Hands-on with two Apple Network Server prototype ROMs
13 points by classichasclass
13 points by classichasclass
Nice work!
One small nitpick:
The 1996 Apple Network Server is one of Apple's more noteworthy white elephants and, to date, the last non-Macintosh computer (iOS devices notwithstanding) to come from Cupertino.
I believe the Newton line outlived the ANS line by a year or so.
What a great piece! That brought back some great memories... the repair shop I worked in used to have an ANS 700, and I learned all kinds of AIX mischief on it. My boss bought it because, at dealer cost, this was actually a relatively cheap way to get a rather nice UNIX server for the time, onto the network.
This was a really cool look into things I'd heard rumors about but never had a chance to see.
ALSO, this tidbit:
32-bit PowerPC has little-endian support through a little-endian bit in the machine state register or by setting a flag on memory pages in the MMU (which is how Virtual PC ran) or at the instruction level with byteswapping, but to this point all official Power Mac payloads had run big.
was an interesting and new-to-me bit of trivia. I was aware of little-endian support on PPC, but I had no idea that Virtual PC on PPC used it.
ALSO, this tidbit:
32-bit PowerPC has little-endian support through a little-endian bit in the machine state register or by setting a flag on memory pages in the MMU (which is how Virtual PC ran) or at the instruction level with byteswapping, but to this point all official Power Mac payloads had run big.
was an interesting and new-to-me bit of trivia. I was aware of little-endian support on PPC, but I had no idea that Virtual PC on PPC used it
It was sadly absent from the G5, which is why VirtualPC was either ridiculously slow or unsupported, I forget which. I kept my old PowerMac G4 around for awhile after I got my G5 purely for running Windows programs.
Amusingly, as far as I'm aware, Linux on POWER these days only runs in little-endian mode, so it presumably would have the opposite problem trying to run classic Mac software.
You can still get it to run big, and some people do (Adelie Linux comes to mind, and of course Gentoo), but indeed no major distro supports it anymore. My POWER9 systems run Fedora little.
What speed was the G5? I still think the 970 was practically the PowerPC NetBurst. Less than it should have been, for sure, even though I do like my Quad.
What speed was the G5? I still think the 970 was practically the PowerPC NetBurst. Less than it should have been, for sure, even though I do like my Quad.
It's been at least 13 years since I owned it and more than 20 since I bought it, so I'm not 100% sure, but based on what was released when, I believe it was a dual 2 GHz. The G4 was a dual 450 MHz. For what it's worth, I really don't remember running VPC on the G5, so I'm guessing VPC at least initially didn't support it. It'd have been moot after 2006, because I used my first paycheck to buy a Linux laptop.
Hey, thanks! I guess this comes down to the definition of last - the Newton definitely lasted longer than the ANS, but the first ANS came out later than the first Newton. Maybe computer lineage?
As @gecko below says, this was a major part of VPC's performance. Microsoft had to substantially rewrite the emulator core for the G5 which was reduced to byte-swapping instructions (no MSR bit, no per-page endianness). It's still not bad on a Quad and I use it, but I probably should see how the Quad stacks up against the MDD next to it with a 1.8GHz G4 Sonnet card.