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A Real PowerBook: The Macintosh Application Environment on a Pa-RISC Laptop
- Telemakhos 1y agoRISC Mac? Why am I reminded of the original Mission Impossible movie?
- raddan 1y agoIf you scroll down long enough there actually is some discussion of the (unbadged) Macs that appear in Mission Impossible!
- bluedino 1y ago686 protoypes with the artificial intelligence RISC chips
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pezezin 1y agoDamn, the scene Ving Rhames and Jean Reno having that conversation is burned into my brain xD
- esafak 1y agoHa, PA-RISC! I remember faxing HP as a teen for a brochure about it. Back when HP was a contender :(
- classichasclass 1y ago(author) I thought PA-RISC could go a lot further. It had good performance and a fairly sane ISA, and HP put a lot of work into it. Dropping it for Itanic was one of HP's poorest decisions, because compilers just weren't sophisticated enough to make EPIC VLIW efficient, and arguably still aren't. The issue about the "one instruction per cycle" limit got addressed in a different way.
- jeffbee 1y agoI mean, the performance was better than "fair". Nothing could touch it including Alpha. They abandoned it right at the top of their game.
- kev009 1y agoThe most astonishing thing about this is it was done under forbearance of the ISA.. PA-RISC ISA was basically frozen in 1996 and they were able to ride that at the top for years. For instance PA-RISC doesn't really have appropriate instructions for desirable atomic operations. But it led to working on the right problems, a hardwired control RISCy chip that happened to be philosophically similar to the survivor POWER.
- jimmaswell 1y agoI wonder if we could make an LLM or other modern machine learning framework finally figure out how to compile to Itanic in an optimized fashion.
- o11c 1y agoNo, VLIW is fundamentally a flawed idea; OoO is mandatory. "We need better compilers" is purely Intel marketing apologia.
- whaleofatw2022 1y agoIsn't VILW how a number of GPUs worked internally? That said GPU isn't the same as GPC
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- classichasclass 1y agoSome older ones, yeah (TeraScale comes to mind) but modern ones are more like RISC with whopping levels of SIMD. It turns out that VLIW was hard for them too.
- sgt 1y agoAs a teen, I needed help with an Alpha 21164, and I phoned Compaq. This was a year after Compaq had bought Digital. But they had absolutely zero interest in helping a teenager with hardware they probably believed I had no business using.
- spauldo 1y agoCalling DEC probably wouldn't have done you any good either, unless you could get ahold of an insider that took interest in you. I did tech support for DEC's Starion line of Windows PCs. I'd get the occasional call from someone wanting help with a VAX or a Rainbow or some other piece of DEC kit. But a lot of DEC's customer support was actually handled by 3rd party companies, including the one I worked for, and we had no way of connecting people to anyone from DEC itself. Compaq killed off most of the online resources for DEC equipment fairly quickly. I always thought DEC deserved a better death... But at least it was better than being bought by Oracle.
- kev009 1y agoI remember doing something similar with Bull, a now obscure but once somewhat formidable mainframe and UNIX company. I had a DPX/20, which was for that model just a rebadged Microchannel IBM RS/6000. I was 12 and trying to figure out how to use it. I knew what I was in for, that I needed to load AIX, but the "firmware" on these are bare bones and you don't have much to go on once it passes off control if you don't know if your console is working in the first place. Given what I now know, they were surprisingly kind and passed the call around until landing it with an old timer that was familiar with the model and somewhat bemused that I had it and was trying to use it but didn't really know how to help me remotely. Eventually someone on Usenet clued me in that I needed more pins on my serial cable connected, and it all turned out to be a nice learning opportunity building the GNU toolchain and AMP stack on it. There was some serendipity years later when I moved back to Phoenix after school and joined a newly formed PostgreSQL user group. Bull was trying to pivot into that open DB market and still had a huge campus in Phoenix where they held the meetings. It seemed sparsely occupied and the writing was on the wall that was all going away (it eventually did a handful of years ago), but I was still a bit wide eyed now having some notion of the campus's historical significance as Honeywell, in the Multics project, and other things. And that my naive call from back then was almost certainly answered in that facility not that far from where I was struggling.
- pjmlp 1y agoHP-UX was also the very first OS where I used something like containers, the Virtual Vault introduced in HP-UX 11, almost a decade before containers became fashionable in UNIX systems.
- ethan_smith 1y agoMAE was Apple's fascinating attempt to run Mac OS on Unix workstations, essentially creating a compatibility layer that translated Mac Toolbox calls to X11, allowing Unix users to run Mac software without actual Apple hardware.
- lukeh 1y agoAlso was the foundation of Blue Box if I remember right. (And QuickTime’s portability layer was for Carbon.)
- classichasclass 1y ago(author) MAE isn't the basis for Blue Box, though I'm quite sure it informed its design. Blue Box/Classic is actually more like MAS, the aborted Mac compatibility layer for PowerOpen/AIX/"A/UX 4," in that it runs PowerPC code directly on the CPU in the "problem state" and uses a paravirtualized operating system and enabler. There is no processor emulation in Classic except for supervisor and faulting instructions. There are also differences at the level they execute: MAE can, and was designed to run, as an independent process like any other well-behaved X11 application, and multiple users can run multiple sessions of it, but Classic/Blue Box needs operating system support and only one instance of it can be running on a system by a single user.
- lukeh 1y agoI stand corrected, very interesting!
- sillywalk 1y agoThere was a 3rd party toolkit called I believe Equal, then Lattitude for porting Mac Apps to Unix. Equal was used to port MS Word & Excel, and Lattitude for porting Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. It was essentially a reverse-engineered MacOS Rom Toolkit. It implemented most of System 7 as well as QuickDraw. http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Jun97FactoryFloor/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.13/13.06/Ju...
- pjmlp 1y agoI guess having a big fat guy for A/UX advertisement kind of says how Apple saw UNIX even then. Jobs were also not that keen into UNIX, around this time NeXT was already going on, and some of the surviving remarks including his presence at USENIX, was similar to Microsoft's tatics, in the sense of bringing UNIX applications and custmers into NeXTSTEP, and then offer them tools unavailable in any other UNIX. OpenSTEP effort, and collaboration with Sun only started after the sales not going that well as expected. Nonetheless, I only saw A/UX live in 1994 at Lisbon's IT conference (CEBIT in miniature), and it looked kind of interesting.
- nxobject 1y agoHuh - literally every trick in the toolbox (pun intended) is used to integrate the running System with the host OS. An actual Quadra ROM, but a System Enabler (and a Helper application). For Toolbox UI services, it does everything from patch the Toolbox (e.g. to prevent windows from being moved onto the MAE toolbar) to call the host OS for services (eg direct translation from QuickDraw to Xlib.) But so many other mysteries remain. How is transparent disk access/conversion implemented if there are no SCSI devices, and the ATA/IDE Manager isn’t installed? Is the File Manager heavily patched as well? Is the 68k emulator patched to map the graphics card DeclROMs into the memory windows the Slot Manager expects? (Why not just patch the Slot Manager as well?)