another reason is that the Jonathan is a strain of
| apple, as is the McIntosh (spelled Macintosh for the Apple
| product).
| pjdesno wrote:
| There were lots of projects at Apple that never made it off the
| ground.
|
| When I was there in '88-'90 I remember seeing a few prototypes of
| their Mobius computer - an ARM-based system that emulated an
| Apple II much faster, and was (unfortunately) faster than a Mac
| II in native mode. It got canned before they ever got around to
| designing a case for it, but folks who had the prototypes kept
| them for quite a while.
| jefurii wrote:
| An S-100 bus computer as done by Apple! I love this form-factor
| even though I can understand why it didn't catch on. The early
| personal computer era was exciting in the same way as the early
| 1900s were for aeroplane design.
|
| Maybe it wouldn't have been the nightmare the author imagines -
| Apple figured out how to connect all sorts of gear using
| Appletalk, and somebody else here pointed out that the chaos of
| IBM PC compatibles is probably what helped PCs really take off.
|
| This would've used more desk space tho.
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