[SunRescue] G3 upgrade for PowerMac 7300

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2001 at 09:17:31PM -0500, Mike Hebel wrote:
> >> Last word from the Darwin crew was sometime after snowballs spend a
> >> night in hell. :(  The power just isn't there.  And I'm starting to 
> >> believe them...
> 
> DM>   Hmm, that's funny.  The 604e-based machines sure had enough power
> DM> for heavy-hitters like Photoshop.  Why can't they run this new
> DM> operating system?
> 
> DM>   It's a design choice to purposely ignore an entire class of
> DM> a-model-line-old-but-nowhere-near-obsolete machines.  Nothing more.
> 
> That's especially funny and true since the internals of OSX are BSD in nature
> which can be made to run on just about anything.  NetBSD as an
> example. Although admittedly a less "showy" one than OSX.

Heck, the precursor to OSX was NEXTSTEP.  Which ran on 68030 @ 25Mhz NeXT
Cube (which I used to own), and was OK for light usage (terminal windows,
one or two apps).  The Turbo Color (68040 at 33Mhz) was quite zippy.

> I'm betting someone else will port it to the older machines.  IIRC
> there's already talk of a port in the works for Intel but that may just be the
> fogginess in my brain.

NEXTSTEP ran quite well on 486/DX266's (I ran it on this hw myself).  It
screamed on anything with PCI graphics or higher, since NS doesn't use much
graphics acceleration, instead it just double buffers and then does block
memory copies.

ObSun:  Scott McNealy hated how Jobs would breeze into an account Sun was
trying to win, and put the "Jobsian reality distortion field" to work.  Sun
would lose the account.  The canonical NS demo was to build a working RTF
word processor with the GUI tools - in 5 minutes.  Couldn't exactly do that
with X Windows/Open Look...

Cordially

Patrick Giagnocavo
patrick at zill.net