[rescue] Mac Appliance

[Dave McGuire]

On August 3, joshua d boyd wrote:
> Somehow I don't think that anyone is ever going to start calling Crays and
> PDPs home PCs anytime soon.  Even if that is what we need.

  Well the PDPs are just for preservation purposes nowadays, at least
for me.

> I really just care that an OS doesn't crash, and that it does support my
> hardware.  If NetBSD supported it well (like it should for my SS2 if I can
> ever ger linux's rarp troubles worked out to load NetBSD), I'd be just as
> happy using it. 

  Bring If you don't solve your rarp problems by then, bring it with you
when you come down here.

> Especially if you've only got 4 bloody registers.  Darn it McGuire, stop
> ranting and invent a time machine so that we can go beat the 386 guy who
> decided to stick with 4 registers.  That alone would radically improve
> things.

  Too true.

> >   I have a nine-year-old machine in my computer room whose primary clock
> > is 33MHz per processor.  Yes, thirty-three.  For floating-point
> > applications, you have to clock an Intel processor at like 500MHz to
> > get similar performance.
> 
> Care to say which machine that is?

  My older Cray, a Y/MP-EL.  (three of them actually)

> So, what they really should have done is dropped in a dedicated Postscript

  There weren't any at the time.  At least none that I know of.

> chip.  Wait, wasn't that essentially what the Dimension was?  I wonder if
> that board also make the printer faster.

  No, the dimension was for more "conventional" video processing.  It
basically gave you a big chunk of memory into which frames magically
appeared, and a big honkin' processor (i860) to dick with the pixels
before they got read out to the DACs and fed to the monitor.

        -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Laurel, MD