[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 : ttepasse
Score : 157 points
Date : 2024-03-26 20:09 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (512pixels.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (512pixels.net)
| rbanffy wrote:
| It's a lot like the Burroughs B-25 (AKA the Convergent NGEN).
|
| https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_convergent5Brochure198...
|
| Convergent extended that idea into their Megaframe, which could
| be expanded by adding more enclosures, each with a number of
| separate processors.
|
| http://bitsavers.org/magazines/Mini-Micro_Systems/198304_Meg...
|
| This last one lists our familiar Steve Blank as one of its
| authors.
|
| It must have been a sight to behold:
|
| https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_MiniMicroSrDigest_8947...
| Manfred wrote:
| I got to borrow one those Burroughs machines when I was 16 from
| a collector and they were really well built, but not great for
| a teen that wanted color screens and games. I did learn a tiny
| bit of Fortran.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Lots of envy here... I never even saw one in person. Would
| love to play with it.
| bombcar wrote:
| It involves the 186, the rarest of x86 processors.
|
| 11 megabyte bus in 1983 is pretty impressive.
| rbanffy wrote:
| They were Sun's "the network is the computer" well before Sun
| had that idea.
| hsnewman wrote:
| I worked on those in the mid-80's. Very easy to program (we
| used PDS-ADEPT), but the Burroughs megaframe would always have
| issues.
| compressedgas wrote:
| Reminds me of the Shim computer
| https://www.purdue.edu/uns/html4ever/2006/060112.Shim.comput...
| bogantech 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.
|
| _gestures at the Amigas and PCs of the time_
| 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?
| colanderman wrote:
| Some examples of "nonflexibly-attached expansions" I can
| think of, though not arbitrarily expandable like the
| TI-99/4A:
|
| * Sega Genesis (CD, 32X, Modem, Sonic & Knuckles, Game
| Genie, Power Base Converter -- most of which could be
| attached at once [1], and a few games even required both
| the CD and 32X)
|
| * Nintendo GameCube (the Game Boy Player attached to the
| bottom) [2]
|
| * Epson HX-20 laptop (various expansion units could attach
| to the side, though only one at a time) [3]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y55ZBT_UcmU
|
| [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Gam
| eCube...
|
| [3] http://www.decodesystems.com/epson-hx20.jpg
| CharlesW wrote:
| Fun, thanks! Those examples reminded me of the amazing
| PowerBook Duo and DuoDock combo. https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/PowerBook_Duo#Duo_Dock_(M7779)...
| cancerhacker wrote:
| More of a "back car" - the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 used
| piggybacking RAM with passthrough to other peripherals. It
| was a really fragile setup - the ram pack in particular
| would glitch out when typing.
| kalleboo wrote:
| The IBM Convertible let you stack on options on the back,
| including a printer
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htl_JbZIcUU
| porterde wrote:
| The ARM based Acorn Risc PC [1] from mid 90s had a case
| with up to 7 stackable slices. It made the internal volume
| larger and you installed a longer backplane for expansion
| cards.
|
| Someone built a pizza oven in one of the slices [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risc_PC
|
| [2] https://www.houseofmabel.com/personal/computers/riscpc/
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The East German KC85/2../4 line was one example of this
| (scroll down for an 'expansion tower', theoretically such a
| tower could be 64 units high (the system could address up
| to 256 expansion modules, and one expansion unit had 4
| slots):
|
| https://floooh.github.io/virtualkc/p010_kc85.html
|
| I also remember a similar module system for the Sinclair ZX
| computers, but my google fu is failing me at the moment.
| Such 8-bit home computers usually had their entire system
| bus exposed via a connector at the back or side, so even if
| the original manufacturer didn't support a stackable module
| system, 3rd parties could jump in and offer a solution.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| PC/104[0] was enormously popular for embedded systems, it
| consisted a stack of cards sharing an ISA bus (later PCI
| and PCIe).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC/104
| saagarjha wrote:
| Note that this sort of open and stackable expansion is
| illegal to build in most American cities.
| 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.
| musicale wrote:
| Amusing but not entirely practical.
|
| That being said, Apple's modular design gives me a Eurorack
| vibe that TI's lacks.
| spc476 wrote:
| The IBM PCjr also had sidecars. I had a PCjr as a kid with two
| memory sidecards, and a parallel port sidecar. And yes, it did
| make the computer wide.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The TI-99 also had an expansion box that accepted cards for
| more RAM, RS-232, disk controllers, and other functions.
|
| https://www.arcadeshopper.com/wp/ti-99-4a-faq-peripheral-exp...
|
| The cable to connect the box to the computer console was
| ridiculously thick and heavy, and rarely shown in marketing
| photos.
| mrkstu wrote:
| I had this as a kid, hooked up along side the voice
| synthesizer.
|
| I never had a reason to actually buy an expansion card, but
| having the disk drive was nice, and I was the only kid I knew
| with a disk drive vs tape- the local library even had the
| ability to check out TI shareware type software via cassette.
|
| Great platform, other than some clunky decisions up front
| that crippled the hardware so it didn't compete with business
| lines, and trying to keep out 3rd party developers.
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| My Amiga 2000 had a PC on a card in it that used a window on my
| Amiga workbench as output. It's not like making weird stuff
| work together was unusual.
| boomlinde wrote:
| This can be solved through reasonable abstraction. Windows does
| it, OS X does it, earlier Mac OS and pre-Mac Apple computers
| did it.
|
| Your application software doesn't need to know what exact disks
| you have in your system so long as it can interact with the
| disks through a standardized interface. Your application
| software doesn't need to know what other application software
| is running on your system so long as you can facilitate
| interoperability through shared resources like storage,
| clipboards and sockets using standardized formats and
| protocols. That's how systems have been designed to host
| arbitrary software and hardware in more than half a century.
|
| In OS X, `ls` doesn't know that `cat` exist, and neither know
| anything about your SSD, yet they have absolutely no problems
| interoperating.
| CharlesW wrote:
| That FrogDesign-era aesthetic is everything. I'm as affected by
| it as I am by my favorite music of that era.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| The book mentioned in the article, AppleDesign, is full of
| great photos (of prototypes and shipped products) and
| interesting stories from that era. It covers the entire Frog
| Design era in great detail. Highly recommended, but
| unfortunately quite expensive these days.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| I've kept every single computer I've used since 1978, a
| veritable collection of over 40 machines.
|
| I _still_ lust for an Apple IIc. Never had one, my eyes go
| _boink_ whenever I see one in the wild.
| bombcar wrote:
| After the (only) Mac in the computer lab was grabbed, the IIc
| was the next favorite. Everyone else had to be satisfied with
| green-screen older ones.
| lisper wrote:
| You can get them on eBay for a few hundred dollars.
| azulster wrote:
| my dream is to have a lamp-style imac with modern internals.
|
| i wish apple would have fun with the chassis design again
| flenserboy wrote:
| Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWcOTN7orEg
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Agreed. I looked at the photos and my immediate visceral
| reaction was to think "Wow, that's beautiful."
| azulster wrote:
| for such an influential design firm, i'm dissapointed in how
| uninteresting their website design is
| 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).
| mattl wrote:
| There's a McIntosh Hi Fi company which may have had some
| influence there too.
| 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.
| musicale wrote:
| Apple fixed the "faster than a Mac" problem by moving ARM into
| their first handheld, the Newton.
| 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.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Well and FireWire was developed in the late 80s, and of course
| later usb made connecting different hardware trivial.
| queuebert wrote:
| From a software perspective, yes, but give me the old serial
| and parallel cables any day over that damn USB-A connector
| that never fits in either orientation.
| shrubble wrote:
| I didn't see anything about S-100 mentioned in the article -
| did I miss it?
| leejoramo wrote:
| It wasn't mentioned. I think they are referring to how the
| Jonathan's bus is more similar to S-100 than a PC's
| motherboard card bus. There was not a primary mother board
| that ran the bus like in Apple 2 or IBM PC
|
| I ran TSR-80 systems and I never had a S-100, I was always
| fascinated how it could have multiple motherboards on it with
| different CPUs. I think S-100 was more similar to SCSI or
| Ethernet than to a PCI bus.
| convolvatron wrote:
| not really like scsi - that's more like usb with a central
| controller. more like VME - a bus that looked alot like a
| 68k bus, but supported multiple masters with a protocol to
| negotiate temporary ownership to assert a transaction.
|
| there was a single address space. so every board had a set
| of dip switches to give it its address. which was always a
| big source of pain
|
| I can't imagine apple shipping a computer product like
| that, so maybe you get the high bits based on what slot
| you're in and a config eprom to do discovery?
| flenserboy wrote:
| I could see them using something like they did with NuBus
| -- something similar to the declaration ROMs could make
| this sort of configuration work nicely, as long as part
| makers played according to the specs.
| leejoramo wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| I suspect if Apple had done this they would have had
| someway for the cards to auto-negotiate.
|
| A few years after the Jonathan prototype, I remember
| fighting with the DIP switches on PC ISA cards and
| setting the the correct IRQs, and then seeing a friend
| drop in a NUBUS card into their Macintosh II and the
| hardware was magically configured. I wonder if NUBUS
| could have multiple masters?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Apple II cards knew which slot they were in and could
| have small ROMs with simple IO functions.
| rbanffy wrote:
| IIRC, it's entirely possible to build an Apple II on an
| Apple II card and let it drive a completely passive
| backplane with slots 0 through 7. I think it'd even be
| possible to drive the bus from any slot.
|
| The Jonathan bus would probably be a lot more robust,
| however, as power delivery was an issue on loaded Apple
| II's (with too much current flowing through too few VCC and
| GND pins).
| gumby wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This describes modern devices connected via USB C or Thunderbolt,
| which in my experience works fine (eGPUs are a bit specific, but
| perhaps that will shake out). I don't think we're smarter today
| than back in the 68030 days; probably they would have worked it
| out. After all there have been any number of coprocessor cards
| for apple computers over the years.
| lloeki wrote:
| That, or really, closer in timeframe, PCI cards, except the
| shelf is internal.
|
| Also, Framework laptop. Or RPis with stackable HATs.
|
| I think the concept holds water, e.g thinking of the music
| realm, from pedalboards to a ton of USB devices (soundcards
| like Scarlett or Volt, DAS...) to standard rackable items like
| DACs/ADCs with a ton of IO.
| AntiRush wrote:
| There's someone on Reddit who is building some real Jonathan
| modules:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/1at3bjb/jonat...
| aquova wrote:
| There's also a user I follow on Mastodon who has done some very
| believable mockups
|
| https://bitbang.social/@NanoRaptor/111761697339047308
|
| https://bitbang.social/@NanoRaptor/111722274256144766
|
| EDIT: Oh they're the same person as mentioned in the article!
| How about that.
| rbanffy wrote:
| @NanoRaptor's fakes are always awesome.
| lobochrome wrote:
| This is what I want the MacPro to be.
| Findecanor wrote:
| In an alternative universe, Apple could have made the Mac
| Studio the new "Mac Pro", with a slot on the underside for
| vertical stacking accessories.
| sneak wrote:
| Instead we get peripherals with the same finish and footprint
| and little U-loops of thunderbolt cables mucking up the top-
| down view. Even the Raspberry Pi figured this out with their
| HAT system.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Just because an idea wasn't implemented or didn't become popular
| doesn't mean it's not a good idea. I have always strongly felt
| that expansion cards in desktop computers should work more like
| this rather than requiring the case to come off.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Yeah, it has DEFINITELY worked in other contexts.
|
| NIM modules and CAMAC modules have been popular instrumentation
| platforms for experimental physics since the 70's and 80's. Of
| course that's very far from consumer adoption but the concept
| kinda works. No idea if NIM modules are still in production
| though!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Instrumentation_Module
| timw4mail wrote:
| IBM had at least two computers that used this concept: The
| PCJr, and the IBM Convertible "laptop".
|
| One of the many problems with sidecars is that they make the
| computer footprint larger. While it hypothetically allows for
| unlimited expansion compared to a limited number of internal
| slots, this would be practically limited by physical space and
| electrical signaling issues.
| eloisant wrote:
| I'm not sure, I'd rather open the case the rare times I need to
| add an expansion card than have the whole thing take more
| space.
| jasaldivara wrote:
| Well, if you don't populate all expansion slots, it takes
| more space than it needs.
| userbinator wrote:
| Apple might've taken over if they actually got this to production
| --- their competitor at the time was the IBM PC/AT with its 8 ISA
| slots, and Apple's bus could've become the "ISA" instead. Then
| again, given that these would cost a lot more for the housings
| compared to just a PCB with a card edge connector and mounting
| bracket, maybe not.
| joshu wrote:
| i had a meeting at Frog once and saw one of these (or a similar
| design) off in the corner.
| trhway wrote:
| I think it is informative to look at the 1981 Macintosh business
| plan
| (https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/2009/1027...)
| page 6 "Clustering of Retail System Prices" - Apple has a machine
| in the 3 top bands out of 4 (note the sub-Macintosh VLC, "Very
| Low Cost" targeting home market, envisioned by Jobs, in his other
| document from that time with 5 bands (that I couldn't find today)
| it was in its own sub-$1K band - ultimately came 30 years later
| as iPad and iPhone), and 2 pages down there is a slogan "The
| Advantage of a Product Line is that Each Individual Product Does
| not have to Do Everything". As far as I see a thing like Jonathan
| just didn't fit there.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| Note that Jonathan also is the name of a fruit apple variety:
| https://minnetonkaorchards.com/jonathan-apples/
| doubloon wrote:
| 1 every time u add a component to a system you double the
| complexity. If you build automated regression testing it becomes
| easy to see the impact as test runtime grows exponentially. So
| the definition of the interface between components must be able
| to isolate them from one another. We saw the consequences in PC
| land with cards and dip switches and irq settings and plugnplay
| and even pcpartsbuilder. Vs say USB c.
|
| Like there is a spectrum between pluggable sidecars and
| Bluetooth. In between is open isa , scsi, adb, usb, ethernet,
| wireless. Each one has tradeoffs in cost per module , cost of
| manufacture, cost of testing, physical form (space) and user
| experience. The market decided where the tradeoffs mattered most
| and it basically rejected every single side car variation ever
| produced. Its a niche thing that always remains niche due to
| suboptimal tradeoffs for most use cases
|
| And i bet it is mainly a version of the premature optimization
| issue. A side car is spending enormous manufacturing resources to
| optimize something people will do extremely rarely... plug parts
| of a cpu box machine together. If you need to frequently plug and
| unplug.... You are better off with some interface that uses
| cables and ... like sequential io vs random io you wouldnt want
| to have to get the module from the middle of your stack. If you
| dont need to plug very often.... Then you wind up paying for some
| enormous amount of plastic molding work and pcb design and
| testing for something you do maybe once a year or less. Better
| off to just buy bare boards like in PC land. But even if you have
| fancy plastic cases on modules that doesnt solve the software
| side. So ironically the thing that makes usb great isnt just the
| physical design but the software isolation between subsystems .
| vidarh wrote:
| A sidecar type design is literally just exposing the bus, and
| yes, it rejected exposing the bus externally over "just"
| providing a variety of cases to take cards internally. On the
| Amiga, it was literally exposing the raw CPU bus.
|
| Most of the 1980's sidecar designs existed to provide options
| at a point where they were competing at price points and in
| market segments where that was not viable. At the same time the
| price points for peripherals made the extra plastic a rounding
| error at that point in time. I think most of these designs
| failed largely because the moment you got people thinking about
| how many extra things they might assemble to get what they
| want, they'd look for a machine that provides more of that out
| of the box instead.
|
| Having _a_ sidecar felt like an "escape hatch" so you didn't
| feel locked in when buying a fairly basic machine. If you think
| there's even a possibility you might need 3+, you'd be looking
| at a big box machine from the start.
| boomlinde wrote:
| _> 1 every time u add a component to a system you double the
| complexity. [...] Vs say USB c._
|
| Then you concede that it is not necessarily so.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Was expecting to find some modern examples of such modular
| computer approach in comments, but am disappointed for now. Looks
| like Framework laptop is closest i can think of in this regard.
| Which is basically just USB hub for extra ports.
|
| Another example from mobile phones which was google modular phone
| prototype which also failed to reach consumers.
|
| Project Ara : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
| sneak wrote:
| I would still like a backplane like this with a bunch of
| USB3/thunderbolt ports with lots of power available. I'm so tired
| of USB cables and hubs. It would be nice for our computers to be
| more like modular synthesizers.
| dhosek wrote:
| You could have usb jacks on the front to set up routes through
| the hardware and use cables to configure options in your
| software!
| nntwozz wrote:
| Very nice design, that PowerPod 500 on the screen was new to me.
| Found a pic of it and larger version 3 here:
|
| https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/archive/the-cursed-univ...
| scrumper wrote:
| This deserves a submission of its own. Great find.
| gigatexal wrote:
| This is the nerdiest, coolest thing I've ever seen. I wonder if
| the next, next Apple Mac Pro will be expandable similar to this.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm thinking rack-mount, but on its side.
|
| You know some kids would have been posting GIFs of their rigs
| to the local BBS showing a 20 foot wide desk barely containing
| the machine.
| sergius wrote:
| How about a bus that carries hi speed network and power... and
| everything running Plan 9 to glue it up together :-)
| kevindamm wrote:
| mmm tastes like beowulf
| floren wrote:
| In what way? "Beowulf clusters" were built out of off-the-
| shelf machines connected through relatively normal (if high-
| speed) networking, running MPI programs on Linux. That's what
| distinguished them from the more expensive, more custom HPC
| systems of the day.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| In the way of it being a pipe dream relentlessly
| pursued...in words only...by many nerd types. So much so it
| turned into a meme during the 90's. Like someone would
| mention a hamburger and someone else would say imagine a
| Beowulf cluster of those.
|
| I kinda doubt ggp's Plan 9-linked idea has enough legs to
| take it that far though.
| bombcar wrote:
| Conceptually the Framework laptop is getting moderately close to
| this.
|
| Unfortunately we have signaling over USB C or Thunderbolt so good
| that everything is connected by wires instead of being integrated
| into a "standard case design" so whilst we can (somewhat) have
| the expandability, we don't have the resulting neatness.
| marci wrote:
| Somebody somewhere will probably see this and build the
| framework to build something similar out of Framework parts.
| That is, if it hasn't be done already.
| fundad wrote:
| It's great. Almost 40 years of miniaturization, energy
| efficiency and price/performance improvements made it so you
| can achieve the Jonathan over wires that run outside of the
| case.
|
| Modularity like this inside the case is cool and necessary for
| high bandwidth needs (gaming and hyperscalars) where you get
| good price/performance but they're not business computers like
| The Jonathan.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Steve realized this would surely lead to the discovery of his
| estranged son.
| brk wrote:
| My IBM PCjr utilized this concept with their sidecars. I recall
| having: 1 Memory expansion sidecar 1 Parallel port sidecar 1
| Sound module sidecar 1 Extra power sidecar (just power insertion
| to make up for the anemic default power supply)
|
| I also had -4 Deskspace - the sidecars made the footprint almost
| double, it took up a lot of room!
| leptons wrote:
| As a 15 year old in 1985, I had dreams of a very similar concept,
| except I was fascinated by the _Transputer_ CPU as the heart of
| the system I was dreaming about.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
|
| The "transputer" was a CPU that had high speed serial
| interconnects that could connect to other transputer chips to
| support parallel processing. I was so enamored by this chip that
| I contacted the company to try to get datasheets, and the guy at
| the company couldn't believe I was a 15 year old. He sent me some
| brochures anyway.
|
| My dream was a modular system, with each module catering to
| different computing needs. I/O modules, compute modules, storage
| modules, even a printer module - and each module would contain at
| least 1 transputer chip so it could talk to all the other CPUs in
| the system.
|
| Want a faster computer? Just add some compute-only modules that
| contained 4 or 8 transputer chips, all working in parallel. Each
| peripheral added like a hard drive module or I/O module would
| have at least 1 transputer CPU so you would end up with a faster
| computer simply by plugging in any kind of module. I had so many
| drawings in my high-school notebook about my dream computer
| system.
|
| I have never heard about the "Jonathan" computer idea until today
| on HN, but back in 1985 I would have been very excited about it.
| It seems very similar to what I thought I wanted back then,
| though without the parallel processing aspect.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Ya you're just a few years older than me, I remember thinking
| the same thing in the '80s, but didn't learn what a transputer
| was until just a few years ago.
|
| I truly believe that we could have been on an alternate
| timeline completely different than what we have today.
| Basically nothing now is how I would do it. Not hardware, not
| programming languages, not video cards, not networking, none of
| it. It's all.. runner-up solutions. Nothing really
| revolutionary, just evolutionary over enough decades that it
| approximates what might have been.
|
| Had I had any early wins at all in the critical era from 1995
| to 2001 before the Dot Bomb and 9/11 sent us down this
| alternate timeline where one guy has all the money and
| resources in the world while everyone else makes rent, I would
| have designed infinitely scalable hardware and written
| languages to recruit it. Basically we'd all be sharing our
| neighbors' processing power and bandwidth in a free and secure
| way, which would feel like BitTorrent compared to dialup.
| Instead I spent most of those years in college and struggling
| to survive after everything fell apart, no better off today
| than I was 25 years ago.
|
| I perceive computers as having run about 1000 times slower than
| they should have in 2010, and about a million times slower
| today, coming up on a billion by 2030. GPUs are sort of a
| stopgap to hide the fact that Moore's law died around 2007 when
| smartphones arrived.
|
| I've lost hope that any help will come from the top, just like
| with political parties. If we want real performance and to get
| to a Star Trek future with stuff like UBI in our lifetimes,
| we're going to have to self-organize and do it ourselves. Which
| basically means that someone who won the internet lottery or
| actually bought Bitcoin when it was $10 (like I didn't) will
| have to choose to pay it forward instead of doubling down on
| whatever all this is. I imagine that people like that exist out
| there, I've just never met one. Then we get an army of prolific
| young people and experienced veterans getting real work done
| outside the profit motive for the benefit of all humankind.
| titzer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Uh, what? It's not like there haven't been several standards for
| busses, I/O, and DMA _inside_ a PC case for decades. Somehow
| wrapping plastic around a PCI connector makes this harder? I just
| don 't get it. Seems like a great idea to me.
| jandrese wrote:
| In some ways the design is a throwback to the Altair where the
| "computer" was just a bus that you had to slot in whatever
| functionality you wanted. Sure the form factor is a bit nicer
| (no screws!) but fundamentally built the same way.
|
| He is right that if you're serious about running different half
| a dozen different OSes the driver situation would have been a
| nightmare.
| azulster wrote:
| USB solves this, but before USB every serial connection had to
| be programmed for individually, both for the OS and the
| firmware of the attachment.
|
| we've solved it now with USB for peripherals, but we only just
| managed to solve the bandwidth problem for PCI, and we are
| still unable to attach RAM or CPUs via usb with any sort of
| performance
| causi wrote:
| Computers used to look so damn cool.
| imglorp wrote:
| They went another way to wall the garden.
|
| The super-open Apple II family had expansion slots and published
| circuit diagrams that third parties could use to build all sorts
| of cards. And build they did.
|
| Instead of Jonathan, Apple drove towards the 1984 closed Mac
| ecosystem. You needed a special wrench to gain access:
| https://www.micromac.com/products/macopener.html
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| It's just a long Torx-15 screwdriver. You can buy them at any
| hardware store today, but in 1984 they were not very common.
| InvisibleUp wrote:
| You can see a somewhat similar concept to this today in the test
| and measurement field with the PXI standard. It's an open
| standard of plug-in instrument or computer modules that slot into
| a chassis. The only real sore spot is the drivers, often being
| proprietary Windows DLLs.
| phtrivier 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.
|
| Whao. On the contrary, I could imagine plenty of ways in which it
| would _simplify_ stuff. Imagine if, instead of having a single
| computer juggling between many software process contending for
| the same resources, each application was its own mini-computer,
| with physical separation of memory and processing, and a single,
| hardware defined way of sharing data ?
|
| At this point, our computers are dumb terminals for computation
| happening on someone else software, so we're forced to develop
| distributed systems anyway. But having hardware separation forces
| doing the only sane thing (the old "share memory by communicating
| values", as opposed to "communicate commands and share memory")
|
| Sort of, OTP/Erlang on multiple chips of the same desktop box ?
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