- To a first approximation, yeah, that's basically the process.
- This is cool. In my mind this is what I though the Data General "Eagle" CPU would look like during the events described in the _The Soul of a New Machine_.
It’s crazy to think that this collection of boards and wirewrap would be transformed into a set of chips that became the beloved Amiga. I assume it goes from CAD to wire wrap and if it "works" the CAD is sent to fabrication on real silicon ?
- I was a the booth and talked to one of the original designers. Was really cool to see such a nice part of history up close.
- I think you need a beefier Amiga like an A3000 to do that. But I could be pleasantly surprised....
- C64 in north america was ubiqitous and probably one of the first network effects. My friends Zach and Josh and traded games back and forth effectively doubling their game library. Quality was superiour to the 2600 and the NES wouldn't be out for a few more years. definitely a sweet spot.
The killer app for a high school kid was a word processor and printer. Really couldn't do that with a dedicated console. Teachers were inclinded to give better marks for typed content that obviously easier to read than the chicken scratch that passed for cursive. With spell check, that was the ultimate cheet code.
- ChatGPT and Grok indicated to me that this is likely LLM assisted but not fully LLM generated. Example in this related link : https://slicker.me/emulator.htm - the heading about "caution find something better to do" is just against the LLM ethos. I've seen graduate level draft papers with "As an LLM..." stuck in them so I get your frustration.
I will leave it to our benevolant overlord to decide if the site should be in the kill file. I am more than happy to comply if that is the will of the site.
- Every retrocomputing article from slicker.me is partially, or completely, generated with an LLM. There is even residual copy-paste the "author" forgot to remove from the bottom of the article: "Further context: For specs, market share, and sales estimates, see historical summaries and technical overviews of the C64’s hardware, software ecosystem, and market impact."
Please don't post these; they don't provide benefit.
- I will want one just to run Amiga Unix. Does it have a network port?
- > - The primary effect (as far as I can tell) was in convincing all the executives at Apple of the value of the GUI.
That's my takeaway as well. Larry Tesler says as much somewhere.
I'm not sure about the talent thing. The overall vision for the Mac as a shipping product came from Steve Jobs, who was never really an engineer. The original Mac team members have been very clear on this point. The engineers, however talented and visionary, necessarily had smaller scope (which is why they were engineers and not executives).
- > The Apple projects were underway prior to these visits.
Some interesting Polaroid screenshots are found in "Busy Being Born" by Andy Hertzfeld [1], showing windows and a pointer interface for the Lisa, probably predating the PARC visit.
Andy Hertzfeld:
> (…) a mouse/windows based user interface. This is obviously the biggest single jump in the entire set of photographs, and the place where I most wish that Bill [Atkinson] had dated them. It's tempting to say that the change was caused by the famous Xerox PARC visit, which took place in mid-December 1979, but Bill thinks that the windows predated that, although he can't say for sure.
[1] https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
PS/Edit: It may be of interest to note that it wasn't a secret, at all, what was going on at PARC. At this point, hundreds of visitors had been given the tour, and some (or most?) had been given an even more extensive one than the one Apple was eventually given. It would have been trivial for folks at Apple to have a cursory knowledge of the ongoing GUI developments, even when they hadn't seen it with their own eyes, yet. And they were by no means the only ones: when the Lisa was eventually introduced, it was just one of 3 commercial systems with a GUI introduced that year. (The PERQ 2 / ICL 8222 being one of the more prominent examples.)
- Notably, the Apple teams weren't shown the Star, but individually GUI enabled Alto applications, which didn't feature a coherent interface.
Xerox did have a fair chance to monopolising the desktop with the Star (developed by Xerox SDD El Segundo) and was first to market. Also, Apple licensed a lot from Xerox (like the mouse, while they actually came up with their own designs.)
The idea of the "stolen GUI" probably comes from the "Look and Feel" court case, where the argument was irrelevant, as it was found that Apple had unknowingly granted an unlimited license for the desktop GUI to Microsoft. (If the technology had indeed been stolen, would Apple been in any position to grant a license, in the first place? In this sense, the argument is somewhat contrary to its intentions.)
- I spent 20 years at Xerox, including research. Even in the 90s and beyond the company had no interest in anything that didn't involve putting dots on paper. Now it's stuck in a rapidly shrinking industry and buying competitors to capture market share. Oh, what could have been.
- It's kind of funny. I've been working on a write of Xerox history following my article on SRI/ARC at ARF. And I've been working on this question.
- There were two visits.
- Xerox held a stake in Apple in exchange for the visit.
- People from SRI and from Xerox were already at Apple.
- To whatever extent Apple "stole" from Xerox, Xerox had already "stolen" from ARC.
- The Apple projects were underway prior to these visits.
- The primary effect (as far as I can tell) was in convincing all the executives at Apple of the value of the GUI.
The key take away from this bit is honestly that employers should work harder to keep talent. Companies need the talent more than the talent needs the company. Over and over, my research into tech history shows that great talent can flourish at any number of companies, and there are far more great business managers, accountants, and marketers than there are extremely good and visionary engineers.
I do not mean to downplay the impact of great executives. They are important. The talented and visionary engineers are just more rare.
- Apple had improved the Xerox original design a lot. Here is a video where Xerox Star is compared to Apple Lisa.
- I had a friend yank it out of his ANS (sounds crude, but...) and it looks like it might just be an edge connector.
If you're willing to go with socketed DIP EPROMs you burn on a TL866 or something like that instead of a fancy in-system-programming thing we could probably make our own.
- Not yet. That's another part being worked on, and then we'd need to figure out some way to flash it like the 68K ROM programmers.
- The Apple Network Server in question was made before Jobs returned to Apple and brought OS X with him, so it means classic Mac OS.
- Do you know what connector that ROM card uses (any makers' marks?) This would be a fun project to throw some hours at.
- Classic Mac OS. It will run up to Mac OS 9.
XPostFacto might be able to drag it over the finish line, but I suspect there will be a driver problem. No way to know until we can get a system up with these ROMs, of course.
- Asking for a friend. Does macOS here mean classic Mac OS or osx/macos ?
- A genuinely interesting set of BBs sites running in Atari 8bit equipment. What it was back in the 80s when you could reach out and connect to someone you were otherwise unlikely to meet.
- I don't think it is the same anymore. For some time after the Jag was EOL'ed, many of the alpha devs took a fairly authoritarian view toward anyone wanting to just hack around and learn.
And for a time, there were a few ways one could more fully exploit the hardware. The non 68K processors or at least one was buggy. Problems with JMP type instructions landing a guy in places that were too difficult to recover from.
Of course, there were convoluted ways it could get done and a lot of gatekeeping surrounding all of that.
I remember it being such a difference J was stunned right out of any interest in the machine! All of us early 8 bit people would just disassemble things and the magic was right there for the reading!
On the Jag? Sure! So long as you held your nose and did it anyway, ignoring cries from "those people" who probably had a bit more into the Jag than most would end up doing.
Today, I bet it is like most other scenes. If so, have fun! I think the Jag is an interesting machine and it has some untapped potential.
Or... it did. Perhaps all is known today. I don't know!
Lol
- Yeah, I was hoping for a Christmas treat, too. I'm usually not very interested in these emulator machines but I think I'll get this one. Having the right keyboard layout will (hopefully) make usage smoother compared to emulation on a PC.
- Apparently. If you can access the “god mode” on it, an atm/cash machine can be made to spit out money :-)
- Any other usage for the one I have in the garage, anyone ? ^^
- around 180€ or 150UKP, which is quite good considering you get a full working keyboard and a supposedly rather powerful ARM SOC
- Would totally kill if it was shipping for Christmas 2025. Any word on pricing ?
- zx spectrum this side of the pond did the same. it worked for a number of reasons, some of which are mentioned in the post.
1) a computer was perceived as educational. even if it was for games. 2) games were so much cheaper. and could be copied so easily with 2 cassette recorders. 3) there were tv shows here on home computing showing how to use/setup/program to get kids interested. 4) they were cheaper. the zx spectrum had many faults (glares at rubber keyboard) but it was cheap. anyone could get one. and as people upgraded 2nd hand units came along even cheaper. 5) monthly magazine gave away free games to type in and later included on cassettes taped to the cover. 6) schools had some of these home computers and created instant support groups if you bought one that gave you access to help, support, games, software.
- Interesting read, thanks!
Too bad the other parts are password-protected, and the password isn't "bloodmoney" :)
- All those are true. I don’t really know what I thought. USB is going to be faster than anything the device had.
in my head. I had a mental lapse thinking it might have sata support which is a fever dream of epic fail.
I think fujinet is still a work in progress.
Regardless. This is going to make so many happy. I hold out for rm800xl but that appears to be a true science fiction fantasy
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